7 of the best air purifiers to deal with wildfire smoke

Most of us spend a lot of time and effort on staying healthy. We’re drinking water, wearing fitness trackers, trying to get good sleep, and taking our vitamins. We all know we’re supposed to limit sugar, alcohol, tobacco, bad fats, and salt, and those are all things we can personally decide to ingest. But when it comes to air, we don’t really have a choice. We must continue to inhale and exhale nearly constantly in order to continue living.

And that’s usually all good, but now that wildfire smoke is becoming more prevalent across the U.S., breathing in clean air is getting harder. If you live in an area that’s prone to wildfire smoke, it might be seeping into your home and compromising indoor air quality.

Without slathering on the doom and apocalypse vibes, inhaling wildfire smoke for extended periods of time is not good. It can cause headaches, dizziness, and eye irritation. But it can also cause serious problems like permanent lung damage, and that’s true even in healthy people, according to Yale Medicine.

If you’re not interested in that, adding an air purifier to your house is the way to go. These relatively small (and often super quiet) machines can literally suck the smoke particles out the air, leaving you to enjoy clean air while you work, make dinner, and sleep in the safety of your home.

Testing a Levoit HEPA air purifier in my living room.
Credit: Lauren Allain / Mashable

Testing the popular Coway Airmega air purifier in my home.
Credit: Lauren Allain / Mashable

Just how bad is wildfire smoke for our health?

Plenty of stuff in the air can cause us physical discomfort. Consider when the pollen counts skyrocket every spring or when we walk into a smoke-filled casino. According to the Centers for Disease Control, wildfire smoke can cause breathing issues, headaches, lethargy, coughing, and wheezing, to name a few ill effects. Those who have asthma, heart disease, or diabetes are at an increased risk of getting sick. Kids and pregnant people are also considered high-risk when it comes to getting sick from wildfire smoke.

Even if you feel fine, smoke particles are small enough to get into our bloodstream, according to Yale Medicine, and that means they have access to other organs like the heart and the liver. Over time, exposure to PM 2.5 might lead to an increased risk of cancers, heart attack, and cognitive issues.

It’s not just us humans who can struggle with smoke, but our pets, too. The American Veterinary Medical Association says that if we can see or feel the effects from smoke, our pets can as well. That’s especially true for pets with cardiovascular or respiratory issues.

The benefits of an air purifier

If your neighborhood gets socked in with wildfire smoke, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends you keep windows and doors closed. Even still, it’s possible smoke can seep in under doors, through cracks, or from vents in the kitchen and bathroom. Running a portable air purifier can help cut down on harmful particles that might enter your home. 

Air purifiers work by sucking in the room’s air and sending it through a filtration system.

Most high-quality air purifiers do so with a HEPA filter (High Efficiency Particulate Air) in addition to a few other filters. A pre-filter is a great addition, and it looks similar to a screen with a fine weave. These help capture dust and hair, which leaves the more-important HEPA filter cleaner and less clogged up from larger debris that can float around in the air. A HEPA filter is capable of removing 99.97% of tiny particulate matter in the air that we can’t see, but can cause us discomfort, according to the EPA. That includes wildfire smoke, cigarette smoke, pollution from nearby traffic, pollen, and dust.

A briefing on particulate matter

When shopping for an air purifier, you’ll see many models explain that they capture particulate matter, or PM. For the most part, that’s stuff in the air that you don’t really want to inhale. We measure PM by its diameter. Either with an on-unit display or in the app, most air purifiers will track the level of PM 10 and PM 2.5 in the air. To help get a baseline of understanding, a single strand of human hair measures between 50 and 70 microns in diameter, according to measurements from the EPA.

• PM 10: Particulate matter that measures 10 microns in diameter includes dust, pollen, mold, and some wildfire smoke particles.

• PM 2.5: These tiny particles measure 2.5 microns in diameter, which is true of the majority of particles emitted from wildfire smoke. 

Since PM is so small, it can enter our bloodstream and nestle itself deep in the lungs, according to Yale Medicine.

Do air purifiers help with allergies and viruses?

Since HEPA filters are designed to scrub the air of potentially harmful particles, they can also help cut down on pollen, dust, and even viruses. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America says using a HEPA filter can reduce airborne allergens that wind up indoors. That can be from an open window, your clothes you wore to the park, or even when the dog comes home from a walk.

An air purifier with a HEPA filter can also be helpful during cold and flu season. Not all virus particles are large enough to get captured by HEPA filters. However, many are launched into the air via a cough or sneeze so those virus particles are traveling within a larger particle (what the CDC calls a respiratory droplet) which can get filtered out by a HEPA. By no means does using an air purifier mean you won’t get ill if you hang out in a room with a sick person all day, but it might reduce the likelihood.