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This Coway Air Purifier Gave Me Clean Air After a Four-Alarm Fire

There’s no better air purifier for common large rooms than the Coway Airmega 250, and I’ve used almost all of them.

By Matt Jancer | Reviewed by Ysolt Usigan

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Hate to break it to you, but the air inside your home isn’t all that different from the air outside your home. You know, with all that pollution floating around. Think about it; if your house were airtight, you’d suffocate, right? So new air is entering it all the time, and where is it coming from? That’s right. So while it’s new air entering your home from outside, I certainly wouldn’t call it fresh air. It’s full of germs, dust, viruses, and pollution, such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

To breathe easily, you need an air purifier indoors. I’ve been testing them for six years now, and my hands-down favorite for large rooms is the Coway Airmega 250. As for the fire I mention in the headline, we’ll get into that in a moment. Forgive me for forgetting whether I counted seven or eight fire trucks outside the apartment building. I was bleary-eyed without my contacts, and I’m already not much of a morning person, so it goes double when I’m roused from bed at 4 a.m. and it’s dark outside.

TL;DR – My Quick Verdict

I’ve used a lot of air purifiers, and none of the competition out there beats the Coway Airmega 250 when it comes to purifying the air of large rooms. It’s not enough for truly huge rooms, despite Coway’s marketing language, but it’s plenty powerful enough for most homes that aren’t owned by people who appear on shows that start with The Real Housewives of… Rock-solid reliable for years, easy and intuitive to use, the Airmega 250 checks all the right boxes: a genuine HEPA filter that captures 99.999 percent of bacteria, viruses, dust particles, and pollution down to an extremely tiny 0.01 microns, plus a smart automatic mode that ramps up the purification when it detects elevated levels of indoor pollution.

Airmega 250 (opens in a new window)

Hah. You ready for this? Aside from just running the damn thing for four years without ever unplugging it, the Airmega 250 has carried me through a few calamities. For one, I was woken up at 4 AM due to a raging fire in my apartment building, which firefighters battled for three hours. Imagine 1,000 bags of popcorn being burnt in the microwave. After the building was saved, the place stank and black grit had been pumped through the building’s HVAC system into my apartment. It was ludicrous. The Airmega 250 kicked into its highest fan setting, but within a couple of hours its carbon filter began to absorb and neutralize some of the stink as the HEPA filter captured the carcinogenic particles released by the fire.

And then on June 6, 2023, when Canadian wildfire smoke descended upon New York City, I hunkered down indoors and breathed easy.........

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