Dyson’s bid for a clean and safe home

Singapore—You don’t need special equipment to see how heavily polluted our cities are. You just have to look outside. But did you know that you aren’t free from pollutants inside your home, too? And since you spend a lot of time indoors, you’re also still constantly exposed to pollutants, and some of these can cause serious harm.

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British technology company Dyson has a solution for this issue—the new Pure Cool Link purifier fan. This air-purifying fan is also the company’s first foray into the connected home as it links up to an app to give you information about the device and let you control the Pure Cool Link right from your Android or iOS device.

But why would you want one? What benefits will it bring to your home? Dyson flew us and different media outlets from Southeast Asia to Singapore to introduce the Pure Cool Link and tell us why this makes for an important addition to any home.

There are a number of air purifiers available in the market already and they should do the same thing. But what one of the major things that set apart the Pure Cool Link and what Dyson boasts about is its capability to filter out even the ultrafine particles we have in our homes.

The Pure Cool Link promises to remove 99.95 percent of indoor allergens and pollutants up to as small as 0.1 microns from the air. These can be anything from mold, pet hair, pollen, human skin, deodorants, gases and fumes from cooking, cleaning solvents, waxes, to pesticides. The Dyson-patented 360-degree Glass HEPA filter has 1.1 square meters of constructed microfiber that can trap these ultrafine particles as well as odors and harmful toxins from things like paint fume.

At most, Dyson claims this air purifier reemits around 0.05 percent of these particles. If compared to its competitors, who Dyson says the highest reemitted ultrafine particles is at 31 percent.

Why do you need to be concerned about these ultrafine particles? At less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (approximately 1/30th the average width of human hair), these particles can lodge deep into the lungs. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, these can cause breathing issues and irritation of the lung capillaries. It can cause decreased lung function, lung cancer, and emphysema. These ultrafine particles pose a greater threat to children since they breathe up to four times faster than adults and have immature immune systems that can put them more at risk.

Aside from its health benefits, if we were completely honest, the Pure Cool Link looks pretty, well… cool, especially when you compare it to the bigger, boxy air purifiers. If you’ve seen Dyson’s Air Multiplier (the bladeless fans), these look like them. It makes sense since this also serves as a fan just as much as it is an air purifier. It comes with the Air Multiplier technology. There’s a desk and tower version of it.

On the convenience front, the Pure Cool Link requires less maintenance as Dyson promises what they call “pit-stop filter maintenance,” which means it’s easy to take the filter out of the base and pop a new one in after the existing HEPA filter has gone through its lifespan. The filter is built to last for about 4,382 hours.

While conventional purifiers usually need to be cleaned, washed, and dried once a month, Dyson promises and encourages you don’t tamper with the filter. Only take it out when you’re going to replace it. And if you use the Pure Cool Link 12 hours a day, every day, you’ll only need to replace it once a year. The replacements can be bought from Dyson stores.

And no, you don’t have to keep tabs on the filter for when you need to have it changed. That’s where the “smart” component comes in.

The Dyson Link app can remotely control the Pure Cool Link, no matter where they are, as long as the Pure Cool Link is connected to your home Wi-Fi. It will let you know if the filter needs to be changed. It can also inform you of the air quality inside your house and set new targets to reach before air quality becomes “very poor.” Or you can have it in auto mode and let the machine automatically react to the monitored air quality. And since it tracks this information, it can give you air quality history to see when peak pollution times are. By working with air quality data analytics company BreezoMeter, the app also provides outdoor air quality.

During our tour of Dyson’s R&D facility in Singapore, we were able to briefly sit down and chat with Jim Roovers, Dyson Singapore’s head of Southeast Asia Electronics. We found out from him more about the Pure Cool Link as Dyson’s first foray into the smart home.

“Dyson is very much about making machines,” Roovers says about the challenges they faced with making a connected appliance. “That’s what we do. We are very much about the design and how to make machines better. For the connectivity bit, you require more software skills, which is my team. So we are constantly trying to find the right people, of course, for our different sites.”

“This is the first product/machine, which we made as a connected product,” he continues. “It has a Wi-Fi modem inside, which also has an app, which then communicates to each other, and communicates with a cloud server, which allows you to control the machine from anywhere and any place.”

When prodded further about the security of user data, Roovers assures that they are careful with user data.

“We handle security very, very tightly,” he emphasizes. “Not only towards our own technology but also to the consumer and data of our consumers. We only use the generalized data that we see which we then try to learn back from how users are using machines and actually then trying to use that data to improve our machines for the future.”

When asked if we will see more connected devices from Dyson in the future (the only other smart appliance Dyson has is the 360 Eye robot vacuum), he can’t as expected give a definite answer but he does give us an idea of what may happen.

“Connectivity is one of the major drives in Dyson,” Roovers says. “We’re trying to think of that moving forward. I think the Dyson Pure Cool Link fan is now able to show consumers or Dyson owners that you have dirty air in your house and you can see that. The app and connectivity gives you that added feature. Before you weren’t so aware of all those things.”

He adds, “In the future you’ll see more connected products. But it’s not just to connect [for the sake of connecting]. It’s connect[ing] to add more value, to make sure that machine performs better.”

While we don’t know when another smart Dyson appliance will show up, for now we’ll have to settle with one connected Dyson appliance (no word yet on the 360 Eye). We were told the Pure Cool Link is coming next month with suggested retail prices of P29,900 for the Desk Purifier and P42,500 for the Tower Purifier. Dyson is offering a two-year warranty including parts and labor.