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Oct 30, 2024

Coway Airmega 200M Review: This Air Purifier Is a Must-Have

Breathing clean air is a luxury these days. Until the major polluters clean up their act (yeah, right), this air purifier is your best bet to breathe easy. By Matt Jancer Man, I love my apartment. My

Breathing clean air is a luxury these days. Until the major polluters clean up their act (yeah, right), this air purifier is your best bet to breathe easy.

By Matt Jancer

Man, I love my apartment. My space, my decorations, and my messes, nobody else’s. It’s an idyllic refuge from the mania that is the New York City urban death maze. Too bad the air inside, like in all homes, can poison you just by breathing it.

I’ve got a chemical sensitivity that makes the indoor buildup of off gassing of various consumer goods a literal pain for me. Without an air purifier, I end up with effects similar to living with an unchecked allergy.

Not to mention the fact that homes leak a lot of air, drawing in outdoor air in large quantities. All that nasty particulate and chemicals expelled into the atmosphere through tailpipes and smokestacks? It’s invading your home, baby. And indoor air pollution harms your health.

And aside from waiting for heavy industry to literally clean up its act (may I suggest a sand timer that measures time in centuries?), your only recourse is to clean the air in your own little corner of the world with a home air purifier.

I bought a Coway Airmega 200M about five years ago, and it’s been a game-changer for me. In this review, I’ll go over some of the specs and features that make it, in my opinion, the best air purifier out there.

I’ve been using the Coway Airmega 200M in a series of bedrooms in New York City since I bought it close to five years ago. Automatic mode is my preferred setting.

In this mode, the Coway uses its built-in air quality monitor to determine which of the three fan speed settings—low, medium, and high—are needed. Most of the time, it’s on low. If it detects higher pollution, it may kick it up to medium or high.

You can also manually set it to each of the three levels, if you’d rather. Then there’s eco mode, which turns the fan off if air quality has remained good for a solid 30 minutes, in order to save energy. It’ll turn on again as needed when pollution levels rise again.

There’s an ionizer you can turn on or leave off. Ionizers claim to release negative ions into the air that cause airborne particles to clump together, making them larger and therefore easier for air filters to trap.

I leave the ionizer off because I haven’t seen studies convincing enough to demonstrate to me that it’s as effective as it says.

“Ozone, a lung irritant, is produced indirectly by ion generators and some other electronic air cleaners and directly by ozone generators,” says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There’s no app integration, but I’ve never cared about that in air purifiers. I’ve just never found good reason to control them when I’m away from home, especially if they’re automatic. They’re designed to be left on, not turned on and off every time you come home or leave, anyway.

In those almost-five years, I’ve had my Coway running constantly without break. The only times I’ve unplugged it have been to move apartments. Beyond regular HEPA filter and carbon filter replacements, I’ve never had to fix it or replace any parts. It’s been flawless.

Air quality in New York City is surprisingly not that bad for a large city. Whether that’s to thank for the infrequency of filter replacements or not, I only replace the carbon filter twice a year and can about a year out of a HEPA filter. That keeps running costs nice and low.

There are two pinpoint lights for notifying you that it’s time to replace a filter, one for the carbon filter and another for the HEPA filter. There’s a large, color-coded light that displays how the air quality in the room is currently.

You can turn it off, but not the pinpoint lights, if they’re active, nor the pinpoint lights that show which setting the air purifier is set to. These smaller bulbs cast hardly any light, though. Certainly not enough to bother me or even notice as I lay in bed in the dark.

Changing filters is as easy as falling down. You pop the faceplate off without any tools (easy), then pull the old filters out and push the new ones in. It’s easy enough that you could assign it to your three-year-old, or if you don’t have one, any random three-year-old.

Back in April 2022, my apartment building had a major fire. I say major, even though I’m no firefighter qualified to judge, because seven firetrucks showed up. Must’ve been major, right? As the fire moved into the HVAC system, the air conditioners blew black soot through my apartment.

Four hours after the first firefighters showed up, they saved the building shortly after sunrise. Some of my neighbors spent the next few nights elsewhere. I left my Airmega 200M (plus a Coway Airmega 250) on and went out with friends for lunch and drinks.

When I got home that evening, the air inside my apartment was surprisingly breathable. The HEPA filters were filthy with black soot, and doctors reading this are probably cringing hard enough to turn themselves inside out, but I slept there that night without issue.

