Air Purifier CADR Ratings Explained

When looking to make your home cleaner and safer, air purifiers should be at the top of the list. These devices have monumentally improved over the years, with many premium options being good enough that countless hay fever sufferers consider them to be life saving.

When comparing your options, it’s likely you will have started coming across CADR ratings, which can be confusing at first glance. So what does CADR mean, and how can we use this to find the best air purifier for our needs?

What Does CADR Stand For?

CADR stands for “Clean Air Delivery Rate”. It’s a metric used for measuring how well an air purifier performs. In essence, the higher the rating, the quicker the air is purified. There are a number of categories which each get different ratings such as smoke, pollen and dust.

All you really need to know is the higher the rating, the better the purifier will be. Taking a look at the CADR ratings as well as the filtration rate is the best way to ensure you get a good one.

What is a Good CADR Rating?

A “good” CADR rating is anything over around 200-300, although the size of the room will make a difference. For example, in a small apartment, you don’t need the rate of air purification to be as high as in a large space such as an office. In summary, there isn’t necessarily such thing as a “good” rating in general, it’s more that it’s important to get a purifier which is powerful enough to properly treat your space.

How Much Does a Good Air Purifier Cost?

Generally speaking, a good purifier can be bought from around £150-£200, depending on the size of the space. A great option for around this price point would have to be the Blueair Blue 3210. It’s quiet and has the following CADR scores:

• Smoke – 210
• Pollen – 163
• Dust – 181

Of course depending on your needs each of these different scores will be of varying importance. If you suffer from hayfever, the pollen rating will be the most important.

Do I Need a Higher CADR Rating For Bigger Rooms?

Yes, to properly purify the air in a room it’s important to ensure your purifier is powerful enough to deal with the amount of air in the space. Using the Blueair 3210 again as an example, it’s suitable for rooms of up to 41m sq. Getting a purifier which isn’t powerful enough for a room doesn’t make it useless, but it will struggle to keep up with the volume of air within the room.

Of course, the quoted figures aren’t down to a science with these products, as the height of ceilings and a number of other factors also change how powerful it needs to be to work properly.

What CADR Rating Does a Dyson Have?

Dyson don’t actually quote CADR ratings for their air purifiers and fans in the UK, however an expert did find some interesting details on Dyson’s scores as they are required to be listed by law in China. Paddy Robertson of smartairfilters wrote a great article on that which you can check out here.

The summary of this article concludes that Dysons are about as effective as a very inexpensive purifier, when measured under this criteria at least.

How Much Electricity Do Air Purifiers Use?

Generally speaking, a higher CADR rated purifier will have higher energy consumption. For example, a very popular model for small rooms, the IKEA UPPÅTVIND, uses just 2.4 watts on its lowest setting, and 8 watts on the highest. This, given current electricity prices in the UK, would equate to roughly £0.07 per day on the highest setting.

A more premium, high performance model such as the Philips AMF220 uses around 25 watts- still not too bad, despite being considerably better. This could cost approximately £0.20 per day, or £73 per year. If you live in another country, there’s a high chance it will cost a fraction of that for you to run. Energy prices in the UK are absolutely insane.

How important is CADR For Air Purification?

There’s a lot of debate around whether CADR is the be all and end all when it comes to finding a good purifier. Dyson argue that it’s not an all encompassing metric, and has some valid criticisms, but outright dismissing it’s benefit doesn’t make sense. In conclusion, a majority of market experts agree that CADR is a very important metric for consumers to actually have a good understanding of how effective a specific device actually is. Just like 0-60 in cars though, it doesn’t give the full picture, so doing a bit of additional research on top of solely the headline figures is important.

Conclusion – Clean Air Delivery Rate Is Great For Finding The Right Option

So there you have it, that’s everything you need to know about CADR. It’s almost like the 0-60 of purifiers, and makes a great metric to understand the effectiveness of an air purifier at a glance.