Over the summer months, I’ve been spending time with the latest Dyson Hot+Cool Gen 1 Air Purifier (HP10). I’m in the bracket of people who has never been able to afford a Dyson fan of my own, but everything I’d heard about them painted the picture that they are a divine gift to air circulation.
In my opinion, they’re not perfect, but I do think Dyson fans are one of the best options on the market in terms of multi-functionality.
Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Gen 1 (HP10) Review
What’s good?
The main drawcard of the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Gen 1 is its multiple applications. The device is capable of air circulation (like a regular fan) as well as high-level air purification, and it can alter between heating and cooling. It’s an ideal package for those who would like to literally get a fan that can “do both”.
Let’s unpack all that, starting with the fan component. Air circulation on the Dyson Hot+Cool Gen 1 is decent. It easily managed to cycle air through my bedroom, allowing an even flow. It struggled slightly more in an open-air space like my living/dining combo, but I imagine any fan would in such a large area. One thing I particularly like about the design of the Gen 1 Purifier is the tilt options on the base, which made more directional flow even easier to customise to my specific liking.
The fan is easily able to switch between heating or cooling options at the touch of a button. Admittedly, I did not have much need for the heating option in the midst of Australian summer, but on the rare occasion we had a cooler night, I tested the heat setting and found it quickly warmed me up.
Adding to that, I appreciated having an external remote for the fan. If you’ve grown up with the old pedestal fan, you’ll know that it’s an annoying problem to have to constantly hop up from your seat to adjust its oscillation direction or air speed. The remote provided with the Dyson Gen 1 purifier eliminates that. You can control everything at the touch of a button, including temperature settings, direction and power. That and, while the remote is small, it has a magnetic backing that allows you to snap it to the top of your fan, ensuring you never lose track of it. It’s all incredibly convenient, which is really what this fan is all about.
The major factor at play with a Dyson fan like this one is the air purification system. This is really the unique selling point of units like this one. Often, you can get an air purifier or a fan, but not both in the same package, and this is where Dyson’s Gen 1 Hot+Cool purifier really excels.
Air quality in Australia isn’t nearly as bad as in some other countries, but we do have the odd day where smoke from back burning chokes the streets, or trees unleash an unholy amount of pollen, giving an air purifier plenty of use cases – particularly for those with allergies.
I didn’t experience too many of these events during my time with the Dyson Gen 1, but I do live in an apartment beside a constantly busy road in Sydney, so I was curious to see if pollutants from local traffic were impacting my home.
The Gen 1 Air Purifier is equipped with HEPA filters that Dyson claims can capture 99.95 per cent of ultrafine particles in the home, including allergens and bacteria. The small screen built-in to the fan provides real-time monitoring of PM2.5 and PM10 particles, allowing you to see the levels of pollution in your space as the machine detects them. During the majority of my time using the Gen 1 air purifier, my air quality did not have a heartbeat on the screen, but when I was perhaps burning a candle or using my diffuser, the machine would almost instantly detect the pollutants.
So I was surprised when I placed the air purifier at my balcony door to test for pollutants from the road, only to find it did not pick anything up out of the ordinary. However, I don’t take this to mean the purifier wasn’t doing its job.
Dyson states that the Gen 1 purifier is capable of capturing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which include things like petrol gases, but that it doesn’t have a sensor to provide data on this. So the air purifier may well have been capturing all those nasty pollutants in the background, and I just couldn’t track it on-screen.
When it comes down to it, unless there’s a major pollution event happening outside, I can’t really tell the difference between air that has been filtered or not. But I do trust the air purifier’s process and appreciated that I could see a real-time breakdown of anything hanging around my space.
One last positive I’ll give to the Dyson Gen 1 Hot+Cool is its noise level. It’s the quietest fan I’ve found, considering the huge amounts of air it manages to circulate. It offers 10 different fan speeds, which, naturally, increase in noise the higher up the ladder you go, but on the lower speeds, I found I could comfortably keep the fan on in the background of calls or even when recording my podcast, and it wasn’t noticeable. There’s also an in-built Night Mode that allows the fan to run even quieter at night, while maintaining the same airflow.
What’s not so good?
For all the good the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Gen 1 provides, I don’t think it’s perfect.
For starters, the fan can simply not compete with air conditioning in the summer heat. There were swelteringly hot days that I would have the fan set at full blast on Cool mode, and it still couldn’t make a dent in the temperature, instead circulating mildly warm air around my space.
I understand that to achieve the icy coldness of an air conditioner, different mechanics are required. It’s not something this fan claims to do, but considering that the Gen 1 offers temperature control for its heating settings, I wish it did the same for cooling. Particularly when you’re forking out almost $900.
My other complaints about this air purifier are fairly minimal. The main differentiating factor between the Gen 1 purifier and other models in the Dyson range is the lack of its Formaldehyde-destroying capabilities.
Much has been written about the detriments of Formaldehyde, which is hidden in a lot of household building materials and cleaning products, hence Dyson has chosen to target it withs its flagship range of air purifiers. The Gen 1, however, does not have these capabilities. How much that factors into your decision depends on how concerned you are about Formaldehyde exposure and how much you care about the air-purifying capabilities of your product.
While I did praise the quiet qualities of the Gen 1 earlier in the piece, on the higher settings it does get quite loud, to a point that I don’t think is justifiable for the amount of air that is coming out of it. In my experience, I’ve found ceiling fans are far more capable of circulating larger volumes of air at softer noise levels, but if you took that option, you wouldn’t have all the other air-purifying qualities that this product offers.
Dyson Hot+Cool Gen 1 Air Purifier: The Verdict
All in all, I don’t think the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Gen 1 is the most capable fan for summer heat, but I do think it’s the most multifaceted.
It manages to do a lot in a fairly small package – providing advanced air purifying capabilities and air circulation on both hot and cool settings. It’s ideal for those who want a fan, a heater and an air purifier – and it’s admittedly not that easy to find a device that will do all of those things to this high standard.
But at an asking price of $899, you really want to ensure the product is going to be perfect at everything you want it to do, and I found the Hot+Cool Gen 1’s cooling power to be about the same as a standard pedestal fan, which you can get for a fraction of that price.
If cooling is your primary use case for a Dyson purifier, I’d suggest looking into the Dyson Cool range instead. But if you want a fan that can do it all, it’s hard to go past Dyson’s HP10 Hot+Cool Gen 1 purifier.
You can shop the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Gen 1 here: Dyson | David Jones | Harvey Norman | JB Hi-Fi
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