Americans bought over three million portable air cleaners in 2002. Many of these were in a category called “ionic air cleaners,” or “electrostatic precipitators.” (We’re guessing the latter is more popular among Scrabble fans.) Of these, the market is strongly dominated by the “Ionic Breeze” air purifier marketed by Sharper Image, which accounts for a full quarter of all air purifiers sold in the U.S. Sharper Image advertises the Ionic Breeze as a completely silent device that purifies air in a home every minute of every day. Lou Manfredini, a writer for USA Weekend, recommended the Ionic Breeze in a 2004 editorial (“House Smart,” 22 February) but admitted, “I am no scientist.” Sharper Image’s ads for the Ionic Breeze Quadra claim it relies on “exclusive technology.” How exclusive? What are ion air cleaners, exactly, and how well do they work?
How Ionic Air Cleaners Work—or Charge It!
In order to understand the workings of ionic air cleaners, we need to review a bit of high school science. (Don’t panic; we’ll keep it as simple as possible.) Think of an atom as a planet surrounded by satellites. The planet represents the nucleus, or center, of the atom, which is in turn composed of a specific number of neutrons and protons. The neutrons, as their name suggests, are neutral, which means they have no electric charge at all. The protons each have a positive electric charge, just like the “plus” pole of a battery. Like satellites, electrons orbit the nucleus in a series of concentric shells, each of which has room for a specific number of electrons. Each electron carries a negative electric charge. Ideally, the number of electrons orbiting the nucleus is the same as the number of protons within it, so the atom has a net charge of zero. In other words, it’s electrically inert for all practical purposes.
That isn’t the case for all atoms, however. In some atoms, there are either more or fewer electrons orbiting the nucleus than protons within it. Therefore, the atom has a net charge of electrical energy. We call such atoms “ions,” from the Greek word meaning “a thing that goes.” Ions are drawn to opposing charges. Ions with fewer electrons than protons (i.e, “cations”) carry a positive charge and are drawn to negative poles (or “cathodes”), and ions with more electrons than protons (“anions”) carry a negative charge and are drawn to positive poles (“anodes”).
Do Ionic Air Cleaners Work?
Okay, great: Ions. So what?
The principle behind an ionic air purifier is that most small particles of common household pollutants carry a positive charge. The pollutants are too light to settle on the ground, where they might be vacuumed or swept into piles and removed. Instead, they drift in the air right in front of our faces. We don’t want that. Instead, let’s see what happens if we allow a smoke particle to drift past a negative ion. It’ll have to be pretty close to the anion, because the electrical charges involved are weak and diminish quickly with distance; but once we push the particle into striking distance, the anion jumps over and clings to it. If we add enough negative ions, they’ll collect on the particle like a dog pile at a football game. Together the particle and ions are too heavy to remain airborne, so they sink to the floor or into the device where, presumably, they’re out of harm’s way.
That sounds good in theory, but a moment’s thought should inspire questions and concerns. Maybe that’s why the Sharper Image webpage obfuscates the operation of the product behind a barrage of scientific lingo and advertising bluster. See for yourself: “The all-new Professional Series™ Ionic Breeze® Quadra® Silent Air Purifier — with Zenion Effect™ silent electronic propulsion — features a patent-pending 3+2 collector-blade system with a greatly improved airborne-particle capture rate.” We’re not sure exactly what that means, but a “collector blade” is a thin sheet of metal that catches the ionized particles as they fall. Otherwise, they’d simply accrue as a dark residue on the floor or a nearby wall. What we can say is Sharper Image charges $399.95 for one Ionic Breeze, $199.98 for the second. Those are some pricey little ions.
The Ionic Breeze And Consumer Reports
Reality Check!
Do ionic air purifiers work? Yes, but to widely varying degrees. The truth is the most effective air cleaner available is a whole-house system, custom-designed and installed by trained professionals. Unfortunately, that solution is too cost-prohibitive for most consumers, and besides, it only works for long in homes with forced-air cooling and heating. That puts us back in Sharper Image’s neck of the woods.
Sharper Image’s competitors go out of their way to discredit the Ionic Breeze, and they make some valid points. A company called Absolute Air Cleaners, for example, points out the reason the Ionic Breeze is so silent is that “the unit has no fan to exchange and filter the dirty air in the room….The Ionic Breeze can only remove a very small amount of particles…from a distance of approximately 1/8 of an inch away!”
Absolute Air Cleaners is a retailer of competing air purifiers, but it also conducts tests on all makes and models. They rate the Ionic Breeze as “poor” when tested under ordinary household conditions. They also accuse the Ionic Breeze of producing “harmful” levels of ozone. The jury’s still out on this one, almost literally. In April of 2004, a Florida woman named Alicia Bryant filed a suit against Sharper Image, claiming its product worsened her children’s respiratory ailments. Both that suit and another are currently seeking class-action status.
