I have it in my living room, which is about 35 square meters, where we smoke a lot. Cigarettes, e-cigarettes, chaos. Under normal conditions, if there is no open window in the room, it easily becomes smoky. With the Winix, you simply leave it on Auto in the room and as soon as it detects heavy air, it starts working harder on its own.
It's funny because we have reached the point of calling it the "cigarette cop" since as soon as someone lights a cigarette, its sensor turns red as if it noticed and starts cleaning the air faster.
I don't have equipment to measure particles, so I can't give you more scientific impressions, but what I know is that you simply turn it on and it actually does the job, it doesn't even let smoke form. Especially in winter, it's perfect because you don't have to constantly open a window and get cold whenever you want to get rid of the smoke.
It has 4 fan speed levels. Level 1 is really quiet, level 2 is comfortably tolerable, level 3 is audible and level 4 is like three times stronger than level 3. It is indeed very noisy, but when you have it on Auto, it never goes there. You can only use it in manual mode.
It has the so-called Plasmawave, which compared to a regular ionizer, it produces both negative charged particles (like conventional ionizers) and positive charged particles simultaneously. Winix claims that this way it doesn't produce any ozone - I can't know that. There is an option, of course, to deactivate it if you don't want it.
The smell of smoke doesn't completely disappear quickly, even though there is no smoke in the room, but over time it does eliminate it.
The biggest negative for me, which annoys me and maybe I would have made a different choice if I knew it from the beginning, is that it has a light sensor to detect if the room it is in doesn't have light, so it assumes you are sleeping and automatically enters Sleep mode, which means it only operates at level 1 and activates the LEDs so they don't bother. Personally, I don't agree with this since when you want to watch a movie in a dark room, it goes into Sleep mode and doesn't operate at the intensity it should. I would like an option to deactivate the light sensor, but it doesn't exist.
Overall, I am very satisfied, it does its job and more, and the air you breathe is truly clean. It is also perfect to operate it simultaneously with the air conditioner so that the recycled air is also cleaned.
