In this day and age, there are lots of myths and rumors about so many of the products we buy. Unfortunately, this is true for air purifiers as well, which some claim act like air conditioners. This leaves us wondering: does an air purifier cool the room?
No, air purifiers do not cool down rooms. They don’t have any parts built into the systems that allow them to. However, most (although not all) air purifiers are fans. Although air purifier fans won’t be as strong as traditional fans, they still do circulate air, and this can make you feel cooler due to something called the wind chill effect. This is the same effect as a breeze on a hot summer day. Let’s dive in.
How An Air Purifier Works
Air purifiers are a great investment for you and the ones you love. They have a proven ability to filter out air pollutants that can affect your short or long-term health. They also come in many different shapes, sizes, and means of filtering the air.
Air purifiers, if you don’t know, are designed to do exactly as their name suggests: purify the air. They can do this through a variety of methods, but the basic process an air purifier uses is to suck the air around it in, filter it through one or more filters, then blow the air back out cleaner than it was before.
In essence, air purifiers are fans of air cleaning technology. This setup improves your health by removing as many pollutants from the air as they can. These would be things like dust, bacteria, pollen, dander, and more. that can and can’t be removed by air purifiers depends on the types of filters used).
Why An Air Purifier Can’t Cool A Room
Since air purifiers are only designed to purify the air, they don’t have anything built into them to cool it down. To do so, they would need to be built more like air conditioners. This is because air conditioners have parts that allow them to remove hot air from your home and replace it with cool air.
So, why can it feel like an air purifier is cooling the room then?
Why An Air Purifier Might Make You Feel Cooler
If you stripped away all of the parts of an air purifier that allowed it to clean the air, in most cases you’d be left with a fan, although it would be a fan that’s not as good at circulating the air as traditional fans are. It should be noted here that even though we use fans to help cool ourselves down, they make rooms hotter. The reason why fans help us to feel cooler is because of two processes: evaporation and convection.
Evaporation happens when we sweat and then that sweat evaporates. As a result, we lose heat. Convection happens because our body loses heat to the cooler air around us. Unfortunately, both of these processes heat the air around us, which limits their effectiveness over time.
Fans help us to break past those barriers though. Fans speed up the process to lose those heated molecules from our bodies. They carry both them and the air around us away, allowing for even more to be lost. This is what’s known as the wind chill effect.
Can You Get An Air Purifier That Actually Cools Down A Room?
There are some possibilities for consumers who want an air purifier that can cool down a room too. One is to choose an air purifier that has a high CADR rating. CADR stands for Clean Air Delivery Rate, which refers to how much air an air purifier can clean (cubic feet per minute or CFM) for particles of specific sizes. The higher a CADR rating, the more air an air purifier can take in and clean, which means the more air it can blow out, which increases its wind chill effect.
To also cool the room, your best option would be to look for air conditioners that come with built-in air purifiers or vice versa. Although these can be expensive (especially if you’re looking for a whole-house purifier), this is going to be the best way to have both the air purifier and the air conditioner in one.
In Summary: Does An Air Purifier Cool The Room?
Air purifiers are great at cleaning the air. That’s their job after all and because they do that job well they go a long way to improving our health. But air purifiers can’t do everything, and one thing they can’t do is cool down a room.
Air purifiers don’t contain any technology that allows them to act like air conditioners do, but they still might produce what’s known as the wind chill effect because most air purifiers are fans with filters.
There are certain ways to boost an air purifier’s ability to cool down the room though. First, you can choose an air purifier with a higher CADR rating. CADR ratings refer to how much air an air purifier can take in and clean (measured in cubic feet per minute or CFM) for particles of specific sizes. There’s also the possibility of getting a machine that combines air purifiers and air conditioners into one package.
So, does an air purifier cool the room? No, but there are options if that’s what you’re looking for. Either way, they’ll still do a great job at purifying the air for you and helping to keep you and your loved ones healthy. Is the same true for your experiences with air purifiers? What’s been most effective at cooling down a room for you? Let us know in the comments below!
