About Air Purifiers

I've always been intrigued with the notion of air purifiers—especially as someone who suffers from asthma and allergies. However, I never quite believed all of the claims that air purifier companies made—claims like removes mold and bacteria from the air and makes it easier to breathe. That makes it sound like an oxygen tent or a clean room at a high-tech factory, not a tabletop device.

I don't know if I had been talking about this on Facebook or Twitter, but earlier in the year the PR people for Zon Personal Air Purifier reached out to me and asked if they could send me a unit to try out. Of course, they wanted me to eventually write about the unit—which I'm doing now—but I wouldn't be doing so if I didn't think there was something to share.

And that something is this: that Zon Personal Air Purifier turned my normally sneeze-prone teenage daughter into a sniffle-free person.

The Zon Personal Air Purifier sat in its original packaging for months. I just couldn't figure out how it might be useful, since we try to keep our home as allergen-free as possible. We have hardwood floors throughout, and a no-open-window policy, lest dust or pollen fly around the inside of our house. (Here are other ways you can improve indoor air quality.)

A few months ago my teenage daughter signed up for a two-week college theater course that required her to live in the un-air conditioned dorms of a nearby four-year college. And that would be during the summer when the mercury nudged towards 100 degrees for days on end.

When summer rolled around and we needed to pack her up, we decided to take the Zon Personal Air Purifier along with her box fan. This would be all she had to "cool" her dorm room.

Two weeks later, when we went to pick up her up, she raved about how the air purifier seemed to "change" the air while she was sleeping. She said it allowed her to wake up, in her dorm room each morning, with the windows having been open all night, without a stuffed nose or any allergy feelings.

Since then she's continued to keep the air purifier going 24/7 in her bedroom. This is the first summer in years that she hasn't complained about her allergies.

I mentioned this phenomenon to a Facebook friend recently. He commented that he, too, was never able to sleep with the windows open because of allergies. However, now that he has an air purifier next to his bed (he didn't mention the brand), he can enjoy cool summer evenings with the windows open, listening to the crickets as he's going to sleep, and wake up in the morning with a clear nose and clear head.