Dyson Pure Hot+Cool review: The most high-tech fan money can buy

It might be something you’d prefer not to think about right now, but in a few months’ time the hot, summer weather will be a distant memory, the temperature will fall and the nights will be drawing in. It will also be the time you need to find a place to put away your fans – unless you had the foresight to purchase a Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link.

This is a fan that will not only keep you cool in the heat but will also maintain a comfortable temperature when the temperature falls. Being a Dyson, however, it’s hellishly expensive. Is it worth the outlay?

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Dyson Pure Hot+Cool review: What you need to know

Decoding the name of this fan tells you most of its key features. The main part is obvious: “Hot+Cool” means it can blow both hot and cool air into your room. The “Pure” part means it filters that air, removing particles such as pollen, dust and smoke.

Simple, really. The Pure Hot+Cool’s features don’t end there, however. Other key features and functions include the ability to control the fan and monitor air quality with a smartphone app, a regular infrared remote control, adjustable oscillation and the ability to switch between air circulation (for more effective general heating) and air jet modes.

In short, this Dyson is a multitalented, multipurpose fan. It’s possibly the most advanced product of its type I’ve ever encountered.

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Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link review: Price and competition

It’s also the most expensive, and that really is the big catch. Sitting right at the top end of the company’s range of fans, the Pure Hot+Cool will set you back a not-inconsiderable £549.

That sounds like a lot. However, since most other fans have neither heating facilities, app control nor air filtering, let alone all three, it’s very much a product that occupies its own niche. Put simply, if this combination of features appeals, it’s essentially your only choice.

If you don’t mind missing out on a feature or two, though, there are plenty of less pricey alternatives. Drop the heating facility, for instance, and you can pick up Dyson’s top-end cooling and purifying fan, the Pure Cool tower, for £500. And, if you don’t mind losing the air filtering, you the older Dyson Hot+Cool (AM09) model costs £399.

If all you want is a fan and nothing else, you’re better off saving a few hundred pounds and considering one of our favourites, such as the Ignenix DF0030 tower fan, which costs a mere £32, the £70 Pifco P40015 pedestal fan, or any other of our top choices. Read our roundup of the best fans on the market for the full lowdown.

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Dyson Pure Hot+Cool review: Features and design

If you’re still interested, there’s no denying that the Dyson Pure Hot+Cool is one stylish, feature-packed product. It has the same distinctive bladeless design that most of Dyson’s other fans employ, where airflow is generated in the base and then pushed out through a narrow slot surrounding an oval loop that sits on top.

Not only does this arrangement look rather elegant, but it has the additional benefit that it’s quiet and easy to clean. At settings up to three or four, which generate a significant breeze, the Dyson is all but silent, and even when you turn it up, the fan adds no noise of its own to the calming white-noise rush of air.

As with most tower fans, the Hot+Cool can be set to oscillate automatically, distributing its cooling (or heating) jets of air in a smooth, horizontal arc. Unlike most rivals, however, the Dyson allows you to adjust precisely how wide this arc is. By default, the fan is set to oscillate through 350 degrees, which is great if you have the fan placed in the centre of a large room, but you can also switch to a 180-degree arc, or even a 90/45-degree sweep if you want the put the fan in a corner or you’d prefer it to focus on one particular spot.

It’s also possible to tilt the Hot+Cool on its base so the jet of air points at a slight angle up or down. This is a manual adjustment, however; you can’t set the fan to oscillate vertically up and down as you can with some fans. And if you want general air circulation instead of a focused stream of air (useful for heating large areas), the Dyson can do that by projecting the airflow out of a narrow gap that surrounds the rear of the fan’s loop-shaped head instead of pushing it out front.

There’s plenty of granularity when it comes to adjusting fan speed and heating settings, too. For cooling, the fan has ten settings to choose from. Alternatively, you can put it in automatic mode, which increases fan speed only when it detects the air quality has significantly deteriorated. For heating, you can set a room temperature (up to 37℃) and the fan will attempt to maintain that temperature. Again, it will do so completely automatically.

