Rabbit Air MinusA2 Ultra Quiet Air Purifier

I have 2-3 pipes a day, and my new office is in a finished basement. I have always been able to mitigate pipe smoke with an open window and window fan. I have a tower HEPA air filter, and a smaller TrueAir that can stand on a desk, but this enclosed area was too much for them. Since I no longer have windows, I needed to resolve an obvious problem.

The RabbitAir Minus A2 has been the answer. First, I ran it for a couple days on high to “reset” things down here, and also to “break in” the unit. This worked to completely clear the air down here. The area is what I would call “medium sized” or about 500 sq. feet. Two days on high and that cleared the air right up. I don’t have a door separating me from the upstairs; there’s a stair case going upstairs to the kitchen. Nothing I do down here really makes it up there, though I have gotten a whiff of “stale” smoke on the staircase a couple times. Running the RabbitAir down here cleared that up as well.

This morning I smoked a nice heavy pipe of Dark Fired Kentucky with the unit running about three feet from where I sit at my desk, about level with my head. I didn’t make a strong effort to make sure every bit of smoke made its way toward the unit. In fact, I just ignored it. On the lowest setting, it provides zero distraction and doesn’t make enough noise for me to even remember it’s there. It does kind of “ramp up” a bit when smoke hits it, but it’s still not a distraction. It kind of makes me happy.

A couple hours later, my wife came downstairs and she could smell nothing. DFK is not a “light” pipe tobacco, so that is saying a lot.

I don’t smoke cigars in the house, so I can’t testify to it’s effectiveness with cigars. I suspect it would take longer to clear cigar smoke. I don’t smoke cigarettes so I can’t testify to it’s effectiveness with cigarettes. Cigarette smoke tends to “stick” to things; cigar smoke is just “heavy” smoke, but pipe smoke doesn’t quite suffer from these attributes. So it clears pipe smoke very efficiently, but in my mind you may get some varying mileage with cigars or cigarettes. I have confidence in it, you just might find you have to run it longer with cigars or cigarettes.

One thing I will say, this air purifier makes the air clean in such a way that it is noticeable. There’s just a “freshness” that it produces, almost like if you ever had really nice clean cold water. It’s not a “chemical” clean, either. Just nice fresh air. I imagine there could be other factors that might impact your experience with it, such as where you place it, what kinds of things you already have in your air (we have no mold or stuff “floating” in the air, though we do have two cats), or the configuration of the room you’re trying to clear. But I would say my area would be a “medium” challenge for air purification, as a result of having no windows, a door that leads to a large garage, and no door between here and the upper level, with a staircase that can trap odors. Some things working in my favor are that our air is pretty darn clean by default, and I have a good amount of air coming into the area as a result of several vents pushing air in; I have half of those closed, though. The air circulation here is such that the air down here isn’t pushed back upstairs; we’ve never had any issues with odor up there.

I already bought replacement filters to swap out sometime in the late Fall. I do run this about 12 hours a day now. We also made a trip since I’ve had this thing, and we move a litter box from the garage into the basement office when we are on trips. I left the RabbitAir running while we were gone for two days, and when we returned there was no litter box odor to detect down here. No smoke, no litter box, just clean air. This thing is worth it if you need to mitigate these kinds of issues.

Actually, it’s an understatement to say it’s worth it. It’s an unusually excellent appliance. And it actually increases my happiness each day.

Really quiet with high quality machine I’ve ever experienced.

What can I say? The Rabbit Air MinusA2 has been a godsend for us.

We live in a really heavy juniper area…to which both my spouse and I are quite allergic, and the allergy season for that lasts about 3 months each year. Spouse gets it worse than me, but it’s pretty miserable for both of us. Me, I then get the double-whammy of ragweed, chamisa and other late-blooming pollens which are really bad. Both seasons, when my sinuses are screwed up, I’m far more prone to migraine headaches.

We decided to take the plunge and, after a lot of online research, buy two units — one for each of the rooms in which we spend most of our time each day. (We may yet purchase a third if finances hold up, to cover the middle of our open-plan house.) The air purifiers arrived in original manufacturer boxes, with the ‘odor control’ filter as the extra optional customized fourth stage filter. Suits us just fine. Boxes were sturdy, with styrofoam inserts to hold the purifiers. There were three separate sets of instructions on how to set up the purifier — a Quick Start single-pager, a longer user guide, and also a large illustrative sticker on the inside of the front cover. The only real hassle was removing all the plastic on each of the filter stages save the pre-filter. (Note: You GOTTA remove the plastic filter wrappers or the purifier won’t work at all!) Took care to note which way was marked ‘Front’ on each filter component on re-assembly, put the front cover on and set it to running.

