Dreo MC710S Air Purifier Tower Fan

Verdict

Dreo’s MC710S combines a HEPA air purifier with a monster of a tower fan. The result is a gadget that can purify the air while stirring up a huge breeze. There’s more to it than that thoug as dual motors give you the flexibility to get maximum performance when needed, while reducing the sound and wind levels at night. Best of all, everything’s integrated into an easy smartphone app, making it a cinch to fine-tune the performance and even set schedules for what you want and when. What a disappointment then that its air purifier didn’t perform brilliantly in my tests.

Click here to buy the Dreo MC710S

Introduction

Dreo’s MC710S is a large tower fan, coupled with an air purifier. It’s designed to stir up a powerful breeze even in large rooms, but also to scrub the air clean of common household pollutants like dust, pet dander, and even airborne bacteria and viruses. This really is a big device, weighing nearly 18 pounds, measuring almost a foot across and topping out at just under four feet so you’d really only want it in big living spaces.

In what Dreo claims is an industry first, the MC710S uses dual motors to provide separate control over its fan and purifier speeds. That certainly gives it loads of flexibility, letting you dial up just the right fan speed to stop a room from getting stuffy, and separately use the optimal purifier settings. Both have an auto mode, helping you stay on top of cooling and air quality without having to lift a finger.

Design and features

• A tower fan on steroids
• Separate fan and purifier, but they can work together
• Great app

The Dreo MC710S looks almost like a small robot. It combines a tower fan and air purifier in a way I haven’t seen before. The fan is a fairly conventional tower unit, with a big output vent at the front and a washable input grille at the back. The air purifier sits below, and when it’s running, injects clean air into the tower fan and out into the room.

Because the fan and air purifier have separate motors, and can be controlled separately, the Dreo MC710S is much more flexible than a standard air purifier or fan. You can adjust the tower speed to get exactly the right kind of air circulation, regardless of what the purifier’s doing. Similarly, you don’t even need the fan on to enjoy purified air – in breeze mode, only the purifier runs.

Both parts of the MC710S have an Auto mode. For the fan, it’s controlled by temperature, with the speed automatically nudged up on the hottest days. The purifier has a sensor to detect fine particulate (PM2.5) matter, which causes eye, nose, throat and lung irritation. When the reading is higher – for example, because of traffic smog or pollen – the purifier runs at a higher speed. At the same time, a colour bar on the display moves from blue (good), through green, orange and red (very poor) to indicate the detected air quality.

In theory, most of this can be controlled using the touch-sensitive panel on top of the purifier.

Alternatively, you can use the supplied infrared remote control.

In practice, things can get a little complex, and it’s easier to join the MC710S to your Wi-Fi and just use the excellent app. This gives you visual control over all the purifier’s functions, but also makes it easy to see key information such as the room temperature and the PM2.5 reading.

This purifier can oscillate horizontally through up to 120 degrees – that’s a third of a full circle – but the app gives you full control over the horizontal angle. You can set a reduced range in five-degree increments down to a minimum of 30 degrees, and either have it centered or asymmetric so the air is directed to a particular part of the room.

In the app, you can turn off the panel sound, set a child lock and set the display to show the fan level, PM2.5 reading or ambient temperature. You can also set up voice control through Alexa or the Google Assistant.

Finally, Dreo’s app lets you configure schedules to turn the MC710S on or off at certain times, or have it operate for a period. These are quite sophisticated, for example letting you set a night-time slot where just the purifier runs, alongside morning and evening periods where the fan also comes in. For each schedule you can set the fan and purification levels manually or have either operate in auto mode.

Performance

• Quite quiet, especially as a fan
• Very powerful air circulation
• Poor filtration

Combining a powerful tower fan and a mid-sized air purifier, the Dreo MC710S needed quite a bit of testing. I started by measuring the wind speed from its fan from just six inches away, and then from greater distances, using different settings. My testing showed that Breeze mode, with the fan off and the purifier at its lowest speed, produced the most gentle air stream, but I still measured a wind speed of 3.0 meters per second (m/s), or 6.7 miles per hour (mph), from six inches away. From one yard away I could still feel a good breeze, but the wind speed had dropped below my anemometer’s minimum reading speed.

With the purifier off and the fan on its lowest setting the wind rose very slightly to 3.2 m/s (7.2 mph) from six inches, while from three feet away I could measure a speed of 1.1 m/s (2.5 mph).

From setting six, roughly mid-power, things got altogether more blowy. Six inches away I recorded wind of 5.1 m/s (11.4 mph), which had dropped to 2.7 m/s (6 mph) over one yard. Even two yards away I could still measure 1.7 m/s (3.8 mph). I turned the fan and purifier to full power and measured a huge 8.0 m/s (17.9 mph) from six inches away. One yard from the front grille this had dropped to a still-impressive 4.3 m/s (9.6 mph), and even two yards away I recorded 3.0 m/s (6.7 mph).

These figures confirm the Dreo MC710S as the most powerful fan I’ve tested, but it doesn’t come at the expense of too much noise. I measured a low of 41.0dB one yard away, with the purifier off and the fan on its lowest setting. Even with the fan and purifier on full, the highest noise reading I got was 69.9dB, taken just six inches away from the fan’s air inlet.

I was very surprised when I looked at my power readings, which – thanks to the twin DC motors – were impressively low. Breeze mode used just six watts. With the purifier off and the fan on its lowest speed this dropped slightly to four watts. Running only the fan at the moderately powerful speed six used eight watts. With both the fan and purifier at full power I measured a maximum of 39 watts.

There’s no doubt this is a brilliant air circulator, but unfortunately it’s much less convincing as an air purifier. There’s no carbon layer in the filter, which would be helpful in controlling odours and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). It also goes without a germicidal ultraviolet lamp.

I test purifiers by shutting them in a small room with a burning smoke pellet, which releases a thick fog of particulates. With the purifier running flat out, we test how long it takes for the room air quality to drop back into the ‘very good’ range, generally taken as a PM2.5 reading under 12 µg/m³.

Dreo declined to confirm the clean air delivery rate (CADR) for the MC710S, which would otherwise have given an idea of its likely performance as a purifier. The MC710S was disappointing on this test, needing 20 minutes before our PM2.5 sensor finally returned a reading of 9 µg/m³. By way of comparison, the Levoit Core 400S took only 12 minutes for the same job, while Levoit’s bigger Core 600S needed just six minutes.

This test also showed up that my MC710S didn’t have a particularly accurate PM2.5 sensor. After one minute it had fallen to 17 µg/m³, where it stayed until suddenly dropping to 1 µg/m³ at 11 minutes. My stand-alone sensor read 696 µg/m³ at the first point, and 104 µg/m³ at the second. If I’d been relying on the purifier’s own sensor, I would have entered the room with the air quality still very poor.

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