Over the last few years, we’ve seen a big rise in home improvement and DIY, a penchant for viral candles, and a surging number of flights booked as 2025 is predicted to be biggest ever summer for travel. It’s a random mix of topics with one thing in common: air pollution.
Leading doctors have warned that 99 per cent of the population are breathing in “toxic air”, and air pollution has been declared a public health crisis here in the UK, possibly leading to 30,000 preventable deaths this year alone.
It’s not just us adults impacted by bad air quality. Recent NHS England data shows that in some parts of the country, air pollution is linked to 33 per cent of childhood asthma cases.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, as there are several ways that we can ensure we're breathing clean air. If you want to purify your air at home, providing a better quality of living for you and your family, we may just have found the ticket.
Enter the Dyson purifier hot + cool formaldehyde, the brand’s bestselling air purifier (plus fan and heater). It’s designed to clean the air not only of the usual particles picked up by purifiers with a high efficiency particulate absorbing (HEPA) filter, but also to grab all formaldehyde-based resins that come from plywood and fibreboard, insulating materials, paint, wallpaper, varnishes, and some household cleaning products.
This is no small task: formaldehydes are 500 times smaller than particles of 0.1 microns (10 microns is the limit for the naked eye) and to be efficient specifically at catching this chemical, Dyson created an intelligent formaldehyde sensor that’s gel-based and will accurately catch and destroy it at a molecular level without confusing it with other volatile organic compounds.
Is hayfever a problem in your house? Dyson’s clever purifier also captures and removes the microscopic particles which may cause allergies, acting as a powerful shield against pollen, dust, pet dander and mould. When paired with a great vacuum, you’re ready to tackle pollen season head-on.
But these are all huge claims, and so we tested this purifier to find out if it could really clean our air.
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Dyson purifier hot + cool formaldehyde
What does it do?
Aside from removing formaldehyde, it’ll also filter particles (as small as 0.01 microns, including 99.95 per cent of bacteria, pollen, and mould spores). It’s worth noting that the whole machine is rated to Hepa 13 standards rather than just the filter, meaning it’s sealed from inlet to outlet, effectively grabbing – and hanging onto – all the particles you don’t want in the air.
Additionally, it is designed to be a heater and a fan, heating or cooling a room really quickly (we noticed the ambient temperature rise and fall in minutes after it was switched on, and it’s definitely more effective than other room heaters we’ve tried).
Ease of use
Once you’ve unwrapped the filter and plugged it in, you can either let the machine do its thing and keep it on automatic, or control it via the app or the remote control provided (that attaches to the top of the purifier via a magnet). The app will track all the info in a series of graphs, and you can compare current to previous air quality in quite some depth.
The machine itself also has a small monitor that you can look at for information, and where you can schedule the heater (the built-in thermostat also means you can set it to only heat when the indoor temperature falls below a certain level, if you want to). Once going, expect it to deliver 520m² of clean air an hour.
Design
Dyson has excelled here. The body looks like punched gold, while the white oblong atop the filtering cylinder is futuristic and pleasing, so we didn’t want to hide it away in the corner of a room.
It’s also quiet – yes, you can hear the fan or heater when it’s on full blast, but it fades into the background when running on a normal everyday setting, and being able to switch the speed up on the fan function was handy when trying to absorb cooking smells/spritzes of deodorant/smells of adhesive after using during building works.
The head turns so you can hit different parts of the room as needed, and you can tilt it, so there’s a lot of customisation available in the design.
Buy now £699.00, Dyson.co.uk
The verdict: Dyson purifier hot + cool formaldehyde
The downside of this machine is the cost. That said, if you are looking to invest in a purifier and are keen to own a machine that triples up as a heater and fan and which is easy to operate and looks great, it’s unbeatable.
If, however, you simply want a purifier without any bells and whistles and don’t want to reach so deep into your pockets for it, you might be better off sticking to one that doesn’t have this many other functions.
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