The CADR is the number hardest to find
PurifierPicker is a spec database for home air purifiers, not a review site. It exists because the one number that tells you whether a machine can clean your room — its clean air delivery rate — is the number hardest to find on a product page, while the number that is impossible to miss, the coverage claim in square feet, is computed on an assumption that makes every machine look about five times more capable than it is.
What is in it
44 purifiers from 23 brands, ranging from $60 to $1,200, sorted into 4 room classes by the coverage their CADR actually supports rather than by the class the box claims. Alongside them sit 8 guides and 43 head-to-head pages. The specs were last reviewed in August 2026.
Every unit records the same fields: smoke CADR, AHAM coverage, the manufacturer's claimed coverage next to it, noise at the lowest and highest speed, wattage, filter type and life, annual filter cost, and whether there is an ionizer in the stack. Where a manufacturer will not publish a CADR — Aroeve, Instant, Shark, IQAir, Austin Air, Molekule, Dyson — the field says so instead of quietly borrowing a marketing figure.
Transcribed from spec sheets and the AHAM directory
Manufacturer spec sheets, manuals, and AHAM's verified directory, transcribed by hand into one data file that renders every page on the site. Each price is a list price captured when the catalog was last reviewed, shown with a tilde because they are snapshots and not a retailer's live price. Star ratings, where they appear, are aggregated from retail listings and credited to the retailer they came from. The ordering rules and the ratings policy live on How We Compare.
What is not in it
There is no test lab behind this site, no particle counter, no staff, and no reviewer who has run these machines in a sealed chamber. Nothing here is a hands-on verdict, and you should read any site that claims otherwise about 44 products with some suspicion. What this site does is arithmetic on published figures, done consistently, in public.
Two gaps worth stating plainly. Only 8 of the 44 units carry a star rating that could be cited to a named non-Amazon retailer, so most pages show no rating at all rather than an uncited one. And the owner-sentiment sections — the summaries of what people report after living with a machine — have not been written yet, so they are absent rather than filled with plausible-sounding invention.
Two people keep this, around other work, and neither of them sells filters — which matters more here than in most categories, because the filter subscription is where the money in air purifiers actually is. No manufacturer has paid to be in the catalog, to sit higher in a room class, or to have its claimed coverage printed without the AHAM figure beside it, and no money moves between this site and any brand in it.
Send a wrong CADR or a stale filter price
A wrong CADR or a stale filter price is worth a note. Send it through the contact form with the model and the source, and the data file gets fixed.
The contact form reaches the same mailbox if you would rather not open a mail client.
The rest of the paper trail
- All 44 air purifiers — the catalog itself, sortable by CADR, honest coverage, noise floor and filter cost.
- How We Compare — the ordering rules, the ratings policy, and what this site will not do for money.
- Privacy — what is logged, what is not, and the current state of affiliate relationships, which is none.
- Contact — corrections, missing models, and everything else.