The Vitesy Eteria Portable Air Purifier is an inexpensive, stylish alternative to everything else on the market. It tackles viruses, bacteria, odours, and VOCs from the safety of a compact and stylish shell. It might just be the most beautiful (and convenient) air purifier yet.
If you ask air quality experts about the best air purifiers that you can buy, they'll tell you two things. First of all, get one. Everyone needs an air purifier. And second of all, don't think that your big air purifier can cover the needs of your whole home from one device. It'll only handle one room.
If that's true, why are we sacrificing on style to improve our air quality? The same question was posed by Vitesy when designing the Eteria. The compact Eteria travels around the house with you, offering total air purity without the eyesore. Experts have labelled it "the one Amazon item everyone should have in their home" and I"m finding it increasingly difficult to disagree. Even though Amazon sells my favourite matcha powder.
Specifications
Who would it suit?
The Vitesy Eteria Air Purifier has a lot going for it. First and foremost, it's the most stylish air purifier you're going to be able to find. The simple, slim design is no bigger than a water bottle. With the white (or black) body and fine grey sleeve, it's subtle and easy to place in any room without drawing attention. Vitesy have designed it to be this way, so that you can treat the air puriifer as almost portable; it's easy to carry from room to room when you're working, cooking, sleeping, or exercising.
The nature of the Vitesy Eteria's design makes it perfect for smaller spaces. If your room is 15m² or less, you've hit the jackpot. The Eteria will breeze through all the air purity challenges that you throw at it. On the flip side, this means that large, open plan homes might call for something a little more substantial, especially if you want to smell and breathe the results.
If you've decided that yes, you want the style. And, yes, you have smaller rooms, there are a couple of other things that it's good to know. The Vitesy Eteria is one of the most cost-effective and sustainable air purifiers on the market. The ceramic filters don't need to be replaced. Instead, you run them under water every two months. It sounds crazy, but it works. Then, the 7.5-watt demands mean that this won't run up your energy bills either, so you can keep it running and automatically responding to your air quality all night long. It's not how air purifiers work normally; this is made of extra smart stuff.
Then, there's one final decider. Everything goes on the app. There's no way to control this physically: you have to go onto your phone or tablet. If you're savvy, over there, you'll find some seriously detailed statistics on your air quality, room temperature, humidity, and more. In fact, this out-analyses some of the best air purifiers that I've tested. It'll also connect up to your home assistants, so you can control it with just your voice. However, if you have bad WiFi or a dinosaur phone, you'll hit a brick wall with the Vitesy. You can take the app as you wish: it could be a gem, it could be a disaster.
Design and features
I promised myself that I wouldn't re-hash the light, stylish, and portable properties too much, so here's my chance to really hammer things home. You won't find a more subtle, minimalistic air purifier on the market. It's slim, easily portable, and ultra-subtle. If you've been holding out on an air purifier on account of aesthetics, today is your lucky day.
You'll see that the main body of the Vitesy Eteria Air Purifier is a slim white (also available in black) body. It comes with a light grey filter and teal tab for carrying the Vitesy around. This is because Vitesy designed the Eteria to be moved around your home and set down on different magnetic detection bases in each room. It's clever.
It's not all beauty without brains though. If you take a look inside the Vitesy Eteria Air Purifier, you'll spot that the brand has moved away from classic HEPA filters and uses a photocatalytic, ceramic filter instead (try saying that when you've had a couple of glasses of wine). HEPA filters are great, but they get expensive, especially when you're changing them every two years (at best). So, in order to save you on your £200 splurges, the idea behind the ceramic filter is that you simply wash and clean it. That might sound too good to be true, but I (and other reviewers) reaped the rewards of this sustainable swap. I think we'll see more brands making the move towards ceramic filters in the future.
Whenever I see something that looks too good to be true, I like to ask the question "at what cost do these benefits come?" It's tricky to tell - there's lots of vague language - but experts seem more convinced by the efficacy of HEPA filters. Whilst photocatalytic, ceramic filters still get great results, they might be a little slower than HEPA alternatives.
Unboxing and set up
As you might expect from an air purifier this small, the process of getting set up is simple. The Vitesy Eteria Air Purifier comes in a light, compact carboard box. Vitesy have made the whole experience clear, with printed text on each box as well as a set of instructions for how to use an air purifier. All the different parts of the box are recyclable too, so my score for sustainability got a nice big number next to it.
Essentially, once everything is out of the box, you'll see that you have the main purifying unit, the magnetic monitoring module, and the cable. There is a dust bag and some other accessories, but those are the three key parts to know about.
Once those parts are set up, the Eteria will look ready to go, but you have one more step. This will not start working until you download the app and connect the air purifier to your WiFi. Once that's done, you can name your device and scroll through different settings which will let you choose the brightness of LEDs, track air quality data through graphs, connect to assistants and more.
I found connective up to WiFi really fiddly. I'll admit that I'm not the most Gen-Z when it comes to technology, so I did have to bring in a more savvy housemember to get started. If you're like me, grab yourself someone techy, you'll thank me for it. Once you're on the app, it's clear and attractive. You'll see graphs which take you through the room's temperature, humidity, VOC, and CO2 levels and you can also can look at day's history. If you want to get alerts when air quality drops, you can set that up too. It's clever, but it has to be. You can't control this any other way.
