- This is the Molekule Air Purifier.
You may have seen it advertised on social media recently.
It's a very slick, very expensive machine.
We tested it to see how well it actually works.
(jazz music)
The Molekule is an air purifier.
It's not like really any other air purifier out there.
In particular, it's very different from the
HEPA air purifiers that we typically have tested,
and that we've recommended for years.
Instead of using a HEPA filter, which is a physical filter,
that contrasts directly with PECO technology it uses.
PECO stands for photo electrochemical oxidation,
and that is the main technology
that the Molekule uses to purify the air.
Inside this is a UV light, which shines onto
a substrate that contains titanium dioxide.
And there's an electrochemical reaction
that produces hydroxyl molecules.
That's one oxygen and one hydrogen.
Those are highly reactive.
They can interact with really anything in the air.
If they hit a free hydrogen atom, it just forms water vapor.
But if the hydroxyls come in contact with pollen
or a mold spore, or dust, they can react with those
and alter them, potentially even destroy them.
(jazz music)
Molekule makes a lot of claims about its purifier,
but the one that really caught our attention is this,
where they say, "Our scientifically-proven
"nanotechnology outperforms HEPA filters
"in every category of pollutant."
That's a big claim.
That's really what we directly tested.
What we do now is create a fairly well sealed off room,
but a real-world room.
This year we used a conference room here
at Wirecutter's headquarters in Queens.
We closed the windows, we shut down any sort of ventilation
that may be happening, and then we burned matches.
Matches, it turns out, are extremely good
at producing millions and millions of
extremely fine particles right in the scale
that's most difficult for HEPA purifiers to capture.
To measure how well they're performing,
we use a professional particle counter.
It's the TSI AeroTrak 9306 Version 4.
It's a handheld device,
it's often used to test air quality.
It's literally counting every particle
that comes through in a size range from 10 microns,
which is sort of your pollen scale,
all the way to 0.3 micron,
which is extremely fine, smoke particles.
We take three minutes of readings
to get a baseline before any matches are lit.
Well we burn five matches at a time,
and run the test for 35 minutes.
Do the matches, let the smoke spread for a few minutes,
and then turn on the purifiers, and run them for 30 minutes.
And we track the number of particles in the air,
and how many particles wind up in the air at the end.
And what we found is that the Molekule
is the worst performing air purifier
that we have ever tested.
So what do we mean by worst that we have ever tested?
Running the Molekule on its high setting
reduced particulates by 61.3%.
By comparison, our pick for small spaces,
the Blue Pure on its high setting achieved 87.2% reduction.
Compared to our overall top pick, the Coway AP1512,
it really wasn't even close.
The Coway is able to reduce particulates by 98.9% on high.
The Molekule's performance was even worse
on its lower settings.
They call their medium speed auto.
It is not, in fact, an automated function,
it's just a medium fan speed.
On auto, medium, it reduced particulates by 18%.
The Blue Pure 411 on medium achieved 70.7%.
The Coway is able to reduce particulates by 87.7% on medium.
On its silent setting, which is equivalent
to the slow fan speed, it was even worse yet.
Reduced by just 6.5%.
For the record, that's less reduction than you get
if you don't run any purifier at all.
Yeah, typically, we were getting like 15%, 18%
reduction just on background.
Over time, particles in the air fall out of the air,
so they're not being captured by the particle counter.
Finally, you can run the Molekule on a dark setting,
in which case that PECO system is shut off.
At that point, the only thing that's doing any filtration
is the physical pre-filter that's in the machine.
And on that, the Molekule achieved
21.3% and 18.0% reduction, which curiously
is very similar to what it gets on its auto setting
when the PECO system is on.
So it leads me to wonder whether the pre-filter
is doing most of the work.
So, you know, let's talk about pricing.
The Molekule retails for $800.
That makes the Molekule the most expensive air purifier
that we've ever tested, even though it's not nearly
as effective as all the purifiers that we recommend.
We don't recommend the Molekule
for the reasons that I've just gone over.
We do recommend, for most people, this machine.
This is the Coway AP1512HH,
also known as the Coway Mighty.
It's very quiet, it's compact, not very expensive,
and is a brilliant performer.
In an emergency situation, like a wildfire,
tests have shown that it'll reduce
even extremely heavy loads of smoke to nearly zero
over a course of an hour in a large room.
So it's just a really capable, really simple,
really reliable machine.
There's no denying that the Molekule
is extremely well marketed.
They've done a great job of getting themselves
out there in front of people.
But there's a difference between hype and performance,
and as we discovered in this case,
this thing really is over hyped.
(jazz music)
Oh my God.
- [Woman] (laughing)
- I'm done with you. There we go.