Dyson’s Excellent Humidifier/Air Purifier Combo Is $200 Off—And Worth It

Forget trying to say Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool in normal conversation and not sounding like a fugitive android on the run from the law. It’s an unwieldy beast in name only, though. In its engineering and design, it’s downright elegant, if overengineered.

I’ve been reviewing air purifiers and humidifiers (and owning a few personally) for five years, and hands-on experience with Dyson’s combination humidifier/air purifier/fan just highlighted what all the other models on the market lack.

It’s pretty damn expensive and, well, I hate to say it, worth the price of entry. If you want the best, this is it.

say goodbye to dry skin

Maintaining my indoor humidity is my semi-secret life hack to lower my heating bill. Left alone without a humidifier, the humidity level in my apartment will dip as low as 20%. Skin grows dry and flaky, wood furniture shrinks, and it feels noticeably colder. A lot colder.

Optimal indoor humidity should range from 30 to 60%. Mine usually sticks at 40%. That’s where I find the most relief from the dry air that invades my apartment from the outdoors, without making my home feel so damp that my walls mold up and my guitars go out of tune.

The Dyson holds enough water in its tank for up to 36 hours before needing a refill. Its method of cleaning itself is ingenious. Just hit a button to activate the cleaning mode, drop some citric acid powder (included) into the tank, and it’ll self-clean using the powder and UV light to prevent mold from building up inside the water lines and tank.

clean air

Then there’s air quality. You may believe your home to be a bastion against all the pollution, pollen, and volatile organic compounds floating outdoors, but homes are as leaky as a mesh submarine. Your indoor air is constantly replacing itself with air from, you guessed it, outside.

To keep yourself from breathing all that nasty junk, you should have an air purifier running indoors. Combining a humidifier and large-room air purifier into one machine cuts down on the floor space required, since having two machines could crowd up even a large room.

No standalone air purifier is large enough to clean the air inside a whole home, but the Dyson was able to keep the air quality very good around the clock in a large combination kitchen/living room.

Dyson’s model is a smart purifier, meaning that it’ll ramp up the fan when it detects a higher-than-normal amount of indoor air pollution through its built-in air quality monitor, and then it’ll settle back down to a quieter state once it’s worked through the miniature crisis.

Working near the Dyson at a kitchen table, I was easily able to ignore it and banish it from my mind on its normal, low fan speed. It’s a fairly quiet air purifier and only noisy on its higher fan speeds, which it rarely needed, in my experience.

It’s not a cheap machine, but it is a very good machine. Its self-cleaning routine is genius, and its performance both as a humidifier and an air purifier matched the very best models of its competition. Even at $700, it’s pricey. But if you want the best, the $200-off deal takes at least some of the sting out of the price tag.