Verdict
The Acerpure cool is both a fan and an air purifier, and it somehow manages to master both. It provides strong, focused air circulation without too much noise. Meanwhile, its HEPA13 air filter scrubs the air clean of fluff, dust, pollen, mould and even some viruses and bacteria – it’s one of the best we’ve tested.
This air purifier is let down slightly by an app that can’t keep up with what it’s doing. However, it makes up for it with multiple air quality sensors, a decent remote control, and surprisingly keen pricing given its performance. Unless reliable app control is essential, this is a fantastic way to get cool and healthy air.
Pros
- Powerful fan
- Excellent air purifier
- PM2.5, PM1 and volatile gas sensors
-
A HEPA air purifier and powerful fanThis device combines an air filter with a small but powerful fan, so it can circulate and clean air in quite a large room. This version doesn’t have a germicidal UV-C lamp, but its HEPA 13 filter will still trap many viruses and bacteria. -
Choice of controlsThe Acerpure Cool comes with touch controls, a decent remote, and a neat colour screen. You can also control it via your smartphone, although we had some issues with that.
Introduction
Acer’s Acerpure Cool joins a growing number of devices that combine an air purifier with a fan, which makes perfect sense.
Rather than sprouting extra devices during the summer months, combined fan/purifiers let you keep cool in summer, while keeping the air clean year-round. Still, this is a rather odd-looking beast, which at first glance looks like someone has simply put a small desk fan on top of a medium-large purifier.
Essentially, that’s what the Acerpure Cool is, but it helps that both the fan and the purifier are well-designed bits of kit. A glance at the purifier’s input vents reveals it has a huge filter area, which suggests it should be capable of good filtration. The fan has horizontal and vertical oscillation and a DC motor for good efficiency. The Acerpure Cool has touch-sensitive controls, a remote control, and app support, along with a helpful colour screen. Impressively at this price, it’s also equipped with sensors to detect two classes of particulate, along with volatile organic compounds.
There are two closely related versions of the Acerpure Cool. I’m reviewing the AC551-50W, which makes do with a four-stage filter. The AC553-50W adds an ultraviolet lamp, capable of destroying any bacteria, viruses or mould spores that make it past filtration.
This air purifier is fairly close in size to the Levoit Core 400S, but its clean air delivery rate (CADR) of 307 cubic metres per hour is somewhat below the Levoit’s claimed 442m3/hr. As I discovered, however, specifications tell only part of the story.
Design and Features
- A desk fan on top of a purifier
- Highly controllable and flexible
- The Acerpure app could be better
The Acerpure Cool might look like a desk fan on top of a purifier, but it’s a neat bit of design. The moulded rear of the purifier rises up to provide a mounting point for the fan, making it look like much less of an afterthought.
Unlike Dreo’s MC710, this means the Acerpure Cool’s fan can oscillate vertically, just as you’d expect from a high-end desk fan. There’s also horizontal oscillation, although in this case it’s provided by the base, with the whole purifier and fan assembly able to rotate through about 80 degrees.
One downside to this is that the touch-sensitive controls and display oscillate with the fan, which can leave you chasing them around.
There’s a comprehensive set, however, comprising separate controls for fan and filter speeds, horizontal and vertical oscillation, and an off timer configurable for up to 12 hours. Acerpure provides an infrared remote, which adds a night mode button, and one to change the display mode. Conveniently, there’s a magnetic mount for this around the back of the fan.
Sensibly, you can configure different speeds for the air filter and fan. For the former, you get three main speeds and a ‘Turbo’ mode, plus ‘Smart’ mode – where the filter adjusts its work rate to suit the detected air quality. The fan has 10 speeds, or you can turn it off. Curiously, you can’t disable the air filter, so it’s always running unless you turn the whole device off. It’s a bit of a shame that there’s no temperature sensor, and thus no auto speed option for the fan.
That said, it’s impressive to see PM2.5, PM1 and volatile organic compound (VOC) sensors on an air purifier at this price. The first two relate to particulate matter which, depending on its origin, can exacerbate allergies, or cause significant health problems such as heart disease. VOCs, on the other hand, are gases often released by household cleaning products, or even during cooking. Again, depending on their origin, they can cause irritation, illness, or even significant damage to organs. HEPA13 filters with active carbon, such as the one fitted here, can reduce the levels of them all.
I had some difficulty connecting this air purifier to my Wi-Fi network and adding it to the Acerpure app. Judging by the display’s Wi-Fi indicator the purifier actually joined my network on the first attempt, but the app seemed unable to find it. After re-trying several times, I cleared the app’s cache, turned the purifier off then on again at the plug, and it appeared in the app without me needing to add it.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last of my problems. I found that the app seemed slow to reflect air quality readings from the purifier’s onboard sensors. At times it was also slow to respond to remote controls, for example when I tried to change the fan speed. Often the app’s connection to the purifier would fail altogether, and I’d need to force stop it then restart it before it worked again.
