COVID, Part 2: The Air Purifier Saga

If you have been wondering why I have missed posts for the past month, the answer is that I caught COVID. Again. And it sucked more than the first time, but mostly for reasons that have little to do with the health itself.

The first time, my wife and I caught COVID in London, when visiting the Olympic Park by Stratford, likely not on public transport, since we were wearing masks, but at the cafes or somewhere along the area — and besides the physical, health suckiness, the only impact it had to our plans and events was missing a theatre visit to see Sandi Toksvig. While I’m still a bit sour about it, it’s honestly a minor annoyance in the grand scale oof things and in what could have been.

This time things were less clear cut and less isolated. We had been to Hyper Japan on Saturday, but all of the people we have been with during the day have not contracted COVID, nor the event itself appeared to become a super-spreader event. Indeed, while I have heard multiple people contracting COVID after Glasgow WorldCon, the comment pages for Hyper Japan didn’t suggest it being widespread there and then. On the other hand, on the Sunday we have taken a flight back to Italy, and for the first (and to this day only!) time, British Airways passed up and down the aisle with a fumigant “for our safety.” My bet is that this plane was our contact, but we have no way to prove that obviously — and it honestly doesn’t matter where and when we contracted it.

Indeed, part of the problem is that we, like most people for what I see around me, have let our guard down when it comes to preventing the spreading of respiratory diseases (not just COVID) by abandoning masks even on public transport. I barely ever see anyone in London wearing a mask, and given how things have been turning out recently, I don’t think I’d like to stand out by wearing one myself, still.

In addition to this, NHS – which is now thankfully rumored to be tasked with paying attention to prevention, rather than merely treatment – decided that diabetics no longer count as “65 or over” for vaccine deployment. Which meant that despite me asking explicitly for it back in June, there’s been no option for me to take a new dose or a booster — let alone my wife.

But the worst part of this adventure is to be found in the reason why we flew to Italy in the first place: this summer was my mother’s 70th birthday, so we flew on Sunday, and back out on Thursday, just to be with her for this special day. We did that, not knowing we were bringing COVID with us — and indeed, my wife was so sick on the day, that we didn’t really have much of a party, and the wine stayed unopened. We had not even thought this could be COVID until we came back to London, and my wife complained that the coffee was tasteless — after which we immediately took tests, which turned out positive.

You can imagine then that in addition to our physical symptoms (high fever, stuffy nose, tiredness) we had been worried sick about my mother for the following month — did we bring her COVID, after four years of her carefully minimizing contacts, and getting vaccinated? The answer, thankfully, appears to be “No”, despite us having spent nearly a week in her house, eating at the same table, sleeping (most of the time) in adjacent rooms, and – until we realised we were sick – hugging and kissing as Italians do.

This was obviously a huge relief for both of us, but it also bring to another important point for me. Trust in science: air purifiers work. Four and a half years after we started this unwinnable fight with the disease, we have at least learnt something that works, to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases: air quality matters a lot more than people supposed.

Indeed, I heard this from people I trust over the last few years, so when my mother was afraid of letting anyone in the house last winter, I got her an air purifier. I went for a Whirlpool AP330W, because it looked very similar to the units we kept seeing around Hong Kong when we visited, and because I thought Whirlpool would be a brand to be trusted — this last part turned out to be incorrect, though the purifier itself worked great when we were visiting, properly indicating the bad air quality when my wife entered the closed room right away.

Here’s the kicker though: the AP330W is a bit of a trap: I bought it for my mother in December 2023 for a little over €100 from Amazon — it currently goes for €200 on Amazon Italy, while the UK version (as far as I can tell, identical besides the obvious power cord — not adapted with a screw-in, which very honestly surprised me at this point) is going for less than £50. The HEPA filter it comes with is lasting roughly 3000 hours, and eventually it counted off for my mother at the end of August — and I trusted that Whirlpool would have it on their website, after all part of the reason for choosing them was how reliable they are in terms of replacement parts and components. I was wrong.

Indeed, Whirlpool has barely the instruction manual for this model on their website. There’s no model number for the HEPA filter, there’s no replacement being sold or listed on the website. The one local hardware store in Mestre, which existed longer than me, quoted €106 for a new official filter, but they couldn’t indicate a part number either.

Which is why I ended up buying another purifier here in London (given how much cheaper it is) to check if the filter came with any part number, or at least measure it to compare with suggested alternatives. My plan was to find the right replacement, and then write a blog post to tell people which filter they needed… but it didn’t work out. The HEPA filter is a 28×20 (height by diameter) round, two-components filter, extremely similar to the filter used by Xiaomi’s purifiers, which the Whirlpool purifier also looks a lot like, but it appears to have a weight (pressure) sensor, so just getting a Xiaomi filter didn’t seem to work for my mother.

If I find a way to use the cheap Xiaomi filters with this purifier, I’ll update this blog post, but I guess I’ll have to wait for the 3000 hours to pass on my device here.

So, what’s the story of Whirlpool and this purifier? While I obviously cannot be certain, there’s a number of clues that brings me to a likely conclusion. First of all, this model appears to only exist in Italy and UK. I can find it in multiple stores, not just Amazon, in both countries, but in France or Spain, not even Amazon appears to have a Whirlpool AP330W of any kind. It also very clearly is a Chinese OEM production: the filter’s markings are written in Engrish and Chinese, the manual is barebones, and the Whirlpool logo is the only part of the purifier that is covered with an anti-scratch peelable plastic.

My best guest at this point is that Whirlpool Italy, during the early phases of the pandemic, which affected Italy more than many other countries, decided to do something. While Whirlpool, as a conglomerate, is originally an USA company, they have acquired a number of other manufacturing companies in Europe, including Indesit in Italy, which I suppose kept a significant range of autonomy.

At that point, they realized that air purifiers would be something that would both allow them to sell something, and to actually help. So they look for some company in China to customize a basic purifier with their logo and the 6th Sense trademark. Indeed, as I suggested above, the Whirlpool is very similar to the Xiaomi Smart Air Purifier 4 – starting from the form factor and continuing with the filter – and if you were to look at AliExpress you can find tons of similarly shaped air purifier to this day.

Unlike the common stereotype, for which you turn to Chinese brands to find a badly-copied “mainstream” brand device, it appears in this case, I turned to a trusted Western brand to find a badly-copied Chinese brand device.

But whatever the reason, it sounds like if you want an entry-level purifier at least for a limited amount of time, and you’re based in the UK, the AP330W is a steal: at £46 you barely cover the HEPA filter, and there’s a chance that we can find a way to use the widely available Xiaomi filter, or maybe hack the controller to connect to WiFi (if I do get some spare time I’ll try to do that once the 3000 hours passed!) In Italy, it is definitely not worth it, since it costs more than the Xiaomi, the filters for which are also significantly cheaper.

But if you know you’ll want to keep an air purifier, you probably want to look at other options. Xiaomi, Dyson, IKEA, Philips and others all have options available nowadays, with similar, if not identical, specifications and abilities, and the filters for them are more readily available. Personally, after having had Dyson purifiers for multiple years, I’m a bit concerned about the volume of air they can filter, particularly now that I could compare directly the sensitivity of my old Dyson with the AP330W, and I might decide to get myself a Xiaomi or an IKEA for my office next — particularly given a test with the latter would be cheaper than replacement filters for the Dyson!

So yeah, my recommendation for everyone is to keep your air as clean as you can make it — invest in an air purifier at home, no matter how small or large your home is! They’re not horribly expensive, and who knows, they might save you or a loved one from respiratory diseases.