Breville SmartAir Viral Protect Night Glow Purifier review: Unknown power

Rated to cover just 28 square metres, the SmartAir Night Glow only suits small spaces, but it covers them efficiently. In our testing, it took the purifier 18 minutes and 49 seconds to clear the test room of incense smoke and deliver a “good” air quality rating on an external monitor. This is about the same as the Acerpure 2-in-1 air circulator and purifier, which retails for about double the price and takes up more space. It is, however, not the quickest turnaround time, but considering how small the device is it is still impressive. It comes equipped with a HEPA -13 filter, which is medical grade and eliminates more than 99.97% of airborne particles, viruses, and bacteria.

However, you won’t be able to appreciate or monitor how well the Night Glow works without an additional air quality indicator. Not having an inbuilt monitor isn’t unheard of when it comes to budget air purifiers, like the ones you can get from Kmart or Ikea, but it feels like an oversight. Across the board I would rather see the price of an air purifier go up by $50 and include a monitoring system as standard - it provides better transparency for consumers, and for Breville it would be a bit of a flex when you consider the performance quality.

Instead of the usual traffic light style indicator, the Night Glow has a mood light. This can be set to seven different colours, with a range of brightness levels depending on your preferences. At its highest, it is surprisingly bright, and could easily stand as a beacon during the night so that you don't have to brave an overhead light. Along with this mood setter, it also has a small aromatherapy tray with a sponge-like filter. In this tray, you can add any essential oil which will dissipate through the room as the air flows through the device. How well it manages this will depend more on the oil quantity and quality than on the air purifier itself, but needless to say, the scent permeates faster on higher settings.

These higher settings are significantly louder, however, with this baby purifier getting louder than Breville’s big lad, the Air Protect Max. At the highest of its three speed settings, the Night Glow hits 60dB, which is pretty loud for any air purifier let alone a little one like this. On the other side of the spectrum, it sits at just 26dB on low. Most of the time you won’t need to have the purifier pumping at its top setting, but regardless it is worth noting if you plan on sleeping with it on.

Physically, the Night Glow has a non-invasive size and design, but the digital user experience through the Breville app leaves something to be desired. The tiny, lightweight air purifier is easy to move and uses a clever screw-bottom design to conceal the filter while keeping the body secure. Its control panel sits on the top with just six touch-pad style buttons for easy operation. It is simple but effective, and user friendly.

The device is let down when it tries to extend beyond the physical into the digital through the Breville app. Connecting to the air purifier through the app doesn’t get you any additional features. No air quality monitoring, not even any outdoor PM2.5 or pollen information that Breville could pull from the web to give you some idea of the settings you might need for the day. It acts instead, as a remote control. Through the app, you can turn the device on and off, change the speed settings, and set timers for it to automatically turn off. It may be mildly more convenient than getting up to press a button if connecting the two together wasn’t so tricky.

Like many other smart devices, Breville air purifiers only operate on 2.4GHz WiFi channels. Many new routers and modems combine their 5GHz and 2.4GHz channels, switching between the two to lessen congestion on your home network. In testing this has cause some problems with not only this Breville device, but other smart home appliances like Roborock’s Flexi Pro (a fantastic wet floor cleaner.) While I did eventually end up connecting the device to my network, the half hour that it took simply wasn’t worth what the app offers.

Right now there is this weird trade-off when it comes to connectivity in home appliances. Many of them, like robot vacuum cleaners, or smart fridges, may provide real tangible benefits by being on your home network, but for the vast majority the Wi-Fi portion is totally unneccessary. Such is the case with the Night Glow.

My recommendation is to pretend that this air purifier doesn’t have Wi-Fi, and save the extra bandwidth on your router.

That is unless you want to use voice commands through Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa. Both home hubs allow for basic functionality using voice commands, provided you link the Breville app to your corresponding voice assistant’s app. Neither of these VAs support timers, however, nor changing the colour on the night light. The Night Glow isn’t compatible with Homekit or Siri. 

Outright, the Night Glow will set you back $229, but you can almost certainly find it for cheaper from various retailers.

This, plus its $44.95 replacement filters put it squarely at the cheap end of the market for air purifiers. Plus it runs off just 12 watts, which will cost you a fraction of a cent per hour to operate.

For its price and its power, the Breville Night Glow air purifier is an excellent buy, despite its downsides.

Air quality readouts would easily have catapulted the star rating of this device higher, but even without them you can’t argue with the performance. The tiny formfactor disguises its powerful PM2.5 extraction, and even if it can get loud, it is worth it for the low operation and outright pricing.