CADR

Spring brings out many things and some are not pleasant at all. Allergies to pollen and many other particles attack us and can give us a hard time. Of everything we can buy to combat them at home, the most effective and useful is, without a doubt, purchasing a air purifier. But, How to choose the most suitable one for your home? That is the question I have been asking myself in recent days, since all the purifiers I have seen have a gibberish of figures and data that, paradoxically, can confuse more than help us choose. After doing a little research, it is clear to me that, if I have to focus on something, it would be in the CADR. I’ll explain why. Philips 2200 Series Air Purifier, HEPA NanoProtect + Active Carbon Filter, CADR 400m³/h for 104m², Allergy Friendly, Ultra Quiet, Smart and Durable Filter (AC2210/10) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links What is CADR and why does it matter so much? If we enter a store like Amazon and look for any air purifier (like this one from Philipsfor example), right from the start we are going to be inundated with a lot of information. Perhaps what may catch our attention most at first is that it is capable of eliminating 99.97% of the particles in the air, a very high figure. What’s happening? We will find this in most purifiers and it is not the most important thing. That’s where the CADR comes in. The CADR (clean Air Delivery Rate or Clean Air Delivery Rate in Spanish) is a unit of measurement that tells us, in a few words, the amount of filtered air that a purifier can deliver. A purifier that has the best filter on the market is fine, but is it any good if it is not capable of moving air and filtering it fast enough? Because if you don’t, the pollen or dust particles will end up settling on the furniture and will not be filtered. The CADR has a numerical value that is calculated with two aspects: how many particles the filter is capable of trapping and how much air the purifier is able to move through said filter. No matter how good the filter is, it is equally important that the purifier is able to move through it, since otherwise it will not trap dust or pollen particles well and they will continue to swarm around our room. Bad thing for our allergies. Small note that must be taken into account. The CADR is not just a single value, but there are three. This happens because purifiers have a CADR for pollen, but also for dust and smoke. This is important, since what we should focus on is pollen. The others are more secondary. Falling short of CADR is always a bad idea If we go back to the Philips purifier above, we can see how it is, in theory, ideal for rooms up to 44 square meters in less than 17 minutes. Now, you have to read the fine print on the device’s own page on Amazon: It is a theoretical one-time cleaning time calculated by dividing your CADR of 170 cubic meters/hour by the room size of 48 square meters (assuming the room is 20 meters in area and 2.4 meters in height). Why do I say this? Because although the description of a purifier indicates that it is optimal for a room of a certain size, they are always references taken under certain conditions. that may not fit with our home. The ideal is to take the CADR of the purifier and make a simple calculation that will not lead to errors. This calculation is done in three phases that I summarize below: First, we need to know the cubic meters that has the room where you are going to use the purifier. It is calculated by multiplying length, width and height. Second, we need to know how many times you want the purifier to clean the air. The AHAM (Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers) recommends between 5 and 8 per hour. To finish, we multiply the volume of the room in cubic meters and the air changes per hour that we want. Quick example. If you have a room with a volume of 25 cubic meters (because it is 4 meters long, 2.5 meters wide and 2.5 meters high) and you want the purifier to renew the air 5 times per hour, the ideal is that you look for an air purifier with a CADR of at least 125 cubic meters/hour. Be careful here, because many purifiers give you this information in cubic feet per minute (CFM), which is the original AHAM standard. Now, does it make sense to buy a purifier with a much higher CADR than what you need? If you opt for this scenario, you will have a device that filters the air in your room faster and even without the motor running at full speed all the time (which means less consumption and less noise). The issue here is that a higher CADR also usually means, in the vast majority of cases, paying more for the air purifier. The choice here is up to each user, but with one thing clear: never fall short of CADR. The good and the bad of both options, face to face low or medium frame tall frame THE GOOD 🟢 Cheaper and enough for small rooms like a bedroom Ideal for large rooms and for air to filter faster THE BAD 🔴 It may fall short if you move it to a larger location at some point. They are more expensive and it may not be worth spending a lot if your room is small. Ideal for: Tight budgets and small rooms Rooms like a living room or if you are looking for a purifier that does not always work at full capacity In summary: 👉 Choose a low or medium … Read more