REVIEW – California is known for a lot of things (most of them awesome) but one thing that isn’t so super is our air quality. The smog situation has improved a lot over the years, and people would probably think that there isn’t much left to burn in California, but it’s a big place and we’ve already had one fire in my area. That motivated me to seek out an air purifier. Today I’m going to talk about the Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier. My family room will never smell like a campfire again!
What is it?
The Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier is a quiet air purifier that cleans up to 1,580 square feet in one hour!
What’s in the box?
The Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier and a booklet of instructions
Setup
The setup of this air purifier was pretty easy. It involved taking off the cover and peeling the wrapper off of the filter and then downloading an app and scanning a QR code when prompted. I also took the extra step of following the prompts to add it to my Google Home and Echo devices. More about that below.
Features
Probably the most interesting part about the Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier is that it tests and cleans the air in your home automatically. There are some light rings on the top of the unit that indicate the air quality at any given moment. Blue is excellent, green is good. orange is moderate and red is bad. If you want specifics, you can check the Zigma app and it will give you the particulate level. I had the opportunity to test that fairly soon after I got the air cleaner while my son and I were cooking dinner. We set the smoke alarm off (my son learned that olive oil has a low smoke point) and I looked at the air cleaner it was all red. If I’d had the machine in automatic mode it would have automatically adjusted itself on the air quality, but I didn’t, so I cranked it up myself and opened some windows.
The Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier has a Hepa H13 filter with carbon to absorb odors or smoke. In case you’re not familiar, H13 is medical grade filtration that removes all particles .21 microns with 99.9% efficiency. To put that into perspective, a human hair is about 70 microns thick, So .21 of a micron is pretty tiny!
The company plans to launch a H14 filter soon, so that will probably be what I’ll replace the filter with when it needs it and the machine will tell me when that needs to happen, which is a big plus. Filters are the most expensive part of owning an air cleaner, and I always wonder how often to change them. Change them too early and you’re losing money. Change them too late and you risk damaging the machine.
Another thing I really like about the machine is that the filter is pretty compact because it has several different types of filtration all sandwiched together. There’s a foamy pre-filter for larger particles like pet dander, a pleated True Hepa filter, and then a carbon filter that takes care of odors. The air cleaner is about the size of an office trash can, so it’s pretty easy to tuck it away where it will be unobtrusive. It is also pretty quiet. I have had other air purifiers and the fans are pretty loud. After the “olive oil incident” I put the machine in automatic mode and I don’t even know that it’s on. I should also mention that if you are sensitive to noise, there is a “night mode” that turns it down so it shouldn’t bother you, but I don’t find that I need that because just in “regular mode” it’s so quiet.
The Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier also has CARB certification, which gives me peace of mind. I live in California and all air cleaners in my state are regulated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). CARB makes sure that the air cleaners are electrically safe and also regulates how much ozone is generated by the air cleaner, because although ozone is very effective at cleaning the air, too much can cause upper respiratory irritation and even damage your airways. The Zigma generates negative ions as one of the ways it cleans the air (the others being through the filtration and a UV light). Charged ions combat those floating dust particles you sometimes see when the sun streams through a window. The charged ions attract those floaters and they fall to the floor.
I connected the Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier to our smart gadgets, both Google and the Echo. It wasn’t difficult, but I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more features available through Google Home and Echo. You can really only turn the device on and off through those apps. If you want to adjust the speed, you have to do that through the app. It’s not a big deal, but if I need to open the app, then I probably would just turn it on and off there and not bother with Google or Alexa. I feel like they just enabled Google and Echo integration to label it “smart.” I think it is unlikely that anyone would actually use that function because it’s so limited.
The app, however, has quite a bit of functionality. It tells you the outdoor air quality and tracks your indoor air quality. It lets you control pretty much all the settings and lets you set custom parameters for what the machine interprets as “good” vs. “bad” air quality. I think that’s really a nice feature because if you are super sensitive to air quality changes, you might want the machine to turn itself up to high before it reaches what the presets consider “serious pollution.” You can also use the app for customer service and warranty issues, if you need that. They offer a 24 month replacement warranty with one month unconditional warranty.
What I like
- Quiet
- Automatic/Set it and forget it operation
- Efficiency/Square footage capability
- App functionality
What I’d change
- More smart home functionality
Final thoughts
I’ve owned some fancy air cleaners, but the Zigma Aerio-300 smart WiFi air purifier is the quietest, most unobtrusive cleaner I’ve ever owned. It covers a surprising amount of square footage in such a small package, and it even regulates itself. So if you’re on the fence about which one to buy, I think this one is pretty great.
Price: $199.99
Where to buy: Amazon or Zigma
Source: The sample for this review was provided by Zigma.
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If they are anything like the HEPA filters for home HVAC units, the H14 filter will be a lot more expensive than the H13 filter.
Interesting. Maybe I’ll stick to the H13 then!
Yeah, wait and see. The slightly improved filtration might not justify the increased cost.
In order to give back to new and old customers, the initial price of the Zigma H14 professional medical-grade filter will only be 10 US dollars/Euro more expensive than the H13 filter.
When going to the web site it has been indicating “sold out” for the past few weeks. There is no indication of if or when they will restock.
It’s an older review. I wonder if they rolled out a new model