That’s a shame, because the app has most of the functions I’d want. Particularly, it lets you schedule the fan and filter to come on whenever you want them to, along with other features including oscillation if you want them. It’s a shame it doesn’t support Alexa or Google Assistant yet, but with better stability, it would have been fine.
Performance
- Quite quiet
- Powerful air circulation
- Excellent filtration
This is a reasonably big air purifier, but I was surprised by how effective it was in my smoke test. I shut every air purifier in a small room with a burning smoke pellet, which releases a thick broth of particulates into the air for around a minute. Working on full power, I time how long it takes the purifier to scrub all the smoke out of the air, and ideally get it back down to a ‘very good’ quality rating of less than 12 micrograms (µg) of particulates per cubic metre (m3) of air.
With its fan off, and the filter in Turbo mode, the Acerpure Cool managed to nudge my PM2.5 sensor down from its 999 maximum within four minutes. In eight minutes the room air was into the ‘moderate’ range, falling to very good after 10 minutes. After 13 minutes, the room had returned to its original reading of 1µg/m3 – almost free of particulates. That’s about three minutes quicker than the Core 400S managed in the same test – more impressively, it’s only three minutes behind the extremely powerful and effective Levoit Core 600S.
Happily, the Acerpure Cool didn’t drop the ball elsewhere. It’s very quiet, starting at just 25.5dB with the fan off and the filter on its lowest speed. Turning the fan to speed one raised this to 33dB when measured from 15cm away, or 31dB from one metre. On speed five, noise rose to 44.3dB and 33.3dB at the same distances – still pretty quiet. Only on the maximum fan speed did noise kick up to 55.3dB and 47dB, again measured from 15cm and 1m away.
With the fan and filter flat out, I measured a maximum racket of 58.3dB. This caused a peak power consumption of 55.5 watts, but at more typical speeds power use was much lower. With the filter and fan on their lowest speeds I measured just 5.2W, rising to 8.3W once I turned the fan up to speed five.
This fan produces a reasonably focused and – for its size – impressively strong movement of air. Even at its lowest setting I measured a wind speed of two metres per second (m/s) from 15cm away, although by one metre away this had fallen below the minimum speed detectable by my anemometer. On setting five, I measured 3.9m/s from 15cm away, falling to 3m/s at one metre and 1.4m/s at two metres. On full power I recorded a gusty 6.8m/s, falling to 5ms and 3.1m/s at the same distances. Overall, that’s a bit better than the results I got from the Duux Globe, a good quality small desk fan.
In practice, I could feel a mild breeze when sitting a couple of metres away with the fan on its lowest setting. On the highest setting, I could still feel significant, blustery air movement from more than four metres away.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
You want a powerful fan and purifier
This is a great combination of an effective air purifier with a powerful fan. It’s reasonably quiet and efficient, and its control panel, display and remote make it easy to use. Best of all, it’s great value.
You want the UV-C light for additional purification
If you want the highest level of protection from pathogens, consider paying more for the version with UV-C light.
Final Thoughts
The Acerpure Cool is one of the best air purifiers I’ve tested, turning in the second best performance I’ve measured in our tough smoke removal test and confounding its middling CADR rating.
It’s also one of the better fans I’ve run through its paces. It’s easy to use via its touch panel and remote, and has a useful display showing PM2.5, PM1 or VOC data.
Given all this, I was surprised to find it selling for as little as £90 at the time of my review – that’s about half what the Levoit Core 400S costs. The Acerpure Cool’s only real weakness is that its app seems a little unstable. And that’s something I’d hope might get fixed within a few updates.
How we test
Unlike other sites, we test every air purifier we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main air purifier for the review period
We test smart purifiers with their apps and we test Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility.
We time how long it takes each purifier to remove smoke from a closed room.
FAQs
Opinions differ. In theory, a UV-C lamp can destroy some of the viruses and other nasties that make it past the HEPA13 filter, but some studies suggest they’re not that much more effective. If air quality is vitally important, it might be worth paying the extra.
Not all air purifiers will remove odours. Look for one with a charcoal layer in the filter, which should help capture and break down volatile gases. If odour control is particularly important, choose a pet-specific filter, which usually comes with a thicker carbon layer.
Many air purifiers use efficient DC motors, so they use only a handful of watts at low or medium speeds. You’ll spend more on replacement filters, which might typically cost £30-40 around every six months.
