Airthings Renew review: Quiet but not-so-smart air purification

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Cons

Our Verdict

Sturdy yet easy on the eyes, the Airthings Renew reliably and quietly scrubs the air in smaller to medium-sized rooms, but falls short in the smarts department.

Price When Reviewed

$399.99

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Known primarily for its wide range of air quality monitors, Oslo-based Airthings has finally unleashed its first air purifier. The Airthings Renew arrives bearing many of the company’s hallmarks, including a sturdy yet homey design, easy of use, and reliable operation. But the Renew falls short in a key area for us: smarts.

Priced at a somewhat hefty $399.99 and designed for small- to medium-sized rooms, the Renew is a cinch to set up and boasts some terrific design choices, including the ability to lay the unit on its side, a fabric handle for easy carrying from room to room, and a rear compartment for cable management. Inside is a medical-grade HEPA-13 filter, while the fans that pull dirty air in and blow scrubbed air out are remarkably quiet.

That said, the Renew’s bare-bones smart abilities disappoint. Sure, you can control the Renew from anywhere using the Airthings app, which can track air quality in a room over time. But there are no scheduling features at all, meaning that “Auto” and “Sleep” fan modes must be engaged manually, and there are no third-party smart home integrations, so you won’t be able to control the Renew with voice commands.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping Airthings from adding more smarts to the Renew over time, and what the Renew does do, it does well. But for now, the Airthings Renew doesn’t dazzle in the smart-home department.

Design

Measuring 16 x 16 x 5.7 inches (WxHxD) and weighing 11.9 pounds, the beige-colored Renew has a curved, neutral design that allows it to blend into your surroundings.

Ben Patterson/Foundry

The medium-sized unit can be placed upright or laid flat on its side—a nice touch, but keep in mind that the Renew needs at least 8 inches of clearance for its fabric-covered side (where air is sucked in), its vented top (where scrubbed air is blown out), and its front (where an air-quality sensor is located).

That restriction pretty much precludes sliding the Renew under a bed or a sofa, unless the underside of your furniture is exceptionally high off the floor. On the other hand, you can mount the Renew on a wall, and a hook is included in the package for that purpose.

The Renew has a couple other nifty design elements, including a long, wide strap along its front edge that makes the unit easier to transport, while a rear compartment with a snap-on cover can hide any extra length of the detachable, 5.6-foot power cord.

Ben Patterson/Foundry

Air purification and filtration

With a CADR (clean air delivery rate) of 140 cfm, the Airthings Renew is best suited for small- to medium-sized rooms, and Airthings is (quite rightly) pitching the Renew as an ideal bedroom purifier. In practical terms, the Renew can change the air in a 210 square-foot room five times an hour; put the Renew in a 525 square-foot space, and the ACH (air changes per hour) rate falls to just two.

On the front side of the Renew is a laser-based particulate matter (PM 2.5) sensor, which takes readings of nearby air quality, charts them in the Airthings app, and helps guide the Renew’s “Auto” fan mode. (More on the app and Auto mode in a moment.)

The Renew boasts a four-stage filtration system, starting with an outer pre-filter made of a “speaker-grade” textile that’s designed to catch pet hair, dust, and other large particles.

Next up is an inner pre-filter for finer dust particles and pollen. This honeycomb-shaped filter can be removed and rinsed with water, although it takes a bit of effort to free the filter from its snap-on housing (the top portion of the filter has magnetic fasteners).

Ben Patterson/Foundry

Deeper still is the thick, medical-grade HEPA-13 particle filter, which is rated to remove up to 99.97 percent of airborne particles measuring 0.3 microns in diameter or larger.

Finally, an active charcoal filter screens out odors and volatile organic compounds (or VOCs), including such pollutants as formaldehyde, trichloroethylene, and chloroform.

Airthings estimates that the HEPA-13 and active charcoal filters will need to be replaced every six months or so. The company says it will begin offering replacement packs that include both the HEPA and active charcoal filters in June for $69.99, so you’ll need to factor that cost into the Renew’s $399.99 sticker price.

Setup

Getting the Airthings Renew up and running is easy. Once you prep the filters and plug in the detachable power cord, you can fire up the Airthings app, sign in (you’ll need to create an Airthings account if you don’t already have one), and begin the process of adding a new device.

For me, the Airthings app detected the Renew almost immediately, and paired with it via Bluetooth. You then press and hold the power button on the unit to complete the setup process, which only took about five minutes.

The Airthings Renew connects to Wi-Fi networks on just the 2.4GHz band, but the purifier didn’t have any trouble connecting to my dual-band mesh router.

Indicators and controls

Sitting next to the Renew’s vented top is a touch-sensitive control panel with a variety of buttons and indicators, all of which are replicated in the (soon-to-be-discussed) Airthings app.

