Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S review

Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S: Specs

Size: 11.0 x 11.0 x 46.5 inches
Weight: 18.0 pounds
CADR rating (smoke/dust/pollen): 60/60/60
Recommended room size: 150 to 300 square feet
Estimated annual power cost: $10.30

If you’re looking to clear the air in a large room, Dreo’s Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S can do the trick with a powerful fan, HEPA filter and the ability to oscillate back and forth — sort of like a fan and air purifier in one, or a less expensive version of a Dyson Air Purifier TP07.

However, the Dreo is huge, it lacks charcoal filtration to remove odors and it has a very low CADR rate, making it less effective at cleaning the air in your room than some of the best air purifiers we’ve tested. But, this two-in-one device may be a good fit for your home, so check out the rest of our Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan review to see if it can make breathing a little easier.

Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S review: Price and availability

The Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan is available for $300 at Amazon or the Dreo Web site, although at the moment, there’s a $280 special price. That’s roughly twice the price of the Wi-Fi enabled Clorox Large Room True HEPA Air Purifier and $100 more than the company’s Macro Max S Air Purifier, both of which delivered more filtered air.

Its replacement HEPA filters cost $40. The company also sells a wide variety of air purifiers, fans, heaters and small kitchen appliances.

Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S review: Design

For good and bad, the Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S looks more like a rocket that Elon Musk might dream up than a device to clean your air.

Its silver and black design takes up a modest 11.0 x 11.0 inches of floor space but is 46.5 inches tall, making it one of the largest air cleaners in its class. It’s also a bit on the heavy side, weighing 18 pounds. It does have a built-in handle, but it might have benefited from wheels to ease getting it from room to room.

Made by Changsha Hesung Innovation Limited, the Dreo air cleaner has been designed around two brushless DC motors: one for pulling dirty room air in from the bottom, running it through filters and the other to oscillate the entire unit up to 60-degrees right and left. This is plenty to spread the cleaned air throughout a big room while adding a level of cooling.

Designed for rooms of between 150 and 300 square feet, the filter element is undersized with the air flow augmented by using one of the unit’s 12 fan settings. On the downside, using the fan bypasses the filter, making its output a mix of filtered and unfiltered air.

Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S review: How it works

The MC710S works by routing the room’s air through a foam prefilter to remove large particulates that might prematurely clog the High Efficiency Particulate Area (HEPA) filter. It can remove up to 99.97 percent of particles that are 0.3 micron or larger, which includes bacteria, pollen and smoke. It, however, lacks an activated charcoal filter to remove organic vapors or smells or any technique to sterilize the air.

With an air delivery rating of 1,558 cubic feet per minute (CFM) at full blast, the Air Purifier Tower Fan blows air horizontally across a room. But raw air flow is only half the story because of the filter’s low Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) rate of 60 CFM. The Dreo Air Tower's CADR rating is a small fraction of the filtered air output of our favorite Blueair Blue Pure 211+ Auto's 353 CFM(smoke), 347 (dust) and 380 (pollen).

The Air Purifier Tower Fan is the rare air cleaner with three different ways to control it, starting with the device’s display and control panel. The screen shows the air quality based on an internal laser sensor that glows blue or green when the air is excellent or of moderate quality, while orange corresponds to a poor rating. Red means unhealthy but these color codes don’t explicitly correspond to ranges of particulate levels.

The touch interface on top is for setting up the air cleaner’s Wi-Fi connection, using Manual or Automatic operation as well as choosing among displaying the particulate level, fan level, temperature and how much life is left on the filter. It’s easy to set the fan’s auto shutoff timer and adjust parameters with the “+” and “-” keys. Unlike others, it will remember the previous setting if it’s unplugged, perfect for moving it from room to room.

There’s also a small remote control that had a range of about 30 feet and came with the needed CR2025 button battery.

The Dreo app brings it all together; the main screen shows a logo of the fan with the current settings and air quality, temperature as well as any set schedules. Additional settings for such things as oscillation, air quality, and temperature can be found in submenus. At the bottom is a measure of the air filter’s remaining life. The air purifier responded nearly instantly to commands from the app, and you can also control it via Alexa or Google Assistant.

All the filtration action is in the Home tab, while the Notifications tab oddly has cooking recipes, the Discover tab is for other Dreo products and the Profile section is for Dreo orders and changing things like the time zone. That said, the app’s Settings has a way for others with the Dreo app to share control, although it might lead to a family dispute.

Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S review: Performance

The fan arrived in a huge box, nearly ready to go. All I had to do was unwrap it and set it up; Dreo recommends leaving at least 15 inches between the Air Purifier Tower Fan and the wall. You’ll need to periodically clean the prefilter and replace the HEPA filter about every six months. I used up 11 percent of its filtering capacity over three weeks of a particularly pollen-laden spring.

Its two-prong plug has a built in 2.5 amp fuse to prevent overloads, although it doesn’t use nearly that much power. It worked well in my 300-square foot office set to automatic, where it ran in the background with a mild breeze but once the particle counter rose to 38 particles per cubic meter, the LED changed to orange briefly as the fan went into overdrive. It quickly settled down after a few seconds. Overall, it cleaned the air but lacking an activated carbon layer it could do nothing to counteract the smell of cooking salmon in the nearby kitchen.

Its horizontal output blasted a 6.7-mile per hour gust at the top setting, measured 36 inches from the exhaust grill. That’s between the weaker Clorox Large Room True HEPA Air Purifier’s 4.9 mph and the Wyze Air Purifier’s stronger 7.8 mph wind. The lowest of the 12 different fan levels yielded a 1.4 mph gentle wind.

It consumed 44.2 watts of power at its highest setting, 14.3 watts at its lowest and 1.4 watts at idle. If the tower fan runs 24/7 in Automatic mode, it might cost about $10.30 to operate, assuming that you pay the national average of 15 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity. That’s double the cost of the Clorox Large Room True HEPA Air Purifier.

Considering the amount of air being moved around, the Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S is surprisingly quiet. Measured 36 inches from its outlet, I recorded 55.0 dBA of noise at full blast in a room with a background level of 37.3dBA. That’s significantly quieter than the Clorox Large Room True HEPA Air Purifier’s 58.7dBA.

While it is well-made and sturdy, the Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S comes with only a one-year warranty, versus five years of coverage from Wyze air filtration systems. Figure that you’ll need to get a $40 HEPA filter twice a year. Dreo doesn’t have an automatic replacement program for the filter elements.

Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S review: Verdict

One of the largest home air filters on the market, Dreo’s Air Purifier Tower Fan is ironically less than meets the eye, as it’s less effective at filtering the air than many smaller and less expensive air purifiers. It also lacks an activated carbon filtering stage to get rid of odors and its warranty lasts for only a year.

Still, it could have a place in a home where you don’t want both a fan and an air purifier cluttering up the place. In fact, it worked well in delaying turning on the air conditioning in my office by about two weeks. The Dreo Air Purifier Tower Fan MC710S is better as a high volume room fan than for filtering air. I just wish it was smaller.