After Testing Way Too Many Air Purifiers, THIS Is the Best One for Your Bedroom

Think you’re safe and breathing pure, clean air inside your own home? Hah. Think again, my pollution-huffing friend. Homes are way leakier than you’d imagine, and your indoor air is basically just outdoor air that’s wafted in through open windows, unsealed gaps between your floor and walls, underneath and around your front door, and your HVAC system, and it’s lousy with soot, pollen, mold spores, viruses, and weird pollutants with unpronounceable names that drift into your house from smokestacks and tailpipes.

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I’ve used a lot of air purifiers over the past seven years as a tech journo with a specialty focus in home air purification. Want to know which one lives in my bedroom, the one to which I entrust my own lungs and health? The Coway AP-1512HH Mighty.

TL;DR – My Quick Verdict

Even after seven years I’ve yet to find a better bedroom air purifier. Many companies have introduced competitors since then, and I’ve tested many of them, if not most of them. The Coway AP-1512HH Mighty remains my favorite because it’s been as rock-solid reliable as could be in all that time. I’ve witnessed firsthand how well it can clear out a room filled with fire soot and smoke, and clear up stinky gym clothes and burnt cooking smells. Coway’s filters are genuine HEPA filters that clear up viruses, dust, allergens, mold spores, outdoor pollutants, and more. It may not be flashy, but it’s as good as an air purifier filter can get outside of a hospital.

(opens in a new window) Coway

AP-1512HH Mighty (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon Buy Now (opens in a new window) Available at Walmart Buy Now (opens in a new window)

how i tested

My Coway has whirred away in a succession of bedrooms for 24 hours straight constantly since the fall of 2019. It’s been with me through a few apartment fires (I didn’t start any of them!), including a major one in April 2022, and a whole bunch of German Shepherd fur, Canadian wildfire smoke, and cloyingly strong beauty product stenches that could’ve choked a state fair mule. This has been a long-haul test, and even if it failed tomorrow, I’d have still gotten my money’s worth.

my take: coway AP-1512hh mighty air purifier

Coway rates the AP-1512HH Mighty and Airmega 200M for 1,748 square feet, but that’s only purifying all the air in such a space once per hour. That’s 1 ACH, or air change per hour. For truly great air purification, the CDC says to aim for 5 ACH, and the EPA endorses it. This Coway is rated for 4.8 ACH in a room measuring up to 361 square feet, and that’s close enough.

That’s a room that measures, for example, 18 by 20 feet. When I call it the best air purifier for bedrooms, I’m not just talking tenement-style shoeboxes, like those in New York City. It’s large enough even for main bedrooms, and even some living rooms, family rooms, and bonus rooms that aren’t too large.

There are two separate filters inside the Coway. There’s the carbon filter, which soaks up and neutralizes stank. It’ll vanquish musty cooking odors, doggie bum smells, and your preteen’s smelly armpits. When I brought home the Coway, I noticed that it did a decent job of soaking up the smell of my damp gym clothes when I’d come home from the gym, while I was letting them dry before tossing them into the hamper.

Then there’s the HEPA filter, which captures 99.999 percent of particles down to 0.01 microns. What’s that mean in normal-people terms? It sucks up allergens, such as pollen, dust mites, and mold spores, as well as viruses (including Covid-19), soot, and pollution. That includes pollutants common to indoor objects, such as VOCs (volatile organic compounds). Bringing home new furniture or painting the walls can release all kinds of nasty things into the air when the objects are still new; it’s called off-gassing. And the Coway’s HEPA filter will filter that out, too.

The Coway has an automatic fan mode. I never take it off automatic. It does a solid job of monitoring the air quality and ramping up the fan speed from low to medium or high when there’s an infusion of dirty air, whether it’s from unboxing a new foam mattress or burning food on the stovetop.

For the vast majority of the time, it stays on the lowest fan speed where it’s whisper quiet. My bedroom isn’t huge, and so it’s only about 10 feet away from my head when I’m lying in bed. I can’t hear it at all. If you need pure silence when trying to fall asleep, the Coway won’t bother you. In the worst-case scenario, if the automatic mode keeps ramping up the fan while you’re trying to snooze, you could just manually set it to the lowest fan speed with a button push, and it won’t make a peep all night.

Filter Life and Replacements

the coway airmega 200m opened up and showing the hepa filter and carbon filter – credit: matt jancer

Replacing filters is easy. Tilt the front faceplate forward on its hinges, and then lift, exposing the purifier’s guts. The carbon filter comes out first, and then the HEPA filter. Neither is hard to remove. Thank the two fabric tabs on the sides of the HEPA filter for making it easy to take out. The filter clearly marks which side should face forward, so you don’t need a crystal ball and a water divining rod just to figure out how to swap filters. Replacing both takes me under 30 seconds.

