Sensibo Pure – Smart Air Purifier

With the growing concerns over the environment and one’s health, air purifiers are starting to become a common product in homes. Let it be large units that can take on a full family space like a living room and more, to smaller personalized units for a bedroom or desk. Taking it further, they have finally been making the move to “smart”, joining in with the other devices within your smart setup. One of these smart options is the new Sensibo Pure.

The Sensibo Pure offers the functionality of your typical mid-sized purifier that can handle an area between 173 and 294 sq ft (depending on the mode). It’s a simple design when you look inside, featuring a single plastic fan toward the top, and a large barrel/cylinder filter that is loaded in from the bottom.

The filter is a good-size that should be able to handle plenty of air, which works well for when you crank it up to “Pure Boost” mode–which tremendously boosts the speed of the fan so that it can handle more space.

Installing or swapping out the filter is as easy and popping off the lid on the bottom and sliding the filter right in (or swapping it with the one already in there). You can also dry-wipe off any dust build-up overtime to help extend the life of the filter (although eventually, it will have to be replaced).

It features all of your typical options, right on the surface of the purifier for easy access. So you don’t have to break out the app every time. This includes the ability to turn it on/off, control the speed, set a timer for shut-off, and turn the LED on or off (or dim).

All of which can be done on the app as well. Which is their own proprietary app you have to download from any of the mobile app stores.

After you install the app, it will walk you through registering for an account and adding your purifier to the account. Within no time, you should find yourself at the dashboard of the app with a view of your unit added and ready to configure.

Clicking into the unit, you are led to a unit-specific dashboard that displays the current air quality of the room with the ability to turn it on/off and set those settings that have the same buttons across the front of the unit. You also have the option to “Boost now!” to set that fan to turbo-mode and really clean out a room. Given, the noise goes from really quiet, to what sounds like a tower fan in the room.

Then you can swipe around to accessing the ability to set schedules for the unit to turn off and on. For example, you can set it to turn on at 9 PM and then to turn it off at 7 AM. You can also break up schedules based on what day of the week it is, in case you want it to match your daily schedule perfectly.

Swiping further, you get to an “event” tab that tracks your air quality and settings events of the unit (turning on, off, etc). The chart only tracks for the day unless you buy into their Sensibo Plus membership (monthly or yearly), which then gives you by the week or month.

One final swipe will bring you to the unit settings page where you can adjust the boost settings, where it can automatically kick in to boost when it detects poor air quality within the room. You can also have it kick on when the air quality outside is poor, however, that requires the Sensibo Plus membership. You also have an option to share in case you want to give them some free advertising. You can move the unit to a new room in the house, change the appearance of it on the dashboard, and remove it completely from the app.

Backing out of the device and back to the main dashboard, you can visit the main menu at the top-left. From here, you can manage your Plus subscription, or control what notifications pop up on your phone during various events. There are other options as well. 

The LED stripe running down the front of the unit does change color to represent the air quality in the room. Blue represents “good”, while yellow is “moderate” and red is “unhealthy”. Hopefully, you don’t run into the latter, but it is a plus to have a visual cue when you walk into a room.

One thing that kind of ate at our OCD-ness was that you can’t set the state of the LED light to off by default. In normal rooms, this may not be a bother. However, if you plan to use this in a bedroom, you’ll have to manually turn the LED light off every single time you turn the unit on. This could get annoying, but it could also be fixed by adding the option in the app likely. For now, the only way to disable it by default would be to open it up and snip snip (wire), but then there goes your warranty.

Update: Thankfully, we have been told that they are fixing the LED function this week in a firmware update, so that is agreat improvement and shows they are listening to feedback, which also plays quite well for a company.

All-in-all, it’s a simple smart purifier that offers many of the options you’d expect to find. At least, when comparing it to some of the other smart options out there.

Although, we did feel that the Pure subscription was a little unnecessary when you compare it to many other smart devices in the market that can monitor outdoor analytics for free. Let it be other air purifiers or stand-alone air quality sensors around the same price or even less. So we felt this was a desperate push to make more profit from the line.

What you do get with the subscription:

• Outdoor air quality monitoring and stats
• Geofencing
• Reminders to clean your filter
• Energy saving tips (you can gets these free online or from your energy provider typically)
• 1yr extended warranty

They could beef up the attraction of the subscription by adding more options, but then again, there isn’t much more you could add to a purifier. Maybe with what they charge, the warranty could benefit from being for the life of the subscription vs just a single extended year.

If they tried taking options away from the free-use, then it would drive a majority of consumers away. Thankfully, many options do not need subscriptions when it comes to the air quality and function within your home.

It supports Alexa, Google, and Siri digital assistants. However, It isn’t compatible with other smart hubs or app setups like Smartthings, Vera, Smart Life, etc (with the exception of the recent addition of Apple HomeKit support). So unless you control everything through one of the three digital assistants, the purifier wouldn’t be able to interact with other devices on your network (ie, like the Amrobt model can via the Smart Life app that is also controllable from SmartThings and other popular hubs).

That being said, it does work with their own Sensibo Sky or Air devices that connect to air conditioners to allow you to control them (ie, turning on the fan to help circulate air while the purifier is working). They have also stated that they plan to support other popular thermostats in the future. This will help them catch up with some of the other options out there that do support things like Smartthings or Smart Life (which through these hubs/apps, can interact with hundreds of other devices, including thermostat controllers, already).

The manual, surprisingly, doesn’t talk about Alexa, Google, or Siri. Which may lead a consumer to be a little confused on how to make this happen. Thankfully, if you are tech-savvy and familiar with these options, you should be able to figure it out on your own. For example, for Alexa, you open the Alexa app and head over to skills where you can search for the Sensibo skill. It will have you log into your Sensibo account to connect it to Alexa. Leaving it out of the manual is likely a mistake, but it will drive more contact requests which isn’t good for a company’s costs.

It comes with everything you need, including the filter, a power cable, and a small manual. Nothing else is needed, so this encompasses everything outside of replacement filters, which are always an additional buy with any unit.

Last Update: 03-31-2021

Our Conclusion

This unit has been working quite well for us during our testing. Build-quality and features are pretty decent. When you look at the $129 price tag, the price seems like a good spot for it. However, as mentioned, we have seen similar products that don’t try to lock you into a subscription for some of the features like this one does.

It doesn’t work with other hubs/apps like Smarthings or Smart Life as it has a proprietary app/cloud setup. However, half the smart models out there have taken this approach, so this isn’t unheard of. Hopefully, they offer an API once they begin to grow more so that some of these other solutions can adopt them into pre-established smart ecosystems as this should grow their popularity quite a bit. This would allow their device to interact with hundreds of other devices out there.

For now, you at least have Alexa/Google/Siri support, which is big in itself. They just need to add the details of this to the manual for average consumers that may not be so good at finding their way around in the dark.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

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