universo-virtual.com

buytrendz.net

thisforall.net

benchpressgains.com

qthzb.com

mindhunter9.com

dwjqp1.com

secure-signup.net

ahaayy.com

soxtry.com

tressesindia.com

puresybian.com

krpano-chs.com

cre8workshop.com

hdkino.org

peixun021.com

qz786.com

utahperformingartscenter.org

maw-pr.com

zaaksen.com

ypxsptbfd7.com

worldqrmconference.com

shangyuwh.com

eejssdfsdfdfjsd.com

playminecraftfreeonline.com

trekvietnamtour.com

your-business-articles.com

essaywritingservice10.com

hindusamaaj.com

joggingvideo.com

wandercoups.com

onlinenewsofindia.com

worldgraphic-team.com

bnsrz.com

wormblaster.net

tongchengchuyange0004.com

internetknowing.com

breachurch.com

peachesnginburlesque.com

dataarchitectoo.com

clientfunnelformula.com

30pps.com

cherylroll.com

ks2252.com

webmanicura.com

osostore.com

softsmob.com

sofietsshotel.com

facetorch.com

nylawyerreview.com

apapromotions.com

shareparelli.com

goeaglepointe.com

thegreenmanpubphuket.com

karotorossian.com

publicsensor.com

taiwandefence.com

epcsur.com

odskc.com

inzziln.info

leaiiln.info

cq-oa.com

dqtianshun.com

southstills.com

tvtv98.com

thewellington-hotel.com

bccaipiao.com

colectoresindustrialesgs.com

shenanddcg.com

capriartfilmfestival.com

replicabreitlingsale.com

thaiamarinnewtoncorner.com

gkmcww.com

mbnkbj.com

andrewbrennandesign.com

cod54.com

luobinzhang.com

bartoysdirect.com

taquerialoscompadresdc.com

aaoodln.info

amcckln.info

drvrnln.info

dwabmln.info

fcsjoln.info

hlonxln.info

kcmeiln.info

kplrrln.info

fatcatoons.com

91guoys.com

signupforfreehosting.com

faithfirst.net

zjyc28.com

tongchengjinyeyouyue0004.com

nhuan6.com

oldgardensflowers.com

lightupthefloor.com

bahamamamas-stjohns.com

ly2818.com

905onthebay.com

fonemenu.com

notanothermovie.com

ukrainehighclassescort.com

meincmagazine.com

av-5858.com

yallerdawg.com

donkeythemovie.com

corporatehospitalitygroup.com

boboyy88.com

miteinander-lernen.com

dannayconsulting.com

officialtomsshoesoutletstore.com

forsale-amoxil-amoxicillin.net

generictadalafil-canada.net

guitarlessonseastlondon.com

lesliesrestaurants.com

mattyno9.com

nri-homeloans.com

rtgvisas-qatar.com

salbutamolventolinonline.net

sportsinjuries.info

topsedu.xyz

xmxm7.com

x332.xyz

sportstrainingblog.com

autopartspares.com

readguy.net

soniasegreto.com

bobbygdavis.com

wedsna.com

rgkntk.com

bkkmarketplace.com

zxqcwx.com

breakupprogram.com

boxcardc.com

unblockyoutubeindonesia.com

fabulousbookmark.com

beat-the.com

guatemala-sailfishing-vacations-charters.com

magie-marketing.com

kingstonliteracy.com

guitaraffinity.com

eurelookinggoodapparel.com

howtolosecheekfat.net

marioncma.org

oliviadavismusic.com

shantelcampbellrealestate.com

shopleborn13.com

topindiafree.com

v-visitors.net

qazwsxedcokmijn.com

parabis.net

terriesandelin.com

luxuryhomme.com

studyexpanse.com

ronoom.com

djjky.com

053hh.com

originbluei.com

baucishotel.com

33kkn.com

intrinsiqresearch.com

mariaescort-kiev.com

mymaguk.com

sponsored4u.com

crimsonclass.com

bataillenavale.com

searchtile.com

ze-stribrnych-struh.com

zenithalhype.com

modalpkv.com

bouisset-lafforgue.com

useupload.com

37r.net

autoankauf-muenster.com

bantinbongda.net

bilgius.com

brabustermagazine.com

indigrow.org

miicrosofts.net

mysmiletravel.com

selinasims.com

spellcubesapp.com

usa-faction.com

snn01.com

hope-kelley.com

bancodeprofissionais.com

zjccp99.com

liturgycreator.com

weedsmj.com

majorelenco.com

colcollect.com

androidnews-jp.com

hypoallergenicdogsnames.com

dailyupdatez.com

foodphotographyreviews.com

cricutcom-setup.com

chprowebdesign.com

katyrealty-kanepa.com

tasramar.com

bilgipinari.org

four-am.com

indiarepublicday.com