There are two LEDs on the control panel that’ll warn you when to replace each filter. The carbon filter has tended to require replacement first, in my experience. Resetting the warning light is easy; just hold it in until the red light disappears. Over the years I’ve tended to get about 10 to 12 months out of each HEPA filter. That’s pretty good.

When it comes time to replace it, just buy the Coway-branded ones. That’s what I do. They’re neither cheap nor that expensive at $50 for a HEPA filter and two carbon filters, but at least you know you’re getting a filter that’ll meet the HEPA performance standard, unlike some of those cheaper mystery-brand filters. What’s the point of buying the best bedroom air purifier on the market if you cheap out on the filters and end up unnecessarily breathing in a bunch of crap because of it?

Brother From Another Mother

(opens in a new window) Coway

Airmega 200M (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon Buy Now (opens in a new window) Available at Walmart Buy Now (opens in a new window)

Wondering why I’ve got two seemingly different air purifiers jammed into the same review? Underneath their covers, the Coway AP-1512HH Mighty and the Coway Airmega 200M are the same. Why Coway decided to engineer two slightly different versions of the same air purifier, I’ve never been able to figure out. It isn’t that one is replacing the other. They’ve both been on sale concurrently at least since late 2019, when I began paying attention to Coway in earnest.

There’s no reason to buy one over the other, aside from looks. I’ve found over the years that one—typically the AP-1512HH Mighty—will be on sale while the other isn’t. Buy whichever is cheaper, unless you feel some strong way toward one in particular. Both are available in black or white.

the coway airmega 200m’s control panel – credit: Matt jancer

Get the Reusable Pre-Filter

One glaring omission is that this Coway, unlike other Coways I’ve tested and owned, doesn’t come with a washable, mesh-screen pre-filter to catch fluffs of dust, pet hair, and other large-diameter debris before it can make its way to the carbon filter.

Coway sells one for $30 that I highly recommend. The same one fits both the AP-1512HH Mighty and the Airmega 200M, and the only real downside is that it’s tough to find at a typical retailer. I bought mine from Coway directly, and I immediately noticed that my carbon filter would last longer because it wasn’t getting gummed up with dust bunnies.

I used to rinse it under the tub’s faucet when it got completely blocked with debris. Then I moved on to wiping it down with a damp paper towel. Then I got even lazier—no, more resourceful, we’ll call it—and started vacuuming the dust directly off the pre-filter. To this day that’s what I still do, and it works fine as long as I’m careful not to jar the dust loose so much that it floats away into the air.

coway AP-1512hh mighty air purifier: at a glance

The Coway AP-1512HH is ideal for bedrooms of 350-400 square feet. It’d be a little unnecessarily overpowered for rooms smaller than that, but it’d still work just as well, and you could use it in a room slightly larger than that, such as 50 square feet or so, although once you’re looking at a room 500 square feet or larger you should really be shopping for a larger air purifier. I recommend Coway’s excellent Airmega 250, which has performed flawlessly for me over the past four years, too.

Do you really need an automatic air purifier?

Need is a strong word. I’ve used and tested both automatic and non-automatic air purifiers, and while the latter won’t necessarily be any worse at scrubbing pollutants, allergens, and odors from your home’s air (assuming they have quality HEPA filters and carbon filters), I strongly prefer automatic air purifiers.

Automatic air purifiers can constantly measure and monitor your indoor air quality and can speed up the fan when pollution levels are elevated, all without anybody having to walk over to the air purifier and push any buttons. Like with any home appliance, I just want the thing to run so that I don’t have to babysit it or even think about it much.

It’s not like I’d reliably be able to tell when indoor pollution levels are elevated, anyway, so even if volatile organic compounds (VOCs) jumped, I wouldn’t be likely to get off my lazy butt and set the fan speed higher because it’d probably happen without me noticing.

An automatic air purifier is different from a smart air purifier, though. Smart air purifiers connect to smartphone apps so that their user can check in on their status and change settings on the air purifier when they’re away from home. These I find a total waste of money. Why would I care what my air purifier is doing when I’m not home? It’s just one more example of a product that has smart features wedged into it for the sake of wedging them in there.

Perhaps I’d want that level of granularity if I had a newborn baby at home with a babysitter regularly and I wanted to keep tabs on the air quality for my own anxiety, but outside of such specific circumstances it’s a feature (and added expense) that I can completely do without.

the bottom line

It’s an interesting time at which to be shopping the AP-1512HH Mighty because even though it’s been on the market since 2014, Coway just released the Mighty2 AP-1512HH, the $270 sequel to the AP-1512HH Mighty and Airmega 200M featured in this review.

Despite Coway positioning it as the successor to the AP-1512HH, it doesn’t appear that Coway is phasing out the older model. At least not yet. It also retails for about $100 more. That means that even though Coway promises improved performance (I’ve yet to test it, but stay tuned this spring), the older machine lives on as an excellent alternative for those who still want a world-class, best-in-market bedroom air purifier at a more affordable price.

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