We both noticed the purifiers on Auto mode ran at pretty high speed and indicated poor air quality for about the first 10-15 minutes before quieting down. Then, after that, they went to higher speed maybe every 20 minutes or so for perhaps 20-30 seconds tops. Now, after owning them for a while now, we’ve noticed neither of them is running at higher speed nearly as often. (Although they nearly always react when we walk near them, probably because we’re raising dust from the pile carpeting they’re on.)

Over the last week, the difference for us has been dramatic. Oh, we still suffer the allergies, but we can easily tell the difference between when we’re outside versus inside, in terms of being snuffly and having itchy eyes. Another common effect during heavy pollen season is we accumulate a lot of house-dust, most visible on polished surfaces like my desk. The day after I fired up the Rabbit Air, I dusted my entire home office…and days later, it’s basically still mostly dust free.

Pros:
– Really purifies the air, to a degree cheaper air purifiers and filters just can’t match in my experience
– Have noticed general household odor reduction overall, especially after the purifier’s been doing its thing after we’ve been cooking
– Attractive unit design, and I like the idea it can be mounted on a wall; still haven’t quite decided whether to do that here though
– Definitely dead silent on the lowest fan speed, just audible on low. Can definitely hear it on medium or high (and of course Turbo), but it’s not an unpleasant noise by our standard; certainly no more noisy than when the heat pump central air comes on.
– Rather energy efficient for an air purifier

Cons:
– Other people have mentioned this: It would be nice to have an automatic / pollen mode that ignores the light levels entirely and just stays active, including with the mood light and air quality sensor light. However, at least in Pollen mode, the unit will change speed based on impurity levels detected, even if the lights won’t stay on. (Given pollen is heaviest at dawn and dusk, that’s the setting we use on both units.)
– Yeah, it’s very pricey for an air purifier. But after the research I did, “You get what you pay for” seemed to be one of the truisms. Only if one jumps to the way, way more expensive (more than a thousand bucks) models were the results and performance noted to be better than the Rabbit Air models. When when I looked at the models priced in the 150-300 range, results and reviews were mixed, but I was concerned at how many were of Chinese manufacture and accompanied by reviews that dinged them for noise, durability, manufacturing quality, and effectiveness. (Also did NOT want to buy any purifier that had filters reported to out-gas on initial use. That would not be acceptable at all.) There’s almost no point in buying a sub-hundred dollar purifier…as we’ve already learned with some of the other cheap ones we’ve bought over the years and found they didn’t really help at all.

Just Is:
– I know some folks have said replacement filters are expensive, and they have a point, but at the same time it’s still competitive in pricing versus replacement filters for other makes and models of air purifiers at roughly this purifier-quality level, and these ones are supposed to last about a year. I for one plan to disassemble and clean what I can — washing the pre-filter and vacuuming the others — about every 3 months; pre-filter monthly, as recommended, of course. Word is Rabbit Air has promotions every now and then which can reduce the replacement filter prices somewhat. But seriously, when I divided ‘time between replacement’ by the price of those replacement filters, the Rabbit Air is cheaper than most — particularly since a lot of those have you replacing every 3 months.
– For example, the Rabbit Air is often compared to Blue Air models. Well, the latter cost more, use way more energy, are much louder, and their filters are significantly more expensive.

Would we buy these again, if given a chance to reconsider? Yes, no question. The only unknown at this moment is just how reliable and durable these air purifiers will be over the long haul. I would definitely revisit this review if something goes wrong and we’re not able to resolve it. For now though, we’re both enjoy much better sleep, and as I said the allergies aren’t gone, seeing as how our house isn’t and can’t be hermetically sealed — but the allergies are quite manageable now. Also looking forward to having to do a tad less dusting around here…

We purchased this unit because our doctors office has them. We got the mid size one as we wanted something with more umph. The design is sleek. It’s very sophisticated in terms of technology. I like how it knows when the air is bad and it kicks into high gear. Once it detects the air is good it goes to slow mode. When it’s on slow mode it’s very quiet we do not hear it when we are sleeping and it’s right next to us. The lights also go off at night on his own. Very easy to use just plug and it goes no fussing with any setting. The air feels very fresh like how in casinos they pump in fresh air. We noticed there is less dust in our room as well. Hopefully it will continue to perform the way it has been and we are thinking of purchasing another unit for another floor of the house. It’s pricier than some other competitors however I think the quality you can’t compare. You pay for what you get.