📦 UNBOXING:
Inside the box, you’ll get the 2-in-1 air purifier and some documentation. Overall, it was packaged well for shipping so you won’t have to worry about damage during transit.
💪 BUILD:
Out of the box, the Blueair 2-in-1 Purify + Humidify Air Purifier feels lightweight thanks to a plastic build, which makes it easy to move across rooms and different floors of your home. Additionally, there are fabric handles on the side so that it’s easy to carry it.
On the top of the humidifier is the fan exhaust, display and capacitive controls. The display can get plenty bright but can also be dimmed quite low. The controls include the on/off toggle, an LED brightness control, a sleep timer, a metrics toggle, a fan speed control, an automatic mode, and a humidifier toggle.
In the front, you’ll see a window that shows the amount of water left in the water reservoir which can also be accessed via the rear back panel. When you remove the back panel, you’ll also find 3 filters (one of which is installed in the back panel) and the wick filter.
🛠️ SETUP:
Setup is overall quite simple. You’ll want to remove the rear back panel and remove the protective plastic from the filters before you start.
Then you’ll want to fill the water reservoir which can either be done by pouring water over the display (which was strange to me, but it’s certainly convenient), or by removing the reservoir via the rear back panel.
There is a max water level line on the rear of the reservoir, but filling it up to this line does not show a “full” reservoir from the front window of the unit, so it’s likely a conservative recommendation so that you don’t overfill and cause spills when moving the unit from room to room.
Afterwards, you can either start using it via the built-in controls, or set it up via the smartphone app over Wi-Fi. Note that this unit must connect using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. Setting it up via the app was very easy thanks to the guided process.
🎛️ CONTROLS:
The capacitive controls are pretty typical compared to other options on the market. There are no “increase” or “decrease” buttons for any of the functions, so you’ll have to press any given button a number of times to rotate through the option you want. Thankfully, the options are not overly plentiful, so it’s not too annoying.
One thing I dislike is that while the display is backlit, the capacitive controls are not. So it’s fairly likely that you will fumble to use the controls in the dark. You can use the smartphone app under this circumstance, but it seems like a pretty strange omission.
Even so, I especially like that I can quickly set a timer to have it run for a number of hours, control the fan speed, and toggle the humidifier function with ease.
💿 APP:
The smartphone app exposes all the features of the Blueair 2-in-1 Purify + Humidify Air Purifier along with some additional features like a historical graph of the PM 2.5 pollution levels and Humidity levels, the ability to view the filter life and set schedules for different configurations.
I especially like that I can configure schedules so that I can use the humidifier at certain parts of the day, and use just the air purifier at other times of the day. I also like the ability to use the fan as white noise during the night, so it’s nice to be able to have it on a routine schedule so that all I really need to do is fill the water reservoir for the humidifier and change out the filters from time to time.
I also like that there is an indication on the display and app when the water reservoir is low, and that I get push notifications so I can be proactive about filling the reservoir.
🧐 CONCLUSION:
After using it for about 2 weeks in my bedroom, I feel that it keeps my room at an appropriate level of humidity and keeps my air clean from pollutants. I especially like that I can set it on a schedule using the app so that I can mostly set it and forget other than when I need to refill the water reservoir or replace the filters. And because refilling the water reservoir can be done by pouring water over the display, it makes the system very convenient since I don’t have to do any disassembly.