1GreenProduct

It’s hard to believe that 1GreenProduct.com’s Air Purification Week is already drawing to a close.

It seems like it was only a few days ago that we first started talking about air purifiers.

Oh, wait a minute, it was only a few days ago! Never mind…

Anyway, we’re here to review the brand new Paralda HEPA Air Purifier by Alen.

What makes this air purifier different from the others we’ve already covered.

Well, for a start, it’s green. I mean literally green. Alen has used a color that it calls ‘bamboo green’ on the inner core of the Paralda. The core is wrapped in a translucent shell, so that the entire purifier is sort of like an elegant chrysalis and the core is an emerald immature butterfly.

(Hard to believe we haven’t been nominated yet for Poet Laureate, ain’t it?)

This is the first air purifier we’ve featured that comes with UV capabilities designed to obliterate pathogens such as bacteria and viruses in mid air.

Like the other purifiers we reviewed, Paralda also uses a HEPA filter, although interestingly Alen has decided not to use any pre-filters. The Paralda box lists the lack of pre-filters as a bonus (“Easy to Maintain/Clean – No Filter Plates to Wash”), but we can’t help but worry whether the lack of a pre-filter will mean that the HEPA filter needs to be replaced more often…

In its user guide, Alen says that the HEPA filter should last 6 months, with a 3-5 year life span for the UV lamp. Fortunately, both the filter and the lamp are very cleverly designed to allow for easy replacement and to lock securely into place the rest of the time. In fact, the way that the unit combined easy access with secure placement of the filter and lamp was one of our favorite aspects of the Paralda machine.

We also appreciate the fact that replacement filters are only $49, which seems reasonable given the price of some other filters on the market.

We also admire Alen for making the Paralda relatively light (just 15 lbs) and giving it a small footprint. With its green color, the Paralda isn’t exactly unobtrusive, but it does look pretty cool from a design standpoint and doesn’t take up much space.

While we usually push for wheels on appliances like air purifiers, in this case we didn’t mind not having them. The Paralda was light enough to pick up and carry around pretty easily. And wheels would probably have made the tall, slim machine too precarious.

Paralda has four speeds. Using our handy Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Meter (available from Current Energy), we tested the wattage used on each speed -

Lowest speed = 21 watts
Middle low speed = 52 watts
Middle high speed = 58 watts
Highest speed = 64 watts

In each case, turning off the UV light seemed to save about 5 watts. (By which we would deduce that Paralda is using a 5-watt UV bulb. Elementary, my dear Watson.)

So the Paralda appears to use quite a bit more energy than the two other purifiers we featured in Air Purification Week on Monday and Wednesday.

How does the Paralda compare to ENERGY STAR standards? Well, it’s not so simple to figure that out.

ENERGY STAR likes to use something called Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) per watt rankings. I’m not quite sure about Paralda’s CADR, so I’ll have to use another method of calculation.

ENERGY STAR says that an average air purifier operating continuously uses 800 kWh of energy per year. (To put that in context, that is apparently 50% more than a new refrigerator uses!)

Now ENERGY STAR goes on to say that air cleaners with the ENERGY STAR label are at least 35% more efficient than the standard purifiers.

But here’s where it gets a little confusing. ENERGY STAR says that the 35% better efficiency saves 215 kWh of energy per year. But by my calculations, a cleaner that is 35% more efficient, should save 280 kWh of electricity (800 * 0.35 = 280 or 800 * 0.65 = 520).

Anyway, back to Paralda. Let’s take the lowest power setting that uses 21 watts of energy with the UV light on. 21 watts * 24 hours = 504 watt-hours per day. 504 * 365 = 183,960 watt hours per year, or less than 184 kWh per year.

So by our calculations, the Paralda is approximately 77% more efficient than an average air purifier on the market.

Whew! We haven’t done that much math since college Calculus (known henceforth as The Course That Shall Not Be Named).

We do have three gripes with the Paralda -

1) The computerized touchpad on the top of the machine proved fairly annoying. Sometimes it took several pokes to get it to respond to our wishes. The control pad looks nice, but without operating instructions, we honestly weren’t sure whether we were correctly manipulating it. Granted, the control panel supposedly allows you to automatically set different fan speeds at different times of the day using Program mode, but we would much rather lower the fan speed ourselves when we’re going to bed if we could just get simpler user controls. (Then again, we’re in our 30’s and hate to text message, so to each his own. YMMV.)

2) Speaking of a need to turn down the fan speed at night, we found the Paralda a little loud. On the quietest speed, the Paralda is fairly unobtrusive, but the noise gets more noticeable quickly as you ramp up into the middle and higher speeds. Again, we’re a bit noise sensitive and the Paralda isn’t egregious in its noise production, but it was an issue for us.

3) Paralda uses significantly more power than the Blueair Eco10 and more power than the Sharp KC-C150U on most settings. (Sharp did use more power on its max setting compared to the Paralda.) Now we didn’t have the ability to measure clean air output, so perhaps Paralda is putting out more clean air, but we’re worried that maybe it’s just not as efficient.
On the other hand, Paralda is much less expensive ($499) than the Eco10, Paralda has the UV light, and Paralda is still far more efficient than a standard air purifier.