Do Air Purifiers Use A Lot Of Electricity? kWh + Cost Analysis

First thing first: Air purifiers don’t use a lot of electricity. We are not talking 10+ kWh/week usage or $20/week cost. Let’s explain exactly how much power air purifiers use and what is the real electricity running cost.

Quick overview: According to Energy Star analysis of 556 air purifiers, the yearly electricity expenditure ranges from 34.7 kWh/year to 1132 kWh/year. At $0.15/kWh average electricity rate, this translates to $5.21/year to $169.80/year. A standard-sized air purifier thus uses less than $0.25 of electricity per day.

We will compare power consumption and expenditure for all 3 sizes of air purifier with specific examples:

• Small air purifier (up to 200 CADR rating): Levoit Core 200S with 103 dust CADR rating and 37W max. wattage.
• Standard air purifier (between 200 and 400 CADR rating): Alen BreatheSmart Classic with 262 dust CADR rating and 105W max. wattage.
• Big air purifier (between 400 and 600 CADR rating): Medify Air MA-112 with 600 dust CADR rating and 120W max. wattage.

Note: If you have a specific air purifier model, and would like to know how much electricity it uses (+ costs), you can use the comment section below, tell us which model you have, and we can tell you all about the power consumption and costs.

Here’s the deal with air purifier electricity usage:

The only part of any air purifier that consumes energy (more than 95%) is the fan motor (these are non-ionizing air purifiers; useless ionizing UV lights are power-hungry).

Bigger fan (higher CADR rating) = more kWh usage = higher $ running cost.

Power Consumption Of Small, Standard, And Big Air Purifiers

Let’s start with an overview of electricity expenditure and electricity running costs for the Levoit, Alen, and Medify models. Further on, we will show you how you can calculate air purifier electricity consumption yourself:

These calculations account that an air purifier runs continuously all the time (24/7 for the whole year). Based on this, we can see that air purifiers use electricity quite sparingly.

Even if you run a big air purifier all the time (24 hours every day), you should see your monthly electricity bill increase by less than $10/month. Basically, all air purifiers cost a couple of bucks per month to run.

For comparison, while running, air purifiers use:

• About 2-3x less electricity than a standard TV.
• About 5-8x less electricity than a desktop computer.
• About 10x less electricity than vacuum cleaners.
• About 30-50x less electricity than air conditioning.
• About 2-3x more electricity than mobile charging.

We hope this gives you a good insight into air purifier electricity usage and cost. The bottom line is that you don’t have to be worried that air purifiers use too much electricity; it’s pretty insignificant electricity usage, on par with ceiling fan or incandescent light usage.