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Dyson Pure Hot+Cool review: Ease of use and Dyson app

Most of these settings can be accessed via the small silver infrared remote control, which attaches magnetically to the very top of the fan loop. It’s simple to use, and the LCD display on top of the cylindrical base of the fan presents a simple, easy-to-understand menu system that’s easy to get to grips with.

The best way to interact with the Pure Hot+Cool, however, is to connect the fan to your Wi-Fi network and use the app to control it from the screen of your smartphone. This lets you adjust all the same settings as the remote control and more. Tap the remote icon in the bottom-left corner and you get a graphical representation of the remote’s buttons, all of which are in the same places.

There are extra features, however, including the ability to control the fan over the internet, and view the current air quality and historical levels of internal pollution. Just like a regular, standalone air-quality monitor, the Dyson is able to monitor and log levels of fine particles (PM2.5 and PM10), plus VOC (volatile organic compounds), NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), temperature and humidity levels.

It’s also possible to set up a schedule for the fan or heater. You can set up as many time slots as you like and you can customise each one, allocating a different fan speed or temperature level according to your preferences.

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Dyson Pure Hot+Cool review: Performance

As a fan, the Dyson is a pretty impressive performer. One metre away from the fan, using an anemometer, I measured airflow at a maximum 2.4m/sec (level 10) and this fell away to a still-impressive 1.9m/sec at 10cm off-centre horizontally. It’s among the most powerful fans we’ve tested, as you might expect given the price.

I also looked at how effective the air purification was at tackling extreme pollution events. I shut the fan in a 2 x 2.5m room, set it on maximum power and lit a 5g smoke pellet, then timed how long it took for the fan to approach safe levels, monitoring the air quality with a Foobot air monitor.

Unsurprisingly, given how much smoke these pellets give off, this takes some time, but the pure Hot+Cool does at least carry the task out at a faster rate than the Pure Cool Me. After 70 minutes the Foobot was reading 132ug/m3 of particulate matter; the Pure Cool Me had reduced particulates to 157ug/m3 after the same amount of time had elapsed. It clearly works, but the speed at which it purifies isn’t hugely different from the cheaper model.

Where the Hot+Cool is perhaps more useful than the cheaper Pure Cool Me is that it can power up the fan automatically when these events are detected, tackling dust, pollen and other particles as they appear. Spray deodorant in the vicinity of the Pure Hot+Cool, for instance, and it immediately springs into action. It’s also worth bearing in mind that you’ll have to replace the activated carbon and glass HEPA filter occasionally to keep it going strong. It’s a hefty £50, too, but Dyson says you should only have to replace it once every year, based on 12 hours of purification per day.

As far as the heating part goes that works well, too. I’ve only had the fan during a recent heatwave and so haven’t used it extensively but it worked as advertised when I tested it. The fan’s twin ceramic heating plates heat the air as it passes out into the room yet the surfaces of the fan never get so hot that you can’t touch them. It’s not super fast at heating – when I tested it raised the temperature in my small bedroom it took 33mins 31secs to increase the temperature by 5°C (from 23°C to 28°C) – but the warm blast of air it produces is pleasant. I’ll be sure to update this review with my findings once the winter months set in to see if it’s more effective when the temperature cools down.

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Dyson Pure Hot+Cool review: Verdict

The Dyson Pure Hot+Cool is expensive, then, but it is probably the most technologically advanced fan you can buy. It can cool and heat your rooms, purify the air as it does so and you can control it from afar. It can even be set it to purify and heat automatically.

As with most Dyson products, whether or not you’re prepared to spend this much on what is, effectively, a fancy fan depends largely on your priorities. You can, of course, pick up a decent fan, air purifier and heater for much less than the Dyson on its own but that’s three separate products, each with its own power requirements, all taking up space in your home.

If, however, you want the functions of all three squeezed into one clever, easy to use and elegant appliance, there’s nothing quite like the Dyson Hot+Cool.