We see the term “HEPA” thrown around a lot when talking about air filters, and not all air purifiers have them. Widely known as a desirable designation, what it means is that it’s capable of removing nearly all airborne particles. It stands for “high efficiency particulate air.”

“This type of air filter can theoretically remove at least 99.97 percent of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria, and any airborne particles with a size of 0.3 microns,” says the EPA.

Coway says the Airmega 200M provides coverage for rooms up to 1,748 square feet. If it’s placed in a room that large or close to that size, it’ll only purify all the air inside that room once per hour (1 ACH, or air changes per hour). It’s better than nothing, but not really enough.

As the Centers for Disease Prevention (CDC) recommends, you should aim for at least 5 ACH. The Airmega 200M is rated for 4.8 ACH (close enough) in a room up to 361 square feet, so I recommend that this is an ideal air purifier for rooms up to that size.

As wildfires become more common and more severe, air purifiers play a crucial role in keeping the air indoors breathable and avoiding the nasty health effects of breathing in smoke.

Wildfires aren’t just a West Coast phenomenon, either. When Canada tried to smoke us out of North America in June 2023, my Coway plowed on faithfully. My throat burned and I coughed a lot outside, but ducking indoors my apartment’s air was as fresh and breathable as ever.

The carbon filter has a different function. It neutralizes bad odors, including cigarette and cigar smoke, pet stank, food and cooking smells, trash odors, and old laundry. I clean my apartment regularly, yet I can tell a pleasant difference with the air purifier running.

Most of the time, the Coway whispers along on its lowest setting at an almost imperceptible volume (24.4 decibels, says Coway). Five feet away from my face as I lay on my bed, I can’t hear it. Even light sleepers who need silence to fall asleep can share a room with this Coway.

On medium, the noise is noticeable but not overwhelming. From time to time the Coway decides it needs a bit of extra oomph and switches briefly into medium for a minute or two, but it almost always stays on the low setting.

On high, it’s not quiet at all (55.1 decibels, according to Coway), but I hardly ever hear it switch into high. Medium, sure, when I’m dusting and cleaning or if I flip my comforter around as I change the bedsheets, but witnessing it switch to high is rarer than witnessing a blood moon.

At 12.3 number of pounds and with a handle integrated into the top of its case, it’s easy to pick up and position. Measuring 16.8 by 18.3 by 9.6 inches, it’s slim enough that I’ve had no trouble tucking it out of the way in my small apartment bedroom.

You have to buy it separately, but Coway sells a reusable mesh pre-filter that prolongs the life of the other filters by catching larger pieces of dust before they ever reach them. You just rinse off the pre-filter when it’s dirty and pop it back behind the face of the air purifier.

“By effectively removing these larger particles, the inner filters are able to capture smaller particles, such as allergens, dust mites, mold spores, viruses, and bacteria, more efficiently,” writes Coway. I wish it came with the mesh pre-filter standard.

Still, you should go out and buy one. After running the air purifier for a year without it, I noticed the installation of the pre-filter kept the HEPA filter cleaner for longer, and now I don’t have to replace it as often. It’s quibbling, though.

These two purifiers are basically the same. They have identical machinery inside, use the same filters, have the same fan settings, and are almost identical in size and weight. Buy whichever one you can find for cheaper, unless you have a preference for looks.

The handsome, automatic Blueair is the quietest air purifier I’ve used, at 18 decibels on low fan speed vs. the Coway’s 24.4. The downside is that it achieves only 4 ACH in rooms up to 219 square feet compared to the Coway’s 4.8 ACH in rooms up to 361 square feet.

Think of these as younger and older sibling. They’re both fantastic, my two favorite air purifiers for small- and medium-sized rooms, respectively. The Airmega 250 achieves 4 ACH in rooms up to 465 square feet, so it’s better for living rooms and larger bedrooms.

Air purifiers are appliances, and appliances should just be dependable, work as needed, and fade into the background without needing a bunch of handholding or complex operating instructions. Oh, and they should last a long time under frequent use without need of repair.

The Coway Airmega 200M and Airmega Mighty AP-1512HH do that in spades. My unit’s five year anniversary is coming up later this year. It’s spent nearly all that time plugged in and switched on, and it works as well now as it did when new.

My lungs give me less trouble from life’s inescapable pollution and chemicals, and I no longer notice the stink of sweat-soaked gym clothes and ripe trash cans. It may not be the thing I grab if I’m running out of a burning building, but I can count on it to welcome me back inside with clean air.

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