Molekule Air Pro

Verdict

The Molekule Air Pro is a gorgeous, highly effective air purifier for large areas. It’s equipped with one of the most comprehensive set of sensors I’ve seen, providing extensive data about the quality of your indoor air. It’s easy to setup and use, too.

However, it’s hard to get away from the fact it costs more than twice as much as most other big air purifiers. It’s certainly a statement design, and it feels beautifully made, but is it good value? That depends to an extent on the efficacy of its innovative photoelectrochemical oxidation filter, which I can’t independently verify. And, assuming it is more effective than a regular HEPA13 filter, whether you can afford to pay for a greater level of purity.

Introduction

As you can probably guess from its price, the Molekule Air Pro isn’t marketed as just another air purifier. This is a very high-end product, aimed at people who want the highest level of performance, from something that doesn’t look like a decorative afterthought.

There’s no doubt it succeeds as a design. This is a beautifully clean, bullet-shaped purifier. Its clever design does away with the perforations that plague cheaper products, leaving a clean alloy cylinder that seemingly floats above a simple white base.

Near the top there’s a permanently attached faux leather strap – you’ll need it for lugging this 10.4kg beast around.

The Air Pro uses a unique filtration system, comprising HEPA13 and carbon to filter out particles, odours and gases. There’s a proprietary third layer of protection, which aims to break down organic pollutants using a chemical reaction powered by ultraviolet light – I’ll explain that in more detail in my review.

Design and Features

• A lovely bit of design
• Excellent air quality monitoring
• Slightly simplistic app and controls

This is comfortably the best looking air purifier I’ve tested. The Molekule Air Pro also gives off an air of good quality and feels thoroughly, if not overly engineered. Instead of simply twisting it open, for example, you get at the filter by pushing down and turning the centre part of its top.

This ‘core’ contains the fan, then floats up, allowing you to remove it and get at the filter, which hangs on a large spike running up through the body’s centre.

This air purifier is serious about ultraviolet (UV) lighting, which is used to power the photoelectrochemical oxidation (PECO) process that, it’s claimed, breaks down pollutants that make it through the HEPA13 and charcoal filtration. The spike is bristling with LED light sources and, if the purifier’s been running, you can feel that its interior gets a little warm.

While it’s not uncommon for air purifiers to use short-wavelength UVC lamps, which can directly destroy germs, Molekule’s PECO technology is powered by UVA, which has a longer wavelength. This is less effective at directly killing microbes, but here it’s used to power a chemical process on the inside of the filter. It’s claimed that a catalytic reaction ‘breaks down organic matter at a molecular level’, and is capable of destroying volatile organic compounds (VOCs), viruses, bacteria and allergens.

Molekule maintains that this technology, found in all its purifiers, is more effective than filtration with or without UVC. Its website contains multiple studies that appear to back this up, and the company is proud that its purifiers are recognised by the US Food and Drug Administration as medical devices.

The Molekule Air Pro is fitted with one of the most comprehensive air quality sensors I’ve seen. It monitors PM1, PM2.5 and PM10 particulates – small particles that can cause or exacerbate a huge range of health issues. It also measures VOCs, which can cause anything from eye and respiratory irritations to kidney, liver or nervous damage. Finally, it measures relative humidity, and carbon dioxide levels – which can help show if you need to ventilate a room to release stale air. Perhaps the only thing missing are nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) levels, which are covered by some Dyson products.

You can control the Air Pro’s speed and operating mode via a small colour touchscreen in the middle of its core. Over five pages, this lets you change the operating mode from Auto Protect to one of six manual fan speeds, displays the air quality or filter life, and gives access to the settings. It’s notable that there’s no on/off button or shutdown timer – Molekule says its purifiers should run constantly.

Molekule’s Android app asks for permission to make and receive calls, which is there so you can use it to call customer service. You need an account to use the app, and can’t opt out of ‘product news & exclusive offers’ when signing up, although you can unsubscribe later. Other than this it’s very simple, essentially duplicating the features found on the Air Pro’s own display. Again, there’s no scheduling on offer – if you really need to switch the Molekule Air Pro off, you’ll have to use a smart socket, or do it manually.

The Molekule app shows air quality and operating mode at a glance. It also charts the historical air quality for each day or week. You can view each of the six data series individually, or stick with an overall Air Score, which offers an at-a-glance view of your air’s health. This is a great way to understand and act on any trends in air quality – for example, a regular spike in particulates and VOCs during dinner time.

However, while you can link the Air Pro to Alexa, at the time of my review it didn’t support automation through Google Home or IFTTT. That’s a shame, as it would be great if you could use high CO₂ or pollutant readings to trigger other ventilation or filtration devices. The app also doesn’t offer proactive warnings – for example you can’t configure it to notify you if the CO₂ reading enters an unhealthy range.

Molekule recommends changing this purifier’s filter every six months, which will prove expensive at their UK price of around £160. While, as with all purifiers, you could buy a third-party filter, it’s important to note that it won’t properly support the patented PECO technology, which is a key reason for choosing this purifier over something cheaper.

Performance

• Very effective filtration
• Loud at high speed settings
• Moderate power consumption

The Molekule Air Pro is designed for use in big living spaces, rather than bedrooms, but even so it’s not the quietest air purifier I’ve tested.

The slowest fan speed is fine, and easily backgrounded, but at anything from speed two upwards a tone emerges. It’s low and quiet on setting two and three, but by setting four it begins to sound like a leaf blower somewhere down the street. By setting five it’s your own pathway being cleared, while on full speed it’s like someone vacuuming the same room.

From one metre away, I measured a whisper-quiet 29.5dB at the lowest fan speed. This rose to 43.5dB at speed three, and topped out at a punishing 62.3dB.

Get past the noise and this is an extremely effective air purifier. We test every example by shutting them in a small room with a burning smoke pellet, which releases a thick fog of particulates into the air for about a minute. I turn the test purifier on full power, and use a separate air quality sensor to measure particulate levels as they’re returned to ‘good’: a reading below 25 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m³).

The Air Pro needed only three minutes to talk my sensor down from its 999µg/m³ maximum, hitting a ‘fair’ reading of 30µg/m³ in seven minutes, and arriving at 12µg/m³ within eight minutes. After 12 minutes, the reading fell to 1µg/m³ and stayed there. That’s faster than every purifier I’ve tested, other than the Levoit Core 600S, which hit each of the fair and good benchmarks a minute earlier.

I’m not equipped to verify Molekule’s claims about the efficacy of its PECO technology, but I did notice an interesting postscript to my smoke test. Smoke pellets have a distinctive smell, which often lingers permanently on the filter of air purifiers we’ve subjected to them – it’s still noticeable on the Levoit Core 400S I reviewed nine months ago. The Molekule Air Pro smelled clear almost immediately after the test finished, possibly suggesting that any lingering contaminants had indeed been broken down.

With plenty of UV lights onboard, I wasn’t surprised to find this air purifier’s minimum electricity consumption come in at 22 watts (W) – below 10W is more typical of similar purifiers with a DC motor. This increased to 25.8W at the third speed setting, but at top speed it was 108W – significantly higher than other air purifiers I’ve tested. While that’s not ideal, it’s not a huge issue, particularly given that in auto mode the Air Pro is likely to spend much of its time simply ticking over at low speed.

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