Good-looking design, unusual accessories
The LG PuriCare AeroMini catches the eye straight away with its compact cylindrical shape: a 25 cm base, 36 cm tall, just under 3 kg, light enough to put almost anywhere, on a study desk, a work table, a coffee table or wherever else in the house. LG tends to favor the cylinder on its purifiers. Besides looking good and taking up little space, a cylindrical purifier makes better use of the filter area inside and makes it easy to pull air in from every direction.
LG has also thrown in a few unusual accessories here: a leather carry strap, a flower holder and a small tabletop, so you can turn the purifier into a little side table or an understated vase in the corner of the room.
The materials and the finish on the AeroMini and its accessories are all done carefully, which makes this purifier something you would actually want on display at home. The 3-in-1 filter (pre-filter, HEPA and an activated carbon layer) comes out and goes back in easily when it needs replacing.
Filtration performance: a brutal test cleared in an hour
An air purifier is a simple thing: it pulls air in through a filter and sends clean air back out. Given that, strong airflow and a good filter are all it takes to clean the air well.
The AeroMini has both. Air comes in through 360 degrees around the body, maximum airflow is 3.5 cubic meters per minute, and the H13 filter handles fine particles down to PM 0.01 micrometers. H13 is a high-efficiency HEPA grade used widely on purifiers today, from budget models up to premium ones.
I ran a fairly brutal real-world test: burning 10 incense sticks in a closed 15-square-meter room. As you may know, cigarette smoke and incense smoke both produce a lot of fine particulates. After the 10 sticks had burned through, a dedicated particulate meter showed PM2.5 and PM10 in the room running thousands of times above the safe threshold.
To put numbers on it, PM2.5 in the room after the incense had burned out measured 642,286 µg/m3 (micrograms per cubic meter) and PM10 measured 489,300 µg/m3. By Vietnamese standards, a daily average PM2.5 reading is considered safe below 45 µg/m3, and PM10 below 100 µg/m3.
Thirty minutes on high got most of the way there: PM2.5 down to 61 µg/m3, PM10 to 197. Still lightly polluted on paper, though after 642,286 it felt like a different room. Another half hour and both were clean, 2 and 7.
Day to day it holds that line. The air stayed clean even with the air conditioner running and pulling outside air in.
Operating modes and noise
Five fan settings: sleep, low, medium, high, and auto, which reads the dust and picks a speed for you. How loud the AeroMini gets depends on which one you’re in.
You can change modes on the purifier itself or in the LG ThinQ app. The app adds a few things the on-body controls do not cover, such as a timer, a real-time dust reading, a PM2.5 history, and when the filter is due for replacement.
Sleep mode is close to silent; you have to sit next to it to notice the fan at all. Low is quiet too, around 38.5 dB measured one meter from the machine (40 dB is a whisper on the standard noise scale). Medium is noticeable but not yet annoying, around 45 dB (50 dB is light rain on the same scale).
On the highest setting it measured around 55 dB, about what an air conditioner puts out once it settles. That is loud enough to bother you while watching TV or sleeping. Then again, the machine usually only runs that fast for a short stretch, when dust levels in the room are high.
In auto, the purifier sets its own fan speed based on the dust level its sensor reads in the room. It uses a PM1.0 particulate sensor. The dust readings show up in the LG ThinQ app on the phone paired with the purifier.
Verdict
Nice-looking thing, and it holds up when you look closely. The accessories are unusual for a purifier this small, and the HEPA filter actually moves the dust numbers. Quiet enough to sleep next to, quiet enough to forget about during the day, and the app is worth opening. What you pay for all that is $300, a long way above what Xiaomi or Lumias charge for a purifier the same size. Whether that’s worth it comes down to how much you care about having something you don’t mind looking at.
LG PuriCare™ AeroMini Air Purifier- Mint Green, 360° Filtration for Home, Large and Small Room, Up to 900 sq ft in 1 Hr with True HEPA Filter, WiFi, Low Noise: Check Availability on Amazon
LG PuriCare™ AeroMini Air Purifier- White, 360° Filtration for Home, Large and Small Room, Up to 900 sq ft in 1 Hr with True HEPA Filter, WiFi, Low Noise: Check Availability on Amazon
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