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My Air Purifier Saves Me From Pollen, Smoke, and Cat Hair—and It Looks Cool

The Bissell Air320 isn’t style over substance; it's a beautiful home appliance, but also a savior for your home air quality.
Review: The Bissell Air320 Air Purifier Looks Beautiful, and Works Even Better
Composite by VICE Staff

Dunno about you, but in this house, it’s sneezin’ season. My cat is at maximum shedding level and is leaving cotton-ball-like tufts of fur on every available surface; the foliage is rapidly changing (although sadly, in Los Angeles, minus the gorgeous sunset-y colors that East Coasters get) and leaving all kinds of woozy particles in the air; and my allergies are partying like it’s 1999 and they’re at Prince’s New Year’s Eve party. I wake up in the middle of the night to find that my nose feels like it’s been stuffed with cursed beans by an ornery bridge troll. I’m not the only one who is being smote by the long hand of dust, pollen, and hair; my cat actually has asthma and wheezes when it flares up, and I feel awful for her since she can’t just pop a Claritin. But honestly, I don’t like taking allergy meds, anyway; they say non-drowsy, but it isn’t worth the risk of nodding off at Musso & Frank if I might be enjoying a dirty martini later. So what’s a (thirtysomething) girl to do? 

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Sure, you could scan the aisles of CVS or put in Visine every couple of hours, but one oft-overlooked solution is to get thee a high-quality air purifier, and mercifully, I’ve already found the white stallion of my dreams: the Bissell Air320. I initially bought this handsome home appliance a couple of years ago during a particularly heinous California wildfire season, when getting your hands on an air purifier was a contact sport and I had to speedily do loads of research about the specs and worth-it-ness of many models in the span of just a couple of days.

First impressions

I’m not going to lie: Its chic, 1stDibs-worthy looks were what initially drew me to this particular model; it is frequently mistaken for an expensive, aesthetically pleasing speaker, something which I don’t think was just a coincidence on behalf of Bissell’s design team. It has flared, walnut legs and attractive curved lines that whisper “zou bisou bisou.” On VICE’s shopping team, we frequently ask, rhetorically, why appliance and tech design is so often seemingly an afterthought, or at least lacks imagination and fun—much the same way I feel when driving through a gentrifying neighborhood and seeing stacks of brand new, characterless, box-like apartment buildings. With the Air320, I appreciate that in some boardroom meeting at Bissell, which makes many practical things like vacuums and mops, someone must have asked, “Why not make this air purifier sexy?” 

$339.89$224.95 at Amazon
$339.89 at Bissell
$339.89$224.95 at Amazon
$339.89 at Bissell
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What’s rad about it

It’s ultimately in its performance that I’ve been most impressed. Its “3-Stage Filtration” includes a fabric pre-filter, activated carbon filter, and an H13 HEPA filter, which join forces to suck up particles, odors, and pollutants; that HEPA filter alone captures 99.97% of particles 0.3 microns and smaller even when it’s running on the lowest fan speed. This thing also has great range; for quick and frequent air circulation (i.e. three changes an hour) it covers 527 square feet. And, if you’re just running it in the background and you only need air fully changed once an hour, it can do so for a whopping 1,582 square feet. If you’re using it frequently, you’ll want to replace the filter once every six months or so. 

bissell-air320-in-house.jpg

The Bissell Air320 doing its thing in my apartment.

The Air320 has an easy-to-set-up, gloriously simple interface, if you could call it that. Mainly, it’s one button atop the machine that you press to turn it on then rotate to choose your level of air-purification intensity. A backlit, Black Mirror-esque number appears on its surface in a glowing white to indicate to you what level you’re using. Once you’ve landed on the setting of your choice, it also shows you a number indicating the air quality of the room you’re currently in. It even has a color indicator as to whether the air is good, moderate, or poor quality, and when you fire it up, you can watch that number improve as the machine runs.

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What’s tricky about it

It’s not the quietest machine on the market, but the hum it produces is a standard white noise that I don’t find intrusive in the slightest. 

TL;DR

So, aside from allergy season, when do I use it? I recently turned it up to nearly full blast after having to get my ceiling repainted, since fumes sometimes give me headaches (not this time!), and as I mentioned before, it’s been a savior during California’s often-robust wildfire season (which is a stressful time not only because it’s, uh, scary when the Earth is on fire, but also because air quality plummets). It’s even great for clearing out cooking smells and smoke when I accidentally make… well, not the right choices while searing meat or reheating particularly aromatic foods. Did I also mention that my cat is fluffy, and even when it’s not allergy season, she’s like sentient cotton candy leaving a trail of tiny, dandelion-spore-like hairs in every direction? I’m not particularly allergic to cats, but when I have friends over who are, I fire up the ol’ Bissell.

I grew up in a house with a parent who is a heavy smoker, and my mother would often run an air purifier in a futile attempt to keep the house from smelling like cigarettes; since my dad just kept chain-smoking about 10 feet away from it, it obviously didn’t work, and for this reason, I had little faith in air purifiers for years. But after buying this one out of necessity during a particularly smoky September, it’s become my bestie for relieving allergies, ridding my apartment of fumes and unsavory smells, and even clearing the room of a post joint-passing haze after I have guests over. 

The brand more recently introduced a “Max” version of the purifier, which is WiFi-connected and has smart home integration; while I haven’t tried it, I did notice that it’s currently on sale for quite a bit less than the non-Max model, which seems like a smart buy, since it has many of the same features but with even more modern tech. 

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$339.99 at Amazon
$350.19 at Bissell
$339.99 at Amazon
$350.19 at Bissell

Breathe in, baby. Clean air: That’s the good stuff. 

The Bissell Air320 air purifier is available at Bissell and Amazon


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