inquick-enbooks.com

iracmpi.com

kakaschoenen.com

lsm99flash.com

nana1255.com

ngen-niagara.com

technwzs.com

virtualonlinecasino1345.com

wallpapertop.net

nova-click.com

abeautifulcrazylife.com

diggmobile.com

denochemexicana.com

eventhalfkg.com

medcon-taiwan.com

life-himawari.com

myriamshomes.com

nightmarevue.com

allstarsru.com

bestofthebuckeyestate.com

bestofthefirststate.com

bestwireless7.com

declarationintermittent.com

findhereall.com

jingyou888.com

lsm99deal.com

lsm99galaxy.com

moozatech.com

nuagh.com

patliyo.com

philomenamagikz.net

rckouba.net

saturnunipessoallda.com

tallahasseefrolics.com

thematurehardcore.net

totalenvironment-inthatquietearth.com

velislavakaymakanova.com

vermontenergetic.com

sizam-design.com

kakakpintar.com

begorgeouslady.com

1800birks4u.com

2wheelstogo.com

6strip4you.com

bigdata-world.net

emailandco.net

gacapal.com

jharpost.com

krishnaastro.com

lsm99credit.com

mascalzonicampani.com

sitemapxml.org

thecityslums.net

topagh.com

flairnetwebdesign.com

bangkaeair.com

beneventocoupon.com

noternet.org

oqtive.com

smilebrightrx.com

decollage-etiquette.com

1millionbestdownloads.com

7658.info

bidbass.com

devlopworldtech.com

digitalmarketingrajkot.com

fluginfo.net

naqlafshk.com

passion-decouverte.com

playsirius.com

spacceleratorintl.com

stikyballs.com

top10way.com

yokidsyogurt.com

zszyhl.com

16firthcrescent.com

abogadolaboralistamd.com

apk2wap.com

aromacremeria.com

banparacard.com

bosmanraws.com

businessproviderblog.com

caltonosa.com

calvaryrevivalchurch.org

chastenedsoulwithabrokenheart.com

cheminotsgardcevennes.com

cooksspot.com

cqxzpt.com

deesywig.com

deltacartoonmaps.com

despixelsetdeshommes.com

duocoracaobrasileiro.com

fareshopbd.com

goodpainspills.com

kobisitecdn.com

makaigoods.com

mgs1454.com

piccadillyresidences.com

radiolaondafresca.com

rubendorf.com

searchengineimprov.com

sellmyhrvahome.com

shugahouseessentials.com

sonihullquad.com

subtractkilos.com

valeriekelmansky.com

vipasdigitalmarketing.com

voolivrerj.com

zeelonggroup.com

1015southrockhill.com

10x10b.com

111-online-casinos.com

191cb.com

3665arpentunitd.com

aitesonics.com

bag-shokunin.com

brightotech.com

communication-digitale-services.com

covoakland.org

dariaprimapack.com

freefortniteaccountss.com

gatebizglobal.com

global1entertainmentnews.com

greatytene.com

hiroshiwakita.com

iktodaypk.com

jahatsakong.com

meadowbrookgolfgroup.com

newsbharati.net

platinumstudiosdesign.com

slotxogamesplay.com

strikestaruk.com

trucosdefortnite.com

ufabetrune.com

weddedtowhitmore.com

12940brycecanyonunitb.com

1311dietrichoaks.com

2monarchtraceunit303.com

601legendhill.com

850elaine.com

adieusolasomade.com

andora-ke.com

bestslotxogames.com

cannagomcallen.com

endlesslyhot.com

iestpjva.com

ouqprint.com

pwmaplefest.com

qtylmr.com

rb88betting.com

buscadogues.com

1007macfm.com

born-wild.com

growthinvests.com

promocode-casino.com

proyectogalgoargentina.com

wbthompson-art.com

whitemountainwheels.com

7thavehvl.com

developmethis.com

funkydogbowties.com

travelodgegrandjunction.com

gao-town.com

globalmarketsuite.com

blogshippo.com

hdbka.com

proboards67.com

outletonline-michaelkors.com

kalkis-research.com

thuthuatit.net

buckcash.com

hollistercanada.com

docterror.com

asadart.com

vmayke.org

erwincomputers.com

dirimart.org

okkii.com

loteriasdecehegin.com

mountanalog.com

healingtaobritain.com

ttxmonitor.com

bamthemes.com

nwordpress.com

11bolabonanza.com

avgo.top

We put the Dyson Zone’s air filters to the test. Here’s what we found. - Best News

Top 5 This Week

Related Posts

We put the Dyson Zone’s air filters to the test. Here’s what we found.