In the summer of 2003, Consumer Reports tested the Ionic Breeze Quadra and seventeen other portable cleaners in an airtight chamber. The evaluators used cigarette smoke and fine dust, two substances used in standard industry testing. These are relatively small particles, so air cleaners capable of removing them should work on a variety of contaminants. A small quantity of smoke and dust was introduced into the chamber; then sophisticated counters checked the quality of the air as the cleaners went about the task of removing harmful particles. Notice that these tests were conducted under laboratory conditions, not in ordinary rooms as in Absolute Air Cleaners’ tests.
Sharper Image Ionic Breeze – The Verdict
Surprisingly, Consumer Reports found that for all its popularity, the Ionic Breeze Quadra is by no means the most successful device on the market, and may in fact be one of the worst. In the words of Consumer Reports writer David Pittle, “The Friedrich Air Cleaner…cleared the air at a very rapid rate. It reduced the pollution levels in the room to nearly zero within a half-hour.”
By contrast, “the Ionic Breeze Quadra had a very low rate of cleaning. And when we tested it over a longer period of time, its cleaning performance did not improve.” The Honeywell Environizer and the Hoover SilentAir 4000, two competing cleaners that work on the same principle as the Ionic Breeze, suffered similarly poor results. Pittle concluded, “Our tests show, and independent experts confirm, that these air cleaners don’t work fast enough to be effective.” Instead, Consumer Reports recommended the $270 Whirlpool Whispure 450, the $500 Friedrich C-90A, and the $700 IQAir HealthPro (pictured left).
The Power of HEPA
“The IQAir is expensive,” the report admitted; but “it is the best option for people with severe allergies. This brand was chosen by the Hong Kong Hospital Authority as the only room air cleaner powerful enough to be used in the SARS outbreak.” It can clean a room of up to 900 square feet—but that’s because it doesn’t rely on ionic cleaning alone. Rather, it includes a “HyperHEPA” filter. The Whirlpool uses a standard HEPA filter that needs to be replaced every year. The Friedrich includes an electrostatic plate that produces a small amount of ozone.
Sharper Image Bites Back..But to No Avail
Subsequent articles from Consumer Guide and Wired recommended ionic purifiers, but they give undue weight to such relatively trivial factors as appearance, flashy features, and the cost of replacement filters. If all purifiers worked to the same basic degree, those would be fair criteria, but independent analyses have determined that this is not the case. Rather, the Ionic Breeze was found to remove less contaminant particles from the air around it than other models listed above.
As we’ve seen, this was true under both laboratory and household conditions. That’s why both Absolute Air Cleaners and Consumer Reports gave the Ionic Breeze a rating of “poor,” but Sharper Image was quick to bite back. The company griped about Consumer Reports’ testing methodology, so the organization allowed its methods to undergo thorough review—and ultimately, validation—by an independent expert. Then the Ionic Breeze was tested a second time. The results were the same. Consumer Reports invited two other independent experts to examine Sharper Image’s more complementary studies, which discredited those studies’ methods and results. Oops.
Sharper Image, no doubt realizing one of their cash cows was about to be tipped, filed suit in September of 2003, claiming Consumer Reports’ articles were both false and malicious. The suit was thrown out of court on 9 November 2004, but mostly on First Amendment grounds. Both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and American Lung Association have advised against using any air purifying device that produces ozone until more conclusive results have been achieved.
Ionic Breeze – The Bottom Line
Consumer Search points to several professional endorsements of the Ionic Breeze, including a “Label of Truth” from a nonprofit patient organization called the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA) and a Seal of Approval from the British Allergy Foundation. Despite that, Consumer Search sides with Consumer Reports against the Ionic Breeze. It also cites a warning from Mercia Tapping, the president of Allergy Buyers Club: “Vendors routinely overstate the effective cleaning area of a machine because the area is calibrated at the machine’s high fan speed. Now, try to sleep with that fan on high. It sounds like a train going through your bedroom.”
Be that as it may, a low-cost ionic air purifier is still a fairly sensible purchase, especially since purely ionic cleaners do not make the noise associated with other household air purifiers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture found that if used correctly, ionizers can reduce the amount of airborne dust in a room by over half, along with 95% of all airborne bacteria. The Journal of Hygiene Scientists found similar results in burn and plastic surgery units. The Journal of Applied Microbiology reported (in 1987) that negative ionization removes 40% of airborne viruses. Since 9/11, homeland security experts have warned that this is insufficient protection against any possible biochemical attack, but it should be enough to defend us against the allergens and other contaminants that seek to invade our homes on any given day.
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