We love Costco. Our team would be lying if we said you couldn’t find us picking up snacks, paper goods and other bulk items at the retailer each weekend. But is the air purifier Costco sells one of the things in our cart? Certainly not.
As home air experts, we see and review A LOT of air purifiers. While we’re not saying the air purifier Costco stocks is bad, there are clearly better, less expensive options out there. Costco sells the Blueair HealthProtect air purifier. It’s an impressive product, but outrageously priced, in our opinion. At the time of looking into the air purifier Costco sells, the Blueair was priced at nearly $700. We see a lot of high quality, high coverage range air purifiers, but most of those fluctuate between $100 – $500. The Blueair does come with some pretty sweet features, including wi-fi integrations with Alexa and Google Assistant. Though, is that worth paying triple the price? We think not.
What We Recommend Instead of the Air Purifier Costco Sells
If you’re looking for a comparable range of coverage at a heck of lot less money, we’d recommend the Veva 9000 air purifier. It covers 600 square feet to the Blueair’s 675 and costs less than one-third of the price. That’s not a typo; the Veva 9000 performs almost the exact same purification process as the BlueAir for under $150 instead of nearly $700.
From our test, both air purifier were remarkably quiet – no clear winner in that category. The filters that require replacing every few months were both easy to switch out, but Blueair’s were nearly double the price. Paying almost $100 (Blueair) rather than $50 (Veva) can add up over time.
As you can see, the Veva isn’t an eyesore, either. The company makes a lower area coverage version in their Veva 8000 model that won’t make the cover of GQ, but we consider the 9000 model pretty attractive when we compare it to some other high-coverage air purifiers.
One of the things that separates good air purifiers from great air purifiers is not only aesthetics, but physical size. Our least favorite attribute of the Blueair was the fact that it weighs over 40 pounds and is much larger than the air purifiers that we’ve evaluated. For example, the Veva 9000 air purifier weighs less than 12 pounds. This makes moving it between rooms or even across the same room very easy.
3 Big Reasons Why We Don’t Love Costco’s Air Purifier
- Too Expensive (nearly $700)
- Too Heavy (over 40 pounds)
- Too Costly to Maintain (nearly $100 for new filters)