This spring Dyson launched the Zone, which pairs noise-canceling headphones with an air-purifying visor. It was swiftly met with backlash for its funky, bane-like aesthetic. Oh, and it’s $949 price tag. What no one could have predicted is that, just a few months after Zone launched, a massive Canadian wildfire would billow enough smoke across the East Coast to turn New York City’s skyline into a surreal orange nightmare. The “orange scare” was a freakishly timely event that drew attention to the climate crisis. This, in tandem with the World Health Organization’s (WHO), estimates that 9 in 10 people around the world are breathing in air that exceeds pollutant limits, should be enough to scare anyone – especially considering how quickly urbanization is growing, exacerbating those problems. Suddenly AQI entered everyone’s vocabulary and probably more than a few people started giving the Dyson Zone another look.

Dyson’s reputation as a maker of household air purifiers gives the company solid ground to build on; it’s just making the tech wearable. The company claims that the Zone’s two-stage, sealed filtration system can remove 99 percent of ultrafine particles and “city fumes.” Dyson’s engineering lead Vicky Gibson-Robinson told Engadget that the Zone uses an electrostatic filter to capture particulates as small as 0.1 microns. That, paired with an activated carbon filter that she claims can absorb fumes and gasses such as nitrogen dioxide (the main pollutant emitted by cars, trucks, and buses), is the bread and butter of the filter. Keep in mind, though, that the Zone will require electrostatic filter replacements, anywhere from every six to 12 months depending on the dirtiness of the city you are based in. The carbon filter, on the other hand, Dyson engineers said will not need to be replaced as often and should only be swapped out when “it starts smelling.”

The Zone has three air flow rates based on your level of activity: rest (level one), light (level two), and moderate (level three). Gibson-Robinson says the best way to get the most out of the Zone is by setting it to auto mode to preserve battery life (a big point of contention which we will get to later). “If you put it in auto mode, it will just ramp up and ramp down as it needs to,” she said, meaning the Zone is smart enough to know when to increase the filtration rate depending on the wearer’s movement and breathing rate. The more you strain and move, the more inhaling and exhaling, and the more filtration is needed.

Gibson-Robinson says that all the claims made about the Dyson Zone, such as its ability to remove fine particles like PM2.5 that can enter your respiratory tract, were made via testing each part of the filtration system individually. Meaning, the electrostatic filter, the activated carbon filter, and the impeller fan were tested alone. Gibson-Robinson claims that since we were not planning to disassemble the device during our tests, we might find that the Zone’s ability to filter pollutants would be even greater than claimed.

Engadget picked three locations to test how well the Zone performed, including a clean lab as a control, and a subway station in New York City, followed by a busy intersection. We reached out to experts at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine who work in partnership with the University’s Langone’s Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards to help us test the Dyson Zone’s filtration system.

“The subway is a good substitute for a worst-case scenario,” said Terry Gordon, NYU Professor at the Grossman School of Medicine, who helped Engadget run these tests. Gordon, who has researched the underground transit systems and its health effects on commuters, says that in a scenario where an air quality emergency is not taking place, the air quality inside a subway station is comparable. Meaning, how well the Zone does in the subway station would be a good indicator of how well it would perform during another acute air pollution crisis.

Once we agreed on a mission, our aim was simple: test how well the Zone removed pollutants from the air surrounding a wearer’s breathing zone, no pun intended. We primarily used two lab-grade devices: a portable particulate monitor and a particulate counter. The portable particulate monitor gave us real-time measurements of PM10 and PM2.5 particulates in the air, which are the two main types of pollutants scientists care about and differentiate based on size. Meanwhile, a particulate counter is used to measure the concentration of pollutants left in the air. In an ideal world, we would have liked to test the Zone’s ability to filter out volatile organic compounds (VOCs), or toxic chemicals that come from home products and natural sources like benzene, formaldehyde or acetone, but these compounds were not easily detectable in the city streets or on the subway by our handheld VOC detector. This made sense since the subway tract is mostly run on electricity, not coal or gas.

For each test, we collected data while the Dyson Zone’s visor blew air in my face, instead of a dummy head. We did it this way for two reasons. For one, the lab-grade dummy head was not always detected by the Zone, so the filter would not run properly. Also, this allowed me to include real-world user experience in our assessment.

So first, in the NYU lab, while the visor blew fresh air into my face, Gordon’s Ph.D. students David Luglio and Antonio Saporito held clear tubes connected to both the portable particulate monitor and the particulate counter in the path of the airflow. This happened in the small cramped space between the plastic visor and my lips. By doing this, we were able to gauge how the numbers recorded on the devices changed when the filter was turned on and off. Because it was a clean lab, the air quality was already pretty good. When we turned on the filter to rate three, the volume of PMs measured by the monitor dropped to zero. No surprise there.

