Our home has had a dust problem for quite some time. It’s an old place with radiator heating (producing little airflow), two dirty animals roving around (and that excludes the two dirty people also roving around), lots of tables and shelves to breed dust bunnies, and a lack of 1950s-style slave woman to dust daily. Persistent sneezing and stale pet smells just get old over time.

After a few days’ reading of various web reviews and product data, caused by an urgent desire to avoid following salesdudes’ droning advice, I came across enough convincing material to grab an IQAir HealthPro Plus unit for our house.

Yes, the product name is goofy, but at least it doesn’t say SuperHealth Invincible UltraExtreme TurboClean DoublePlus, and it is expensive, and it seems to have no Canadian mail-order retailers, but those were all only minor obstacles. I got my paws on one at a Chinese clientele-oriented retailer Home Comfort Centre, whose other main product area appears to be water filtration. It was expensive (about 20% more than a US mail order might have been), and both HCC locations I visited played unfortunate games with a “discount” from an inflated price, plus a last-minute 2% credit card surcharge.

Does it work? Yes, it seems to be pretty good. Dust-triggered sneezing near an activated unit basically went away. On a low fan setting, it’s quiet enough that one can sleep close to the widget. Over a 24-hour high-power blow session, it cleaned out most of the dingy basement air down below. Visitors claim that the house’s dog smell has gone away.

Problems? Yes, one big one: the air flow generated by a single fan is not manly enough to maneuver all the way around a two-story little house with little rooms and little hallways. We carted the filter up and down our main stairs a few times during the first week to let it focus on one or the other half of the house, but that 35lb borg-like mass is not well suited to such travel.

So we bought another one. Cognitive dissonance or astute value judgement? We’ll report as soon as possible.