What is it like to use?
On the app, you'll see that there are six different settings to scroll through: timer, auto, silence, standard, performance, custom. I won't patronise you: they do exactly what they say and they do it well. I have the tests to prove it.
I wanted to start with 'auto', since this seems like the lowest maintenance, but most sensible option. It uses sensors to adjust the Eteria's work according to movement and air quality in the room. You'll see on the app that the air quality can be scored as 'poor', 'good', or 'perfect'. As soon as you hit the latter two, the Eteria takes a break and drops into standby to save you power.
I have some standardised tests that I put every air purifier through to make it easy to compare them. The first, and probably the most difficult, is cooking. I sat this in my kitchen whilst I made a roast dinner on one day and while I baked bread on another. My Shark NeverChange5 Air Purifier responded instantly to both of these cooking events (you get a lot of compounds coming into the air when roasting, frying and cooking), but there was a real delay with the Eteria. I could smell the cooking and feel the change in air (after about ten minutes) before it kicked into action.
You'll spot the LED light changes when air purity falls and the fan speed will jump up too. Eteria promises a whisper quiet range of 30-52dB, but when it was working really hard, mine got up to 69 dB. You could still easily speak over that and when it's running on sleepy settings, I'd happily have this in my room. However, it's worth noting that this can be louder than it promises.
We'll have to cut the Eteria some slack here. My kitchen is closer to 60 m² rather than the 15 m² that limits the Eteria's capabilities. I set it up for failure really. However, I left it to work and within half an hour (19 minutes slower than the average on my tests) it felt the air quality was 'good'.
My other tests took place in more suitable, 15 m² rooms, because I wanted to give the Eteria a fighting chance. In these, I made toast (the air was cleared in six minutes, which is bang-on average for all my tests); dry shampoo was taken out of the air in three minutes, and my burning candle was cleared in two minutes and forty seconds. All of those results are good. Whilst they're not record-breaking compared to bigger models, when you account for the size difference, the Vitesy Eteria Air Purifier's performance is actually really remarkable.
Cleaning, storage and maintenance
I've offered a couple of teasers into the maintenance and cleaning regime for the Vitesy Eteria and I think you'll be pleased with them. Generally, the sleeve keeps the Eteria looking smart. If you don't move it around, some dust might gather on the white top of the air purifier, but this wipes off easily. There are other general maintenance tasks that you can undertake, which we've detailed in our article on how to clean an air purifier, but the Eteria does have some specific needs too.
The magical photocatalytic filter doesn't need changing or replacing, which is a refreshing break from expensive HEPA filters. Vitesy simply recommends rinsing the filter under the tap every two months. You save money and reduce waste. What more could you ask for?
As for the sleeve, Vitesy says that you can remove this and either hand wash it or pop it in the machine at 60°C. The brand stresses that both the filter and sleeve need to be dry before you replace them, but that's common sense.
How does it compare?
I've tested 'compact' air purifiers from the likes of Shark and Molekule before, but none have managed to make themselves smaller than a Stanley cup. For that reason, it's hard compare the Vitesy Eteria to any other air purifier size-wise.
The closest competitor to the Vitesy Eteria, both for size and style is the Briiv 2 Air Filter. This looks like a terrarium, which makes it bang on trend and really neat to display. It boats similar eco-credentials and, whilst it's a little slower, I prefer the Briiv for general air quality maintenance around the house. It's more expensive and not the one that I'd turn to if I'd burnt bread, but it's a serious competitor nonetheless.
If you're after the thorughness of the VItesy Eteria and you need speed, the next best option is the Molekule Air Mini+ Purifier. Compared with the Eteria, calling the Molekule 'mini' feels like a bit of a joke. However, this is much better in the big rooms around my home. It responded in half the time of the Eteria and could cover over double the space. The Eteria is great, until you start open-plan living.
Should you buy it?
The Vitesy Eteria Air Purifier is a perfectly petite option if you want a portable air purifier to take with you around the home. It's quiet, clever (the app goes deep into the details and the voice controls are great), and works really effectively. I love how cheap it is to run and the fact that you don't have to replace the filter. The only issue arises when you give the Eteria serious taks in rooms bigger than 15m².
How we test
At woman&home, how we test air purifiers is serious stuff. You could even say that we live and breathe it. I'll be transparent with you: the best way to test out an air purifier is to have it in your home and go about your business. We all live day-to-day threatening the air quality in our home: we light candles, cook, fry, spray perfumes and aerosols, burn toast, paint, and buy new clothes. These can bring gasses and particulates into the air and you'll notice your rooms start to feel stuffy.
I'll use air quality trackers when I'm doing my formal tests (cooking a roast, baking bread, creating smoke, and spraying fragrances) and time how long it takes to restore air quality, but the most important aspect of these air purifiers is that they make a difference to your life in real time.
I'll talk about style, maintenance, speed, and noise levels, giving you everything you need to know. Lots of these connect up to apps too, so I'll keep you in the loop on the tech-side of product testing too. After all that, you should be up to date on everything you need to know. However, if you have a question, please email me. I'm always happy to talk about air purifiers.
