Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max Review

Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max Review..Something like the Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max can help if you have allergies, a lung disease, or just want to keep the air in your home fresh and free of smells like pets or food. This $229.99 air purifier is made to work in rooms up to 929 square feet and quickly gets rid of dangerous particles.

Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max Review

You can control it with your voice or an app. It looks good, is simple to use, doesn’t make too much noise, and has a cloth pre-filter that can be washed. The Dyson Purifier Cool TP07 (originally $649.99, now on sale for $499.99), which can also be used as an oscillating fan, has a lot more features. The Wyze Air Purifier ($169.99), on the other hand, only has one filter option, but the Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max is a good midrange model for large rooms.

How to Breathe Better: The Basics

The Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max can clean the air in up to 387 square feet of space in 12.5 minutes or up to 929 square feet of space in 30 minutes. The round object is 19 inches tall, 12.5 inches wide, and 7.8 pounds heavy. Moving from one room to the next is pretty easy, but a handle would be nice here.

Blueair also has a model called the 311i Plus Max that costs $299 and is a bit higher at 21 inches. It is best for rooms up to 1,116 square feet in size.
A gray Stockholm Fog cloth pre-filter picks up big things like dust, pollen, and pet hair, and it’s easy to take off to clean or vacuum. You can order a Limestone, Moss, or Sand colored pre-filter ($10.99 each) if gray doesn’t go with your home’s style.

A 360-degree carbon-layered HEPA filter is inside, and it’s meant to catch 99.97% of airborne particles smaller than 0.1 micron. This gets rid of viruses, as well as food smells, pet hair, mold, germs, and smoke.

Depending on how often it is used, the main filter can last up to nine months. Each refill costs $44.99 USD. It’s not like the Wyze Air Purifier, which has a normal Allergen filter ($34.99), a Wildfire filter ($34.99), and a Formaldehyde filter ($54.99). The 311i Max doesn’t have any application-specific filter choices.

Blueair’s HEPASilent filtration technology is used in the cleaner. This technology mixes mechanical filtration with an electric charge to make it easier for flying particles to stick to the filter. This keeps the filter from getting clogged and makes it work better while using less energy and making less noise from the fan.

The 311i Max checks for PM2.5 levels in real time (microscopic particles smaller than 2.5 microns), but it doesn’t check for PM10 levels, NO2 levels, or VOC levels. Another thing it doesn’t do is check for additional air quality factors like these. For that reason, you might want to think about a more expensive air filter like the Dyson filter Cool TP07 or the Aura Air ($499).

A power button, a fan button, and LED lights for each of the three fan speed sets are on the top of the 311i Max. Auto-Mode (which changes the fan speed based on the quality of the air), Night Mode (which turns the fan down to its lowest speed and dims the LEDs), Wi-Fi connection, and filter replacement are all shown by lights. If you press the Fan button, you can change the fan speed, Auto mode, or Night mode.

The Dreo Max S and Wyze air filters have built-in screens that show real-time PM2.5 readings. This one doesn’t, but you can get that information from the Blueair app, which is free and works with both Android and iOS. The 311i Max instead uses a simple multi-color LED light to show you what’s wrong with the air quality inside. Blue means the air quality is great, green means it’s good, yellow means it’s average, orange means it’s dirty, and red means it’s really dirty.

The 311i Max has a built-in 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio that lets you connect to your home network, as well as a Bluetooth radio that lets you pair it with your phone. Apple HomeKit doesn’t work with it, but Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant do. Also, it doesn’t work with IFFFT applets that let third-party programs work with it.

When you open the app on your phone, you’ll see a screen with an Outdoor section at the top and an Indoor section at the bottom. In the Outdoor part, a bright graph shows the present and past outdoor Air Quality Index (AQI) for your area. It also shows the amounts of PM2.5, PM10, CO (Carbon Monoxide), and SO2 (Sulfur Dioxide) outside right now.

In the Indoor area, there is a screen for the air filter that shows its name, the quality of the air inside, and the fan setting. To turn the filter on or off, swipe left on the panel. To use Auto or Night mode, swipe right. It starts a screen with a color-coded graph showing current and past PM2.5 levels with numbers when you tap the panel. Keys for Power, Fan Speed, Auto mode, and Night mode are below the line. There is also a Child Lock button that stops anyone from using the onboard tools to change the settings. You can change the level of the LEDs, see the state of the filter, and set up on/off times for the fans with other app settings. In the product settings page, you can see details about the software, change the name of the gadget, and change where you are (for Outdoor AQI measures).

Testing the 311i Max

In tests, it was easy to get the 311i Max ready to use. I turned it on, plugged it in, and got the app for my phone. I made an account, then pressed Connect Product, picked Blue from the list of devices, and pressed Connect My Air Purifier. The app recognized the device right away, so I tapped it and waited a few seconds for it to ask me to enter my Wi-Fi password and choose my Wi-Fi SSID. After a few more seconds, I gave it a name and tapped “Next.” The filter connected right away and showed up in the app as a “Indoor Device.”

The 311i Max did well and quietly in my air filter tests. Since it doesn’t give numerical PM2.5 numbers, I put a Govee Air Quality Monitor next to it to keep an eye on the real PM2.5 levels. I set up both devices in my 110-square-foot office, lit an incense stick, and then let it burn out for 10 minutes. I put the 311i Max into Auto mode and let it do its thing. At this point, the Govee monitor showed a PM2.5 reading of 200. The air quality LED turned red right away, and the fan sped up to its fastest setting.

It had been three minutes, and the Govee monitor showed a PM2.5 reading of 55. The purifier’s LED was now yellow. The number went down to 20 after six minutes, and the purifier’s LED turned green. After ten minutes, the Govee showed a PM2.5 level of 4, and the purifier’s LED turned blue. It took 14 minutes for the 311i Max to give the Govee monitor a PM2.5 reading of 0. In comparison, it took 13 minutes for the Dreo Macro Max S to clean the air fully and 14 minutes for the Levoit Vital 200S.

I used the NIOSH Sound Level Meter app to measure the noise level in a room that was otherwise quiet. The 311i Max makes 52dB of noise when its fan is running at its fastest speed. That is less noisy than both the Wyze Purifier (58dB at high speed) and the Levoit Vital 200S (59dB at high speed). The 311i Max makes 33dB of noise when it’s going slowly. The Wyze Purifier is a little quieter (28dB), while the Levoit Vital 200S is a little louder (39dB).

Finally, voice orders to Alexa worked great. To turn the filter on and off, change the speed of the fan, or change the light level of the LEDs, the controls reacted right away.

Cheap Air Purification for Large Rooms

The Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max might not have as many features as other, more expensive headphones, but it does a great job where it counts. It did great in our tests of air cleaning, quickly getting rid of dangerous PM2.5.

As an air cleaner, it covers a large area (up to 929 square feet), is very quiet, and responds quickly to voice and app instructions. If you’re on a budget or need to clean a smaller room, the Wyze Air Purifier, which is designed for rooms up to 550 square feet, is a great alternative that works very well, gives accurate PM2.5 readings, and has a number of filter options. If you can afford it, the Dyson Purifier Cool TP07, which is our Editors’ Choice in this category, gives you more accurate readings of the air quality and has a moving fan to keep you cool. But the 311i Max costs less than the TP07 and lets you buy two of them. This makes it a great choice for cleaning the air in big rooms.

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