The Winix PlasmaWave 5300 home air purifier can’t improve your health. Your body does that. It won’t cure your allergies. Allergies are largely genetic. But it can generate air that’s much better to breathe, giving your body its best shot at optimizing your health.
Winix took some cues from Sharp and adapted elements of that better-known company’s PlasmaCluster model.
They included 3-stage filtering, as well as microbial destruction, and then lowered the price from their Winix 5000 series. Not bad for what some people might (mistakenly) consider a knockoff!
Performance – For Rooms up to 350 Square Feet
The Winix Plasmawave 5300 air cleaner may be similar to the PlasmaCluster but it has even better performance numbers.
The CADR (Clean Air Delivery Rate) numbers are 235 for smoke, 248 for dust and 251 for pollen. The unit will handle a room size of 350 square feet (assuming an average height ceiling).
Its four separate fan speeds allow this model to let you balance noise, electricity consumption, and air-cleansing rate with a tap. Yet, even at high settings you can live quite comfortably with this PlasmaWave model.
Sitting in a home office, you’ll barely notice it above your computer’s fan even at the purifier’s top speed. The only time the fan noise becomes truly noticeable is in the normally short-lived Turbo mode. That’s initiated automatically when the unit senses ‘bad’ air, unless you turn it on manually.
Being energy star approved you may be confident too this unit works efficiently.
Construction – Attractive, Sturdy, Compact, and Lightweight!
The Plasmawave 5300 is an attractive, well-built unit. The case is sturdy, compact, and lightweight. (22″ high x 16″ wide x 9″ deep, 15 lbs.) The seals are high-quality, which helps maintain high efficiency since it eliminates the problem of air (and, therefore, particle) bypass.
Made of high-quality plastic, the case is odor free, a nice benefit for those who are sensitive to outgassing compounds that flow from some cheaply made units. Those molecules, typically VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), are one of the things good home air purifiers are intended to remove, so it’s great that the Winix 5300 doesn’t add any of its own.
3 Stage Purification System
Like most home air purifiers, the PlasmaWave 5300 sports a True HEPA filter, which captures at minimum 99.97% of pollutant particles down to 0.3 microns. That’s good enough to filter out all but some viruses. Many of those are 0.020-0.250 micron.
Pretty good for the most common, and in a way least important, component in an overall filtration system. Least important, because if your vacuum cleaner has a good HEPA filter you get a lot of that value already. The filter needs to be replaced about once a year.
There is, in addition, a carbon mesh filter made of activated charcoal. That not only filters out additional particulates by a mechanical sieve action but – because carbon so readily combines with many molecules – provides a safe chemical cleansing of room air.
In this case, though, that component does much more than simply the normal carbon-filter duty. It’s suffused with anti-microbial compounds that can help combat flu viruses and other nasty bugs in the air that would slip by the HEPA filter. Keen.
That carbon filter needs to be replaced about once every three months for the average home and the manufacturer thoughtfully included three spares in the box, for a year’s supply total. When it comes to replacement, the Winix filter kit #115115 includes a True HEPA filter and 4 disposable activated carbon pre-filters.
There’s another important aspect to the filtration system that deserves a section all its own: the PlasmaWave 5300′s ionizer.
PlasmaWave Ionizer Technology
In the final stages of cleaning, filtered air passes through a type of electric pulse generating negatively and positively charged ions that combine with naturally occurring water vapor (H2O) to form Hydroxyl radicals (OH). The amount of Hydrogen (H) gas produced is too small a concentration to be any kind of danger.
Those Hydroxyls act as forceful oxidizers to destroy microorganisms – bacteria, viruses, mold spores, and the like – in the vicinity. But they also combine readily with many VOCs (compounds in paint fumes, for example).
That allows the ionizer to do double duty, destroying potentially harmful bugs in the air and removing some of the organic chemicals that can irritate lungs, eyes, and nasal passages. After pollutants have been destroyed the Hydroxyls reform into water vapor (H2O) or other harmless air molecules.
This method is more effective and safer than older-style ozone generators. Those work by creating ozone (O3), an oxygen molecule with three oxygen atoms rather than the usual two. That extra atom attached provides additional energetic electrons that ‘stick out’ and zap nearby organisms. But they can also irritate lungs and sting the eyes when the concentration is high enough to do good by purifying the air.
The ionizer is controllable, too. You may notice a slight clicking noise from time to time when the ion generator is pumping out those electrically-charged, air-cleansing molecules. So, it’s helpful that you can turn it off or on as you please. If the noise is irritating, it’s a simple matter to turn on that mechanism just before you leave the room, and turn it off when you re-enter.
Does it include a Warranty?
Yes, the Winix PlasmaWave 5300 includes a 1 year warranty.
Conclusion
The Winix 5300 air cleaner operates at low-noise levels while clearing a substantial volume of air quickly. It offers reliable operation and virtually eliminates smoke, dander, and health-injuring microorganisms. I’d say that merits the phrase “healthy air in a box”.
