Mi Air Purifier 3 Review - Clears the air sans the premium

• The Mi Air Purifier 3 aims to offers a minimalist design, decent performance and smart features at a reasonable price.
• It comes with a true HEPA Class 13 filter with a CADR of 380 cubic metres per hour.
• It has a touch-sensitive display that lets you interact with fan speeds and shows information like the ambient AQI.

Air quality has become a legitimate concern over the decade, especially in a place like Delhi NCR, which becomes a gas chamber during winters. While there are several factors to be blamed, the usual suspects include rapid industrial growth, crop burning, and fumes released from internal combustion engines. The short term solutions, for ourselves at least, include wearing face masks and using air purifiers, and this is precisely what Mi Air Purifier 3 sets out to do. With its true HEPA Class 13 filter, smart features and simplistic design, the Mi Air Purifier 3 comes with improvements that may be pretty useful for your home to enhance its air quality. So is it worth your money? Find out in our review.

Mi Air Purifier 3 Design

From the first glance, the Mi Air Purifier 3 looks pretty simple. It is a rounded box, about 52 inches tall and 24 inches wide, along with a matte white finish. Its job isn’t to stand out in your home but to blend in, and that’s something that it manages to do pretty well. While other air purifiers tend to have grills either on the front or the back, the Mi Air Purifier 3 only has an array of perforations on three of its four sides. The rear has an easy-to-remove panel for accessing the filter assembly. The top of the purifier has a grill that acts as an outlet for purified air to come out of. Given my experience of changing air filters, the Mi Air Purifier 3 is actually one of the more accessible options out there. My only gripes in design would be the lack of any colour option other than white and no handle to carry it around. Because it’s mostly going to be sitting in one place circulating air, it is more prone to getting discoloured due to dust.

To interact with the purifier, you wouldn’t find any physical buttons. Instead, a single touch-sensitive OLED panel clears out the clutter. I honestly prefer physical buttons in appliances, but the controls here were responsive and it also helps that it’s an air purifier at the end of the day so there isn’t much in terms of interacting, you can change the modes and that’s that. So it makes total sense to have touch controls.

The display also gives you a glance at current AQI levels in the room, with a smaller row displaying the ambient temperature, humidity level, as well as selected mode.

Mi Air Purifier 3 Specifications

Before we take a deeper dive into the performance of the Mi Air Purifier 3, I’d like to take a brief moment to simplify the technical mumbo-jumbo of its filter technology.

The Mi Air Purifier 3 boasts a HEPA Class 13 filter instead of an EPA filter that was included with previous models. HEPA stands for high-efficiency particulate air (filter) and, as you might have guessed it, when you remove the ‘high’ from this acronym, you get efficient particulate air (filter).

The basic difference lies in the filtration efficiency – HEPA can theoretically remove at least 99.97% of dust, pollen, mould, bacteria, and any airborne particles with a size of 0.3 microns. An EPA filter can capture 99% of particles that are 2 microns or larger.

Does HEPA kill Coronavirus? Nope. But it does have an odour filter, that claims to capture foul-smelling particles in your room.

Further, the spec sheet of the Mi Air Purifier 3 reads a CADR or clean air delivery rate of 380 cubic metres per hour, thanks to a centrifugal fan at the core of it. Simply put, the higher the CADR number, the quicker an air purifier can clear the air of a room. Further, it’s officially rated to provide a clean airflow for an area up to 484 sq. ft, so it’s alright for a medium-sized room.

Another buzzword here is 360-degree coverage, which means it can purify the air from all directions. This is actually useful, as you can place this purifier anywhere in a room to get optimal results.

The Mi Air Purifier 3 can also be integrated into your smart home, as it can be paired with Xiaomi’s Mi Home app. It also has Google and Alexa integration.

Mi Air Purifier 3 Performance

I’ve used the Mi Air Purifier for a little more than a week, and so far, dropping the ambient air quality from 250+ to a stable 60-70 PM2.5 mark took roughly around 48 minutes when the purifier was set at the auto setting.

The readings were taken from the appliance’s sensor itself, as I did not have an independent air quality detector.

This performance is acceptable, given my room opens towards an open space, but it does get kind of loud, especially during the first 15 or so minutes as it rigorously tries to clear the air. After that, it drops to a manageable decibel level that doesn’t bother you much. I’d recommend using the purifier much like an AC, keeping your door and windows closed while it's doing its job.

While I didn’t expect it to eliminate really offensive odours, it did a fairly decent job of removing the characteristic chalky smell of Delhi’s pollution.

The bundled app adds a layer of convenience, as you don’t have to physically change the settings of the purifier or keep it in your line of sight to check the AQI – it all can be done via your smartphone. Pairing it up with your smartphone is pretty painless, but connecting it to my Google Nest Hub required me to enable the Mi Home skill.

One thing that I really, really liked about the smart features was the ability to add routines. So, I programmed it to turn itself off every time I stepped out of the house using a Google Home routine and it worked like a breeze.

Mi Air Purifier 3 Verdict

Given the price tag of Rs 9,999, the Mi Air Purifier 3 is actually one of the more affordable products of the lot and offers a lot of value thanks to its smart home integration. It is easy to use, has an understated design and works reliably. Sure, it can’t stand up to the CADR of a more expensive air purifier, but it’s a great stepping stone for someone who’s starting to venture into this product category.

SEE ALSO:

Best video editing apps for Android
Apple expected to kick off iPhone 13 production in India starting February 2021 as trials begin