When you breathe at work, you might be sucking in airborne pollution from your printer, formaldehyde from your desk, chemicals from carpet or paint, mold from a ventilation system, and particles from your coworker's cough. The air in your home isn't necessarily fresher, even if you happen to have an air purifier: Filters can't catch all pollution. A new air purifier called Molekule takes a different approach. Instead of trying to catch pollutants in a physical filter, it claims to attack them chemically, breaking bacteria, viruses, mold, and airborne chemicals down into water and carbon dioxide. The purifier is the result of two decades of research from chemical engineering professor Yogi Goswami, who typically works on solar energy technology—but was inspired to work on the problem of indoor air pollution because of his son's struggles with asthma and allergies, which often landed the family in the emergency room. "We tried many, many different things, and finally he felt that what's out there isn't really solving the problem," says Dilip Goswami, his son and cofounder and CEO of the new startup.

"He went into the lab and spent many years researching a technology that could actually break down pollution in the air at the molecular level." The technology took inspiration from a solar photovoltaic cell, which converts sunlight into electricity. air purifier salt"We use that same principle of light shining on a surface, that we've coated with a special catalyst," Goswami says. smoke air purifiers reviews"Instead of taking that energy out as electricity, we use that energy for a chemical reaction that happens on the surface of a filter that we're running air through."blue air purifier uk A similar reaction happens in the Earth's upper atmosphere, where light reacts with water vapor to break down some pollution. "We've kind of bottled that up and put it in a device and made it many, many times more efficient, so that it can break down pollution indoors," he says.

It's also a similar process to the coating that some buildings use to break down smog (Yogi Goswami was the first to use the technique for air pollution, in the 1990s), but faster and more efficiently. HEPA filters—technology first invented during the Manhattan Project to catch radioactive dust—can only catch larger particles of pollution and miss microscopic pollution. (The makers of Molekule say it can destroy pollutants 1,000 times smaller than a HEPA filter and, unlike a carbon filter, can fully eliminate VOCs.) In some cases, filters can even make air worse. When Jaya Rao, Dilip's sister and cofounder of the company, moved into a new house, she realized that the filter in the home's HVAC system was covered with mold growth. "You just don't realize, because you think, I'm safe here," she says. "But the people that lived there before were breathing that stuff, and we were breathing it until we saw it." In a hospital, the devices could help stop the spread of dangerous illnesses, something that hand washing and hand sanitizers can't fully address.

"It creates another line of defense in terms of if somebody sneezes, and that virus gets aerosolized in the air, it's going to get destroyed instead of infecting somebody else," says Goswami. Still, the purifier isn't intended to completely sterilize the air—just to bring indoor air, which can be five times more polluted than outdoor air, back to safer levels. After 20 years of iteration and testing, including peer-reviewed studies, the new purifier is launching today on the startup's website.AN AIR PURIFIER UNLIKE ANY OTHER Adapts to indoor air conditions in real-time Offers more control and features with a mobile app Clearly displays product and air quality alerts Removes up to 99.97% of particles Cleans a larger area at a faster rate Fits within today’s modern lifestyle The Airmega mobile app, available for the 400S and 300S, delivers a wide array of unique features such as real-time air quality notifications, filter lifetime monitoring, and scheduler.

Enjoy the freedom to control your Airmega, anywhere, any time. With its Smart Mode feature, the Airmega automatically adapts to its surroundings by adjusting fan speeds based on the room’s air quality. That means your Airmega is energy efficient without compromising efficacy.We don’t recommend air purifiers which use ozone to clean the air. Ozone can irritate the lungs and cause chest pains, coughing, and shortness of breath, even in people who don’t suffer from asthma and lung problems. Children and older adults are more sensitive to ozone. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, “At concentrations that do not exceed public health standards, ozone has little effect in removing most indoor air contaminants.” Even low levels can be harmful, and repeated exposure can permanently scar lung tissue. Many air purifiers sold these days no longer use ozone, but there are air purifiers which use ion generators to clean the air, and they emit low levels of ozone.

Air ionizers, or negative ion generators, discharge electrons which form negative ions in the air. These negative ions then attach to small particles like smoke, dust and pollen, clumping them into larger particles which can be more easily filtered by the air purifier. However, these larger particles can also simply descend to the ground, or attach themselves to positively charged surfaces in the room. The problem with negative ion generators is that they typically produce a low level of ozone. Now these may be levels low enough that they won’t affect your health, but we’re not keen to take the risk. If you’d still like to get an air purifier with a negative ion generator, take a look at the air purifier’s ozone output and compare it to the recommended levels. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends a maximum eight-hour average outdoor concentration of 0.08ppm of ozone, while the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) both recommend an upper limit of 0.10ppm, not to be exceeded for more than eight hours (OSHA) or at any time (NIOSH) (source: Ozone Generators that are Sold as Air Cleaners

: An Assessment of Effectiveness and Health Consequences, PDF link). The gold standard for air purifiers is mechanical filtration, which uses a fan to force air through a HEPA filter to trap particulars, while letting the air flow back out. There are other kinds of air purifiers, but mechanical filtration is proven and cost effective. However, one by-product of mechanical filtration is noise. If you’re going to be running the air purifier in your bedroom, you won’t want one that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. So how do you figure out how loud an air purifier is? While you can listen to it in the store, loudness is relative — what sounds quiet in a crowded mall can sound loud in a quiet bedroom. For a more objective test, check the air purifier’s rated noise levels, measured in decibels (dB or dBA). It’s complicated, but to keep it simple for this post, dB and dBA are roughly equal measurements. For some perspective, Hearing Aid Know has a list of common noises and their decibel levels.

Vacuum cleaners are rated at 80dB, normal conversation at 60dB, and a refrigerator humming at 40dB. The Engineering Toolbox recommends that living rooms have a maximum noise level of 50dBA, and bedrooms a maximum noise level of 30dBA. You should also know that decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, which means that the difference between values increase as the values get larger. For example, the difference between 20dB and 10dB is not twice, but four times as loud. HEPA filters clog up over time with the particles they trap, and you’ll need to replace them every once in a while. It does add up to the cost, but that’s the price of running an air purifier. You don’t want to buy an air purifier, only to have problems finding replacement filters down the road. That’s the reason we’d recommend you buy an air purifier from a known brand, that will likely be around for the long-term and keep selling its filters down the road. To keep things simple, we’ve listed only the absolute essentials for an air purifier to deal with the haze.

To sum up, an effective air purifier must: Other filters are nice-to-haves in comparison. For example, carbon air filters can absorb smoke, odors, chemicals and gas, while ultraviolet light filters can kill bacteria. If you don’t need these features and just want to deal with the harmful PM2.5 particles in the haze, you can skip them. Lastly, air purifiers aren’t miracle machines. If you run it in a room with open doors and windows, it won’t be able to keep up with the amount of air that’s constantly flowing in and out. Air-conditioners don’t draw air in from the outside, so the air purifier will have a better chance of cleaning the air inside an air-conditioned room. Place the air purifier in a spot where it has good ventilation, which helps make its job easier. Don’t stuff it into a corner where its fans will be blocked and air can’t escape. You only need to run the air purifier when you’re in the room, or just before you’re going to use the room.