Verdict
The Acerpure cool is both a fan and an air purifier, and it somehow manages to master both. It provides strong, focused air circulation without too much noise. Meanwhile, its HEPA13 air filter scrubs the air clean of fluff, dust, pollen, mould and even some viruses and bacteria – it’s one of the best we’ve tested.
This air purifier is let down slightly by an app that can’t keep up with what it’s doing. However, it makes up for it with multiple air quality sensors, a decent remote control, and surprisingly keen pricing given its performance. Unless reliable app control is essential, this is a fantastic way to get cool and healthy air.
Pros
- Powerful fan
- Excellent air purifier
- PM2.5, PM1 and volatile gas sensors
-
A HEPA air purifier and powerful fanThis device combines an air filter with a small but powerful fan, so it can circulate and clean air in quite a large room. This version doesn’t have a germicidal UV-C lamp, but its HEPA 13 filter will still trap many viruses and bacteria. -
Choice of controlsThe Acerpure Cool comes with touch controls, a decent remote, and a neat colour screen. You can also control it via your smartphone, although we had some issues with that.
Introduction
Acer’s Acerpure Cool joins a growing number of devices that combine an air purifier with a fan, which makes perfect sense.
Rather than sprouting extra devices during the summer months, combined fan/purifiers let you keep cool in summer, while keeping the air clean year-round. Still, this is a rather odd-looking beast, which at first glance looks like someone has simply put a small desk fan on top of a medium-large purifier.
Essentially, that’s what the Acerpure Cool is, but it helps that both the fan and the purifier are well-designed bits of kit. A glance at the purifier’s input vents reveals it has a huge filter area, which suggests it should be capable of good filtration. The fan has horizontal and vertical oscillation and a DC motor for good efficiency. The Acerpure Cool has touch-sensitive controls, a remote control, and app support, along with a helpful colour screen. Impressively at this price, it’s also equipped with sensors to detect two classes of particulate, along with volatile organic compounds.
There are two closely related versions of the Acerpure Cool. I’m reviewing the AC551-50W, which makes do with a four-stage filter. The AC553-50W adds an ultraviolet lamp, capable of destroying any bacteria, viruses or mould spores that make it past filtration.
This air purifier is fairly close in size to the Levoit Core 400S, but its clean air delivery rate (CADR) of 307 cubic metres per hour is somewhat below the Levoit’s claimed 442m3/hr. As I discovered, however, specifications tell only part of the story.
Design and Features
- A desk fan on top of a purifier
- Highly controllable and flexible
- The Acerpure app could be better
The Acerpure Cool might look like a desk fan on top of a purifier, but it’s a neat bit of design. The moulded rear of the purifier rises up to provide a mounting point for the fan, making it look like much less of an afterthought.
Unlike Dreo’s MC710, this means the Acerpure Cool’s fan can oscillate vertically, just as you’d expect from a high-end desk fan. There’s also horizontal oscillation, although in this case it’s provided by the base, with the whole purifier and fan assembly able to rotate through about 80 degrees.
One downside to this is that the touch-sensitive controls and display oscillate with the fan, which can leave you chasing them around.
There’s a comprehensive set, however, comprising separate controls for fan and filter speeds, horizontal and vertical oscillation, and an off timer configurable for up to 12 hours. Acerpure provides an infrared remote, which adds a night mode button, and one to change the display mode. Conveniently, there’s a magnetic mount for this around the back of the fan.
Sensibly, you can configure different speeds for the air filter and fan. For the former, you get three main speeds and a ‘Turbo’ mode, plus ‘Smart’ mode – where the filter adjusts its work rate to suit the detected air quality. The fan has 10 speeds, or you can turn it off. Curiously, you can’t disable the air filter, so it’s always running unless you turn the whole device off. It’s a bit of a shame that there’s no temperature sensor, and thus no auto speed option for the fan.
That said, it’s impressive to see PM2.5, PM1 and volatile organic compound (VOC) sensors on an air purifier at this price. The first two relate to particulate matter which, depending on its origin, can exacerbate allergies, or cause significant health problems such as heart disease. VOCs, on the other hand, are gases often released by household cleaning products, or even during cooking. Again, depending on their origin, they can cause irritation, illness, or even significant damage to organs. HEPA13 filters with active carbon, such as the one fitted here, can reduce the levels of them all.
I had some difficulty connecting this air purifier to my Wi-Fi network and adding it to the Acerpure app. Judging by the display’s Wi-Fi indicator the purifier actually joined my network on the first attempt, but the app seemed unable to find it. After re-trying several times, I cleared the app’s cache, turned the purifier off then on again at the plug, and it appeared in the app without me needing to add it.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last of my problems. I found that the app seemed slow to reflect air quality readings from the purifier’s onboard sensors. At times it was also slow to respond to remote controls, for example when I tried to change the fan speed. Often the app’s connection to the purifier would fail altogether, and I’d need to force stop it then restart it before it worked again.
