A few weeks after Diwali, northern India is generally breathing easy, thinking that if the air looks clean, it should be fine with your lungs as well. No chance. It’s the first week of December and most parts of the NCR still have AQI levels well above 200, more than three times what is believed to be the normal range. So when I received the Samsung AX46 air purifier for review, shocking numbers were displayed in my living room.
The Samsung AX46 is a large air purifier for large living rooms or offices. If you need something smaller, you can go for the AX32 with pretty much the same technologies. The AX46 has a very neat design, which shows that it means business. It draws in air from the front and expels clean air from the top and both sides. This means it can be kept in any corner of the room and has no problem being near a wall. The air purifier has wheels at the bottom and is easy to move despite its size.
Using the Samsung AX46 is simple. There’s a power button on the top, as well as auto, fan, and sleep buttons. Additionally, there are touch buttons for setting a timer and checking filter status. Just above the button strip is an LED panel that displays your AQI level along with indicators to show if there is gas (anything below PM2.5) in the room and if WiFi is connected .
The WiFi indicator means the Samsung AX46 can also be controlled using the Samsung Smart Things app. Setup is easy here and you can see AQI levels inside the room and change fan speeds or modes. It is also possible to schedule the air purifier to operate at certain times of the day. I also liked how the app shows how much power the device has consumed so far.
In the two weeks I had the Samsung AX46 air purifier for review, not once did it start showing a green indicator that the air in the room was okay. Early in the morning, when I turned on the purifier in my living room, the AQI levels usually showed near 300. After about 15 minutes of operation, the purifier could bring it down to less than one hundred. You can press the button on the AQI indicator to switch between PM10 and PM2.5, which was usually a bit lower than the former.
The Samsung AX46 can be quite quiet, especially if you run it in sleep mode. But I got used to running it at full throttle until the AQI level dropped, before moving it to a quieter mode so I could listen to music or watch the night’s FIFA matches without too much distraction.
The AX46 has a multi-layer structure with a washable pre-filter for larger particles, followed by an activated carbon deodorizing filter that neutralizes gases and odors and a dust collector filter that captures most types of dust . These are easy to install and change without any help. Samsung claims the filters are good for at least a year with around eight hours of daily operation.
In automatic mode the air purifier has both dust and gas detection which I could see in action every time the front door was opened or when the gas in my open kitchen was left on for a few minutes before the hob is turned on. In fact, one night we had guests over, the air purifier’s AQI levels shot up to 999, more because we were cooking stuff in the open kitchen than the pollution outside. It also shows the importance of an air purifier in urban households, even though it blocks much of the pollution and dust outside.
At Rs 32,990, the Samsung AX46 is a good air purifier option for those with large living rooms. I will not recommend this specific model for small rooms due to its size. If you are a Samsung smartphone user, this connected device will bring you added value. It is currently one of the best options available for home and office.