Air Quality: Purifiers, Filters, Monitors and Humidity Control

Air quality in India is usually discussed as an outdoor problem, which is misleading in one important way: most people spend the large majority of their time indoors, and indoor air is frequently worse. Outdoor pollution infiltrates, and then cooking, incense, mosquito coils, cleaning products and off-gassing from new furniture add to it in a space with limited ventilation.

That has a practical upside. You have almost no control over the air outside your window, and considerable control over the air in your bedroom — which is where you spend eight uninterrupted hours a night.

This section covers the whole category rather than just purifiers: the filtration that actually works and the terminology used to fake it, the consumables that determine long-term cost, the monitors that let you verify anything at all, and the humidity appliances that solve a completely different problem people often confuse with air cleaning. Where we have tested products we rank them; where we have not, we say so and give you criteria instead.