Smartmi Air Purifier E1 review: Apple HomeKit ready, wall-mountable and with super-trendy style

Air purifiers can make a real difference to the air quality in your home. Whether you’re susceptible to dust allergies, hayfever, general pollutants, or the dander from pets, an air purifier can capture the particles that would otherwise irritate and annoy our sensitive airways.

They’re an increasingly common sight in our homes, particularly for city-dwellers, but they tend to be quite industrial in their design, medical-looking, even. They’ll get tucked away in a corner, rather than being a centerpiece for your home.

The Smartmi Air Purifier E1 hopes to change that. With its arty covers and wall-mountable design, it wants prominent placement in your living spaces. That it gets its core job done very effectively is a plus — but its unique filters might make long-term maintenance costly.

Price and Availability

The Smartmi Air Purifier E1 is available now direct from Smartmi, with an RRP of $160 , with a 3-pack of filters priced at $129.99. Though its price has fluctuated since launch, at that price point it makes for a relatively inexpensive air purification system, but the fact that the filters are built specifically for the E1 means you’ll be locked into a pricey filter replacement cycle for the device’s life. But it’s also one of the better-looking air purifiers available, and so that’s what you’re paying for, ultimately.

What I love

If home aesthetics are important to you, the Smartmi Air Purifier E1 is a great choice. Before you’ve even switched it on, it’s trying to catch your eye. A frame-like box, rather than the cylindrical designs that seem to dominate the consumer purifier market, it can be wall-mounted and is designed to be paired with a number of arty filters. They give a pop of color where other similar purifiers can feel sterile, and the purifier’s not insubstantial 313 x 415 x 118mm size, that’s a good thing.

That slickness extends to the set-up process too. Wall-mounting screw brackets are part of the package, though it’s easier to set up the E1 for a floor-standing setup with the included metal foot frame, which simply clips into the bottom of the purifier. I did find it interesting that the instructions encourage you to keep a 20 cm radius around the purifier when floor-standing it though — I’m not sure what performance effect that would have when wall mounting, given it’d be impossible to make that clearance. Swapping the colorful filters is a breeze, however, sliding up and out of the main plastic housing that holds the extraction fan and electronics.

There are just two simple controls on the device itself — two orange buttons that control power and the extraction level, each with accompanying LED indicators that can be toggled off — and so most of the interesting stuff is left to the accompanying app. As well as Apple Home integration, the Smartmi Air Purifier E1 works with Google Home and Alexa, so can easily be controlled by your smart home assistant of choice — Samsung SmartThings and Matter support being the only notable missing standards. 2.4GHz Wi-Fi connectivity gets the purifier talking to your other smart home devices and the app.

The app is pretty stripped back as, as we will get onto shortly, there is not the usual array of sensors onboard that you’d find with pricier air purifiers. You can check filter life, set timers, switch power modes (listed as ‘gears’ in the app) and integrate into your Apple Home set up via HomeKit, and that’s about it. Note that, once integrated into the Apple Home interface, the slider-like mechanic for tweaking power levels can be a bit confusing — it doesn’t illustrate the steps between the three different power levels.

Onto the air purifying process itself. The Smartmi Air Purifier E1 is intended for ‘small to medium’ rooms, with Smartmi suggesting a max size of 205 square feet or below for optimal performance. The purifier is equipped with a replaceable HEP13 filter which can tackle irritants like dust, pollen, and pet dander, as well as removing odors and low-level smoke build-up. It’ll handle these up to a PM2.5 rating — which means fine particles 2.5 microns or less in diameter, which is smaller than the thickness of human hair, while an active carbon layer in the filter will deal with many VOCs (volatile organic compounds), such as the airborne chemical leftovers from hair sprays and perfumes.

It’s done a great job around my home. My office window opens out towards a nearby main road, and the annual summer dance between cooling the room with the window open and breathing in the resultant pollutants is never a fun one. After an hour or so with the purifier on after having the window open, I can tell the difference in how much cleaner the air feels. As a sporadic asthmatic, it’s helped too — I’m sleeping much easier with the purifier on overnight, and its quiet operation means it doesn’t disturb too much when on.

What I don’t love

The long-term cost of filters for the Smartmi Air Purifier E1 could be an issue. A proprietary design, you’re not going to be able to equip the purifier with off-the-shelf alternatives that other companies offer. Of course, to do so would be missing the point of what the Smartmi device offers — an arty smart home unit, rather than a generic appliance. But you’ll want to factor that long-term cost into the purchase price, and consider stocking up on filters in advance, as you never can tell how long a product will be supported for.

A second annoyance is the lack of sensor data from the purifier. Though it can handle PM2.5 particles, it doesn’t have the means to track how much it’s pulled out of the air, so you’re going to need to add a secondary air quality sensor to your smart home array for more than an anecdotal sense of cleanliness.

It’s also a shame not to see Matter support included here — the open smart home standard, it would have future-proofed the purifier to any shake ups to your smart home setup in the future.

Verdict

Some of the best HomeKit air purifiers we’ve looked at on iMore succeed in clearing the air in a room, but can be pretty dull looking in the process. The Smartmi Air Purifier E1 doesn’t have that problem — well equipped for cleaning the air of small rooms, and good looking at the same time, it’s a great air purifier. Just don’t go in expecting to get lots of cleaning data from the job, and be ready to stock up on filters.

Bottom line:

An air purifier that looks as good as it cleans.