Review: Honeywell Air Touch I8
Honeywell Air Touch I8 is a powerful air purifier. It can clean the air in rooms as large as 387 sq. ft, which should cover the living room, dining space, in most modern-day homes
Honeywell ’s latest addition to the indoor air purifier line-up is the Air Touch I8, which looks a lot like the more expensive Air Touch S8 (Rs39,990). This means that the Air Touch I8 also has the same anti-fall mechanism and clean chassis design. The polycarbonate panels are of high quality and have a brushed metal look.
There are touch-enabled controls on the top panel for power on/off, fan speed, sleep mode, for instance. There is also a PM 2.5 indicator which updates in real time to indicate the air quality in the room—the Philips 2000 Series AC2882 (Rs19,995, on Amazon.in) is a rare rival to have that too. All lights on this cluster go off once you enable the sleep mode—this is something we have not seen in purifiers from other brands so far.
The Air Touch I8 is a powerful air purifier. It can clean the air in rooms as large as 387 sq. ft, which should cover the living room, dining space, etc., in most modern-day homes. It has a clean air-delivery rate (CADR) of 300 cubic metres per hour, which incidentally is the same as the Air Touch S. During air-quality benchmark tests with a separate air-quality monitor, we found that after 30 minutes of running in a 349.83 sq. ft living room, the air quality improved from an unhealthy 151g/m3 of particulate matter (PM) to 23 g/m3 PM and then stabilized around 21g/m3. In a smaller 204.51 sq. ft bedroom, the air quality improved from 128g/m3 to 8g/m3, and then stabilized around 5g/m3.
One of the reasons for this quick performance is that the Air Touch i8 takes in air from the base of the front panel (filters inside are placed at a downward-looking angle), and the clean air exits through the vent at the top. This is unlike some purifiers that have air intake vents at the back, and cannot be placed right up against the wall. Second, Honeywell uses a very high-efficiency HiSiv filter with a unique honeycomb design which cleans up particulate matter as small as 0.3 um and removes formaldehydes (found in building materials and many household products), volatile organic compounds (vapours and gases) and odour.
The Honeywell Air Touch I8 has some tough competition. If you suffer from dry throat related ailments, then the powerful Atlanta Healthcare Universal 450 (Rs26,950) with the built-in humidifier is perhaps ideal. The problem with the efficient BlueAir Pure 211 (Rs22,800) is that the filter cost is exorbitantly high (Rs20,129 on Amazon.in). The Air Touch I8’s genuine competition comes from the Philips 2000 Series AC2882 (Rs19,995), which also has similar cleaning capabilities, but doesn’t have touch controls though.
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