Dreo Tower Fan Purifier Combo and AppAn air purifier can significantly improve the air quality in your home, reducing allergens and dust—assuming it's the right size for your space and you change the filters regularly. Smart air purifiers are supposed to have two major advantages over traditional point-and-shoot purifiers: They can tell you exactly when to change your filters, and they can tell you exactly what they're extracting from the air. The Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan ($269.98), like the Dyson Hot+Cool I reviewed last year, attempts to be everything an air purifier should do while also being a fan . While everything on the Dreo works well, I'm reluctant to recommend it based on two factors: size and value.
Dreo is big but the app is easy to use
Standing nearly four feet tall, the Dreo has silver fins and a rotating tower. It's not unattractive, just impressive. An air purifier, like a fan, works best when placed in the center of a room, but you wouldn't want to put it in the middle of your living room — and not only is it big, it's also heavy, weighing in at nearly 18 pounds. (More on that later.) It requires no assembly, though; Once I peeled the plastic off it was ready to go. At that point, I just plugged it in and paired it with the Dreo app, and the pairing process worked flawlessly. Additionally, you can add Dreo devices to Alexa or Google Home hubs. While many newer products use Matter to bridge products to HomeKit, Dreo is not currently HomeKit compatible. (I did find some suggestions online for workarounds for getting Dreo to work with HomeKit, but I haven't tested them yet.)
The Dreo app's interface uses a lot of white space, and it doesn't try to do much: it just tells you the air quality, temperature, and remaining life of the filter. You can view data for the past twenty-four hours or thirty days. The app lets you set a schedule and turn the tower on and off by activating the fan, purifier, or both.
With a product like this, it can sometimes feel silly or unnecessary to have extra smart features, but the ability to turn the purifier on and off remotely from another room or even away from the house does have some benefits. Yes, you can use them in automation to respond when air quality exceeds a certain threshold, but being able to turn them on and off remotely means you don't have to enter the space where the purifier is working, and it means you don't have to keep track of it all. Tiny remote control. This is a real advantage compared to the (non-smart) Dyson Hot+Cold, as there are some features that can only be activated via the remote, rather than via buttons on the face.
The second reason the smart app proves its worth is that it reports when to change the filter. Generally speaking, the rule is to replace purifiers every six months, but this is only an estimate. Filters are more useful if there's a lot of smoke or dust; if they're already clear, you're probably replacing them too soon. I was a bit shocked that after only a month of use, I only had 75% of the filters left, meaning I was replacing them too infrequently. (By the way, Dreo's filters cost about $39.99.)
Disadvantages of the app
Here's where the app falls short of this purifier: Dreo only provides a very basic measurement of ug/m3, which is a common way of expressing the level of air pollution. As I write this, Dreo is reporting a concentration of 10 ug/m3, which it considers "very good." This means there are ten micrograms of pollutants per cubic meter of air in the room. It doesn't tell you what the contaminant is. In comparison, the Dyson Hot+Cool isn't smart, I mean you can't do much with the app - you control it via buttons on the face or a little remote you might lose (at least I did it) . But Dyson reports on the face of the machine the actual composition of the pollutants it filters, such as gases, particulates and volatile organic compounds. I didn't think this was an important feature on the Dyson until the Dreo lacked it.
For example, one night when the up/m3 spiked to 270, the Dreo app reported "poor" air quality in the room. I wanted to dig deeper into why this was happening, but with no other information on what Dreo was pulling I could only speculate that it had something to do with the dinner I was cooking in the next room. However, you can glean some additional information from the PM rating it provides, namely particle size (especially granular material). I had the purifier in my office because I was doing drywall work there and I was able to see the purifier significantly reduce the PM from the time I turned the purifier on until a few hours later. I could even observe the purification. How much air is catching up.
It has a quiet fan that feels like a real breeze
I've been trying out some new Dreo products and one aspect I really like is the quality of the breeze the fan creates; it feels less like a fan and more like an actual breeze. This may be due to the fact that the Dreo fan is powered by dual motors, which makes the fan very quiet even at maximum fan and purifier settings. Dreo reports that the tower's maximum noise is 38 Db, I couldn't measure any higher, but in sleep mode it dropped to 25 Db.
One thing I particularly like about the Dreo fan interface is that you can adjust the intensity from 1 to 10 using a slider, and it doesn't suddenly increase power, but gently scrolls to the next setting. There's a sleep function in case you're intimidated by this behemoth in your bedroom, or you can set it to cycle on and off automatically. The tower can swing up to 120 degrees.
Is the Dreo a reasonable size?
Over the past few weeks, I've found myself staring at the Dreo a lot, trying to figure out where it would fit. Maybe a dentist's office, or a classroom—the space is spacious, large appliances won't stand out, and the design may feel industrial and cool. But this is where my main problem with the Dreo becomes apparent: When using a purifier, you need one that fits the size of the room you're using it in. This is important because the purifier essentially exchanges the air in the room. room, and you want this to happen often so that it makes sense to people moving through the space. A small purifier can eventually purify the air in an entire house, but it will take longer than purifying the air in a single room. If there's a wildfire nearby and smoke is a big issue, you'll need the right size purifier for the space, and you'll have to turn the air over every thirty minutes or less.
Dreo doesn't advertise a recommended room size for this purifier, so I asked them directly and their answer was "150-300 square feet." I'm asking for clarification because there is a big difference between 150 square feet and 300 square feet, which is a very small area for a purifier of this size in either case. I have five purifiers in my home from companies like Medify, and they are very effective for larger spaces with very compact dimensions; but these are just purifiers (not fans), so maybe that's an unfair comparison. The Dyson is designed for space at the top end of the equation (290 square feet), but it has a third of the floor space and comes with a heater. Both the Dreo and Dyson have filters as small as 0.03 microns, which is an average size for purifiers, although some like the Medify have filters as small as 0.01 microns, which is important for virus control.
Dreo is good, but you can do better
Dreo works great. The fan is powerful, the air purifier clearly removes airborne particles, and the price isn't bad at $269.98. But you can't ignore the device's size; it's a major hindrance to home functionality. It feels like a device designed for industrial spaces, but it's not designed to handle this type of square footage. While the Dyson Pure line is generally more expensive, at less than $100 more, you can buy the Dyson Pure Cool Gen 1 ($365), which only comes with a fan and purifier. However, if you have the spare cash, you can buy a Dyson Hot+Cool for $749, which I use regularly year-round because it's a room heater, fan, and purifier all in one. .
