I bought an Airdog X8 home air purifier, as is shown above. It is a console 15” square by 30” high. We put it in our living room.
Lately we have suffered from unsatisfactory air quality due to smoke from large wildfires. In Boise that smoke is blowing east from central and eastern Oregon. I decided to purchase a whole-house air purifier. There is an article by Courtney Linkwall in the May-June 2026 issue of Consumer Reports titled How to Pick the Right Air Purifier. It says that most purifiers use a certified HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filter, sometimes with an activated carbon filter.
Those purifiers basically are just a fancy box with a fan and holders for disposable filters. Under Features that article listed the annual cost for replacing filters. For our HVAC system we already have 20”x20” and 14”x14” (shown above) pleated paper filters that have to be changed every three months. They are inlets for holding them on the second-floor ceiling.
At the end of the listing for Extra Large Rooms there was an alternative - the Airdog X8 which instead used an electrostatic/ionizer and washable filters (so no annual cost for replacing disposable filters). For example at Amazon, the AeraMax SV has an initial cost of $486 versus the $1199 for the Airdog X8. But the AeraMax SV has an annual cost of $293 for filters. As shown above, after two and a half years the AeraMax already will begin costing more total than the Airdog.
