In my apartment, airflow from the kitchen leads directly to the bedroom. Combine that unfortunate reality with a fume hood above the oven that exists exclusively for show and you can imagine the nightmare that ensues when I cook something like…a pasta heavy withsardines.
I’ve learned to close my bedroom door when I start cooking to prevent an aggressive fish smell from perfuming my bed sheets and clean laundry, but even so, kitchen smells have a real tendency to linger. I think the airflow in my apartment is very poor in general. And as much as I’d like to visit a coastal Italian trattoria, I don’t really want my bed to smell like one for days. Still, I'm not willing to give upcooking fish.
Digging around online, I saw that some people have had success preventing permeating kitchen smells with an air purifier. I had been in the market for one anyway to help with my seasonal allergies, so I thought I’d give it a try.
我决定使用Pro-admittedly Molekule空气high-end choice—for a few reasons. First, I liked the way it looked. But more importantly, I was intrigued by the real time air-quality information it promised to provide and the claim that it could handle up to 1,000 square feet, which happens to be the approximate size of my apartment.
I fired up the machine. It started to take in air and after 20 seconds or so the screen blinked on. The word “Bad” appeared in an angry red circle along with the number 201. I soon learned that the number is a composite measurement of pollution in the air. Zero to 100 is good. The machine's bedside manner was a bit blunt, maybe, but I was glad it confirmed what I already knew. Before going to bed I kicked it up to the highest setting and it revved like a jet engine ready to take off.
When I opened my bedroom door the next morning I discovered that my apartment smelled…different. It had a scent I’d never experienced before—a gently sweet smell. I walked over to the Molekule, which was still whooshing at full blast, and kicked it down to half speed (the highest settings are a little too loud for when you're hanging out in the room). This time the little screen was green and the word “Good” and the number 16 appeared where the angry message once was. Later, when my roommate woke up he asked me, unprompted, why our apartment suddenly smelled like a newborn baby.
Reassured, I decided to put it to the ultimate test: I made a super-funky sardine pasta with a couple splashes of fish sauce for good measure. After a half-day out at work with the Molekule running on high, I came home to a faint hint of leftover fish; by the next day I didn’t notice it at all. That may not seem impressive, but before the air purifier, a potent meal like that could leave its mark for a week or more.
According to the EPA, HEPA air purifiers can’t filter out all odor-causing particles. Many of the particles, especially those produced through cooking, are too small to get captured in a conventional HEPA filter. Air purifiers with HEPA filters need an additional charcoal-based filter to effectively absorb smells. Molekule’s filter is a bit different, and uses somethingcalled PECO technology, which claims to destroy particles rather than capture them, and also claims to destroy VOCs, which are often the source of kitchen smells that evade HEPA filters. The Molekule Air Pro PECO-filter needs to be replaced every 6 months, and the filters aren’t cheap. My colleague Noah uses the popular Coway air purifier with the additional charcoal filter, and has found that it does an adequate job at eliminating smells.
I don't have the credentials or resources to test whether or not there was any actual “destruction” of bad smell particles. But what I can say is that this thing made my fishy apartment smell fresh, and until my landlord installs a functional fume hood (never), the air filter is here to stay.