Among the controls are “+” and “-” buttons that let you manually adjust the fan speed (five steps are available), and there are also buttons for three fan modes: Auto (which automatically tweaks the speed according to the detected air quality), Boost (which revs the fan to maximum speed for an hour), and Sleep (which dials down the fan speed to low for eight hours, while also dousing the indicator lights). There’s also a child lock to keep little ones from messing with the fan settings.

At the bottom of the panel and just beneath the power button is a trio of indicators: one for Wi-Fi status, another one that warns you when it’s time to replace the filters, and a third for air quality. That last indicator glows green for good air quality (less than 10 micrograms of air pollutants per cubic meter), yellow for fair (10-25 µg/m3), or red for poor (more than 25 µg/m3).

Ben Patterson/Foundry

Airthings app

Clean, sleek, and intuitive, the Airthings app is a snap to use, with the iOS version boasting haptic feedback as your swipe back and forth on the various air quality graphs. Unfortunately, the app is sorely lacking when it comes to actual smart features.

First, the good. The Airthings app makes it easy to quickly scan the status of your various Airthings devices, including the Renew unit (or units) and any Airthings air quality monitors you might have scattered about the house. A drop-down under the Renew heading on the main screen lets you quickly scan PM2.5 levels, while tapping Controls gives you a concise overview of all the Renew’s on-device controls, including fan speed modes.

The app will also give you a more precise estimate of how much life is left on the filters—although, annoyingly, you’ll need to back out of the Devices tab and drill down into the Renew’s Settings menu to get it. Once there, you’ll see the estimated use left for the HEPA-13 and activated charcoal filters expressed as a percentage.

So much for the good. The bad about the Airthings app is that offers little more in terms of smart features for the Renew. For example, there’s no scheduling of any kind, meaning you must enable and/or disable the Auto, Boost, and Silent modes manually, either in the app or on the unit itself. The app will send a notification if detected PM2.5 levels go too high, but not when it’s time to replace the filters. And while the app will give you a pollen forecast for your location, it doesn’t offer outdoor air quality details pulled from the internet.

Ben Patterson/Foundry

Finally, the Airthings app doesn’t integrate with Alexa, Google Home, or any other third-party smart home platforms, nor is there any Matter support. (Matter works with air purifiers as of the standard’s 1.2 specification, which was released last year.) So, if you want to control the Airthings Renew remotely, you can only do so using the Airthings app.

Asked when more smart features and integrations would come to the Renew, an Airthings rep replied: “We are always looking for ways to improve our products and are excited about what the coming weeks and months will bring to the experience of Renew in the Airthings app, however, we cannot comment on future product roadmaps or features that haven’t yet been released.”

Performance

I tested the Airthings Renew in my basement lounge area over a span of roughly eight weeks. The basement in my Brooklyn brownstone rental doesn’t get much ventilation, thus it’s in dire need of air purification.

Several weeks prior to the arrival of the Renew, I installed an Airthings View Plus air quality monitor a few feet from where the Renew would eventually sit, giving me some baseline readings against which I could measure the Renew’s performance.

The results were striking. Before the Renew arrived, I was seeing PM2.5 levels that frequently hit 25 µg/m3 or higher, with one particularly (no pun intended) ugly spike of 59 µg/m3–all readings that would have tripped the Renew’s “Poor” air quality indicator.

Once I’d installed the Renew, however, those spiking PM2.5 levels dipped dramatically with the purifier in “Auto” mode—indeed, the highest PM2.5 level I saw post-Renew was 17 µg/m3, with the average closer to 2-6 µg/m3, while PM1 and VOC levels showed similar drops. That’s more like it.

The Renew is remarkably quiet given its air-scrubbing abilities. Airthings claims the Renew’s fans only emit 23 dB of noise when the unit is in “Silent” mode, or a little quieter than the sound of a whisper, while “Boost” mode goes up to a rated 51 dB.

That squares with my anecdotal experience with the Renew, which—in “Auto” mode—ran virtually silently throughout nearly two months of testing. In Boost mode, the Renew sounded like a window A/C unit running at full blast—not that quiet, mind you, but well shy of the jet-engine roar generated by some higher-CADR air purifiers.

Specifications

Should you buy the Airthings Renew?

If you’re looking for an air purifier that will smoothly integrate with the rest of your smart home, the Airthings Renew isn’t it—or at least, not yet. When the Renew was first unveiled at CES 2024, an Airthings rep told me the company “anticipates” the addition of smart home integrations down the line, so it’s certainly possible the Renew will eventually play nice with Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, and other smart home platforms.

But while it isn’t so smart, the Renew in its current form is handsome, well-made, quiet, and effective. And while you can’t put the Renew on a schedule, it’s certainly feasible to put the unit in “Auto” mode and forget it, which is pretty much what I did during my testing.

If you can live with its smart shortcomings and can afford the $400 price tag, the Airthings Renew is worth giving a serious look.