That’s a shame, because the app has most of the functions I’d want. Particularly, it lets you schedule the fan and filter to come on whenever you want them to, along with other features including oscillation if you want them. It’s a shame it doesn’t support Alexa or Google Assistant yet, but with better stability, it would have been fine.
Performance
- Quite quiet
- Powerful air circulation
- Excellent filtration
This is a reasonably big air purifier, but I was surprised by how effective it was in my smoke test. I shut every air purifier in a small room with a burning smoke pellet, which releases a thick broth of particulates into the air for around a minute. Working on full power, I time how long it takes the purifier to scrub all the smoke out of the air, and ideally get it back down to a ‘very good’ quality rating of less than 12 micrograms (µg) of particulates per cubic metre (m3) of air.
With its fan off, and the filter in Turbo mode, the Acerpure Cool managed to nudge my PM2.5 sensor down from its 999 maximum within four minutes. In eight minutes the room air was into the ‘moderate’ range, falling to very good after 10 minutes. After 13 minutes, the room had returned to its original reading of 1µg/m3 – almost free of particulates. That’s about three minutes quicker than the Core 400S managed in the same test – more impressively, it’s only three minutes behind the extremely powerful and effective Levoit Core 600S.
Happily, the Acerpure Cool didn’t drop the ball elsewhere. It’s very quiet, starting at just 25.5dB with the fan off and the filter on its lowest speed. Turning the fan to speed one raised this to 33dB when measured from 15cm away, or 31dB from one metre. On speed five, noise rose to 44.3dB and 33.3dB at the same distances – still pretty quiet. Only on the maximum fan speed did noise kick up to 55.3dB and 47dB, again measured from 15cm and 1m away.
With the fan and filter flat out, I measured a maximum racket of 58.3dB. This caused a peak power consumption of 55.5 watts, but at more typical speeds power use was much lower. With the filter and fan on their lowest speeds I measured just 5.2W, rising to 8.3W once I turned the fan up to speed five.
This fan produces a reasonably focused and – for its size – impressively strong movement of air. Even at its lowest setting I measured a wind speed of two metres per second (m/s) from 15cm away, although by one metre away this had fallen below the minimum speed detectable by my anemometer. On setting five, I measured 3.9m/s from 15cm away, falling to 3m/s at one metre and 1.4m/s at two metres. On full power I recorded a gusty 6.8m/s, falling to 5ms and 3.1m/s at the same distances. Overall, that’s a bit better than the results I got from the Duux Globe, a good quality small desk fan.
In practice, I could feel a mild breeze when sitting a couple of metres away with the fan on its lowest setting. On the highest setting, I could still feel significant, blustery air movement from more than four metres away.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
You want a powerful fan and purifier
This is a great combination of an effective air purifier with a powerful fan. It’s reasonably quiet and efficient, and its control panel, display and remote make it easy to use. Best of all, it’s great value.
You want the UV-C light for additional purification
If you want the highest level of protection from pathogens, consider paying more for the version with UV-C light.
Final Thoughts
The Acerpure Cool is one of the best air purifiers I’ve tested, turning in the second best performance I’ve measured in our tough smoke removal test and confounding its middling CADR rating.
It’s also one of the better fans I’ve run through its paces. It’s easy to use via its touch panel and remote, and has a useful display showing PM2.5, PM1 or VOC data.
Given all this, I was surprised to find it selling for as little as £90 at the time of my review – that’s about half what the Levoit Core 400S costs. The Acerpure Cool’s only real weakness is that its app seems a little unstable. And that’s something I’d hope might get fixed within a few updates.
How we test
Unlike other sites, we test every air purifier we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main air purifier for the review period
We test smart purifiers with their apps and we test Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility.
We time how long it takes each purifier to remove smoke from a closed room.
FAQs
Opinions differ. In theory, a UV-C lamp can destroy some of the viruses and other nasties that make it past the HEPA13 filter, but some studies suggest they’re not that much more effective. If air quality is vitally important, it might be worth paying the extra.
Not all air purifiers will remove odours. Look for one with a charcoal layer in the filter, which should help capture and break down volatile gases. If odour control is particularly important, choose a pet-specific filter, which usually comes with a thicker carbon layer.
Many air purifiers use efficient DC motors, so they use only a handful of watts at low or medium speeds. You’ll spend more on replacement filters, which might typically cost £30-40 around every six months.