We applied the same method on the 14th Street-1st Avenue subway platform in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which is often flooded with college students taking the L train into Brooklyn. Using the particulate monitor and the particulate counter, we recounted how the filter did before and after being turned on. The results clearly demonstrated the Zone’s effectiveness. The ambient particle monitor went from giving a reading of 200 micrograms of particle matter per cubic meter of air before it dropped close to 50. This meant the air quality went from dangerous to normal with the Zone running a level three.

Meanwhile, the particle counter went from measuring 20,000 particulates per cubic centimeter to under 1,000 at the level three. So instead of all those fine particles going up into my respiratory tract, they were wafted away through the filtration system.

NYU doctoral student David Luglio, whose thesis work has primarily focused on the health effects of long-term exposure to subway air quality in large metropolitan areas in cities like New York and D.C., was shocked by how well the Zone filtered the subway air. “Air quality in the subways in general, wildfire or not, is probably one of the worst environments to be in in New York City because concentrations are typically at least 100 micrograms per cubic meter, and outside on a typical day it is only 10 or less.”

In our final test, we used the same method on the busy street corner right across from the subway station. Again, the Zone did its thing. Readings from the two live monitors spiked and dropped again-proving that the Zone actually worked.

“It’s Dyson and Dyson knows particles and filtrations, that’s what they’re famous for,” Gordon said. The Dyson Zone proved it can remove ambient particles from the surrounding air, he continued. Those particles “are the main contributor to the adverse health effects of air pollution-more so than ozone, NO2, SO2,” and ultimately wearing a device like the Zone will protect your lungs and your heart from the adverse health effects of long-term air pollution.

This is all great in theory. However, there almost always has to be a catch with experimental devices that explore new categories like the Zone does: the battery life. Unfortunately, while testing, the Zone would only last about an hour and a half. We had to keep a charger handy in case it decided to shut off. This, coupled with the fact that we weren’t even using the audio feature while testing, told me that the device is still a long way from being practical for everyday use. Dyson is fully aware of this issue. “Although the audio system and the airflow system are two separate systems, they’re sharing the battery,” Gibson-Robinson said.

You only have to look at what Dyson has done with the vacuum cleaners, Gibson-Robinson explained. To draw a comparison, Gibson-Robinson brought up her first handheld vacuum. “[It] had a runtime of something like nine minutes, 15 minutes, something like that and now my newest one, which I got the other week, actually blew my mind. It’s like 60 minutes of runtime,” she continued.

It took the company a decade to make that leap. While Dyson’s capacity to boost battery life in its handheld vacuums could be a good indicator that there are loads of gains to be made for the Zone, it’s nearly impossible to justify the $949 asking price. That, coupled with the fact that the climate crisis is worsening day by day, some consumers (myself included) might not be willing to wait for Dyson.

Still, Gibson-Robinson says the compromise on battery life “felt adequate” in order to offer a device that could double as a headphone and a filter. “We’ve obviously had to balance between because the batteries are housed in that headband… and we’ve had to balance comfort and weight with battery life and performance,” she said. But ultimately, “It’s engineered and designed to be worn primarily as a pair of headphones and then secondary, which pains me to say because I did all the filtration stuff, the secondary function is that it’s a purifier,” she added.

Besides the disappointing battery life, I wasn’t a fan of the plastic visor itself. Although Dyson claims it’s super durable (Gibson-Robinson even dropped the visor from a balcony once out of curiosity), the detachable plastic felt like an awkward appendage at times. You can pull the visor down to sit below your chin while you’re wearing the headphones if you don’t want to run the filter all the time. You can also flick it back up and have your face covered in a second if you are ready to turn on the filtration mode. But something about it hanging beneath my chin when the filter was off felt kind of gross after a while.

If you’re a germaphobe like me, there’s plenty of reason to worry about something being so close to your face all the time. For one, it bumps into your face when you put it on in a rush and do not adjust it properly. It also comes off pretty easily, making it easy to drop on, say, a gross subway station floor. On the plus side, although the material feels cheap and flimsy, it’s at least easy to clean since it’s removable and wipeable.

Still, there’s a heaviness to the device overall. I don’t feel like I can just brandish the headphones around my neck, especially with the visor up. Not only is it uncomfortable after a few hours of wear, but it’s sure to attract attention, which isn’t ideal when I just want to feel invisible on my commute home.

If I were really concerned with my respiratory health and wanted to limit my daily exposure to pollutants, I would choose something more practical and affordable. Is it nice to know the Zone does in fact work? Sure, but why would I drop $949 on this when I already have a pair of good noise-canceling headphones, and cheaper filtration alternatives exist. Besides the standard K-95 mask, a chemical respirator with filters used in construction and for painting, there are portable HEPA filters you can buy off of Amazon for under $50 bucks. They run for about 200 to 500 hours and have a filtration efficiency of 99.7%. It basically provides what the Zone offers in its level one filtration mode, but at a fraction of the cost and without any of the battery limitations.

This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.

Popular Articles