They don't make 'em like that any more: Dyson Pure Cool-Me personal air purifier

Kevin Boone They don’t make ’em like that any more: Dyson Pure Cool-Me personal air purifier Note: I have to admit to a certain trepidation here. If you can afford even to contemplate paying nearly £300 for a fan, you’re in a highly fortunate, privileged position. I received mine as a gift, and it’s one of the best presents I ever had; I wouldn’t have spent that amount of money on myself. I’m not altogether happy, singing the praises of a device that nobody truly needs, and that probably only 0.001% of the world’s population would consider a reasonable expense. A shortage of personal air purifiers is most definitely a first-world problem. So, while I think it’s lamentable that Dyson stopped making the Cool-Me – and that nobody else has stepped in to fill the hole in the market more affordably – I’m not surprised to find that Dyson didn’t sell enough of them to keep them in production. Dyson’s Cool-Me is, or was, a personal fan and air purifier; it’s “Personal” in that it’s really designed to be used by one person at a time. Mine sits on my desk and, without making any noise I can hear over my computer fans, makes my life just a little better. The Cool-Me produces a gentle flow of cooling air at head-and-shoulders level, largely stripped of the pollen and particulates that make the spring months so trying. Like its other fans, all of which are eye-wateringly expensive, Dyson describes the Cool-Me as ‘bladeless’, although that isn’t really the case – rather, the air-moving elements are concealed in the centre of the unit. They draw air through the network of holes in the case, through the particulate filter, and out of the vent at the top. At the lowest setting, the fan is effectively inaudible, but it still does a good job of cooling when you’re sitting right next to it. Close up, the air jet is quite intense, considering the fan is almost silent. At the highest setting the Cool-Me is quite noisy, but still quieter than a conventional fan. The ‘bladeless’ design means that there are no accessible moving parts, so it’s safe around children. This is what a serious desk fan looks like On the lowest setting, the Cool-Me’s power consumption is only a few Watts, rising to about 30 Watts at full speed. The low power means that it doesn’t add a lot of heat to the environment, when it’s supposed to be keeping you cool. Because it’s an air cleaner, not just a fan, it makes sense to leave it running for extended periods of time, not just when you’re sitting in front of it. So it’s good that it’s relatively cheap to run: it works out at about 2p for eight hours’ use at the lowest speed. Replacement filters will be a lot more expensive; more on that thorny subject later. The Cool-Me has an ‘oscillating’ mode, where the fan head rotates side-to-side automatically. Conceivably, you could leave it running like this whilst you’re out of the room, so it sprays cleaned air around the environment. Whether this works, I can’t say, and I’ve rarely used this feature. Mostly I just sit the unit a few feet away, so it blows directly towards my chair. Until the ambient temperature reaches about 30 Celsius, I find it as effective as my full-size air conditioner, and a heck of a lot cheaper to run. At higher temperatures the Cool-Me still cools me, but only at much higher fan speeds. As with any fan, a blast of air at head height can dry your eyes uncomfortably, even though it might still make you feel cooler. In short, the Cool-Me is a highly effective machine for providing a modest cooling effect with little noise and low energy consumption, while reducing the misery of hay fever and allergies. The Cool-Me is, of course, not perfect. It has no external controls, just a pointless little remote control, that is supposed to attach to the unit by a magnet. In practice, its job seems to be to drop off into my coffee mug every time I so much as twitch. And, as the range of the remote is (honestly) about 30cm, it’s no more useful than ordinary controls. Despite its low-ish power needs, the Cool-Me’s external power supply is about the size of a house-brick, so it’s unsightly and gets in the way. There’s a measure of up-down adjustment of the airflow, but not really enough. In particular it can’t blow downwards; you only have to look at the fan-head to see why. To use it at night-time to cool my bed area, I have to raise the back of the Cool-Me on a pile of books so it points downwards. The real problem, though, is the filter. The Cool-Me uses a glass HEPA filter, which is claimed to remove ‘99.95% of allergens and pollutants’. Dyson are cagey about how long their filters last, suggesting that they should be replaced about once a year, but they don’t say how much daily usage that corresponds to. There is a filter life gauge on the unit, which you can activate using the remote control. Bear in mind, however, that if you remove the filter to inspect it, that resets the gauge. In all, I find that the filter does, in fact, last about a year with my usage. A replacement filter from Dyson costs – gulp! – £70, and I’m not sure how much longer Dyson will stock them. Dyson does use the same filter in other products, but they all appear to be discontinued, too. The good news is that a number of other suppliers can provide compatible filters, and at a much lower price. Whether these work as well as the original Dyson part, I really couldn’t say. The airflow doesn’t appear to be any lower, nor the fan any noisier. Whether they remove particulates as effectively as the Dyson filters is hard to say. This is all a little irritating, because glass HEPA filter are not easy to clean when they lose their effectiveness. They don’t respond to vacuuming as paper filters do, and washing destroys them. There might be some mileage in trying to blast the accumulated contaminants ‘backwards’ out of the filter using an air compressor, although I’ve heard mixed reports about the effectiveness of this method. Now that Dyson no longer makes the Cool-Me, I guess it won’t be too long before the lack of replacement filters turns mine into an expensive paperweight. So there we have it. The Cool-Me wasn’t a hugely innovative device – it didn’t change the world, or even embody any radically new engineering principles. It’s just sat on my desk, day after day, quietly making my life a little better. The downfall of the Cool-Me was surely its price. I can buy a perfectly serviceable desk fan for about £10. It wouldn’t filter the air, it would be noisy, it would dry out my eyes, and Heaven help anybody foolish enough to poke a finger between its blades. Still, three hundred quid was a lot of money for a fan.