Aesthetic Score: 6/10
The small footprint of this unit allows it to fit into corners or against furniture quite nicely. It also isn’t very tall, so doesn’t stand out too much. There are two colors available – black or white. But if you want the white one, you’ll have to spend extra, which we absolutely did not love nor pay for. Doesn’t look like a big unwieldy machine in your room, which is nice, but certainly wouldn’t say it looks “good”.
Check the price on Amazon
Features Score: 3/10
This unit is as basic as they come. No timed running. No auto-sensing. No oscillating. It does have a UV feature which allegedly could kill germs. Pretty hard to say whether or not this works – I would venture to guess that it maybe isn’t quite as effective as the manufacturer would like you to believe. We were pretty bummed by the manual nature of the unit and scored it accordingly.
Filtering Score: 5/10
Mid. At best. Even our homemade filters outperformed this Germguardian unit in back to back tests. It seemed that this unit could never get a room to quite the same low levels of particulate matter as our other units. Below are results from just one of the tests we performed, running this purifier for 30 minutes on High mode.
Noise Level Score: 6/10
This unit is noisy, considering it’s lackluster filtering performance. Running it on low in an office would be fine, but it would quickly become a nuisance on medium or high modes. When comparing it against our homemade air filters, it was quieter, but the tradeoff for filtering performance was not worth it.
Servicing Score: 8/10
Aftermarket and OEM filters are affordable and readily available on Amazon. We’ve tested a couple, and the aftermarket filters seem to work just as well.
Our Rating: 6/10
Overall, this unit is….fine. The shape is nice, and allows it to take up very little floor real estate, while not looking half bad. Sadly, there is no auto on/off/adjustment sensor, nor any sort of timer – it’s up to you to adjust fan speed. The noise levels we tested were on the high side, but when running on low, it’s not bad. The filter test results were at the low end of all units we’ve tested, but it did reduce PM 2.5s and PM10s in the air.
At the end of the day, this unit is a very low price, and could service a small space like an office very well. We wouldn’t recommend using it as the only air purifier in your home, and if you can afford a better one, go that route.
