Reviews on 3M OAC100 Air Purifier Sometimes it pays to look at the lesser-known products

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The OAC100 is not really marketed as a home air cleaner, although I’m not sure why. Instead, it’s marketed as an office air cleaner (hence OAC in the model name). Maybe it’s because so many consumers want an air cleaner from a company that doesn’t make sandpaper, or maybe it’s because it doesn’t have that magic word “HEPA” printed on the box or tattooed on its skin. Either way, this air cleaner has done the job for me for the past four years.

If you look at my Epinions history, you will see that I have not written anything in a long time. With work and all, I just haven’t had the time to write new opinions, and I haven’t really bought many things that I thought were worth writing about–either because way too many people had already written about them, or because they just plain weren’t worth writing about. What inspired me to write this opinion was that one of my acquaintances started looking at air cleaners for some reason.

10 (give or take 9) good reasons to buy an air cleaner.

Even though I do have allergies, I did not buy an air cleaner because I was concerned about allergens. No, I bought it because something smelled bad, and it wasn’t me–at least, not at first.

Phew!!! What STINKS!?!?!

Several years ago some new neighbors moved into the apartment below mine, and I soon found out that they really liked to smoke. I don’t know what they smoked or how much of it they smoked in a day, but it filled up my apartment so badly I swear I could see a sickening haze throughout the place.

I can’t stand the smoke from any kind of cancer stick, so I was annoyed once I realized that I had started to grow accustomed to the smoke. When I left my apartment I didn’t really notice the lack of smoke, but whenever I returned home I was overwhelmed by the awful stench. My neighbors were nice people, and the apartment leases have no terms against smoking, so I figured I would just tolerate it.

Then I started to smell bad. The smoke had gotten into all of my clothes so badly that I smelled like one of those guys who smokes a pack of cigs every day. That was the last straw for me, and it marked the launch of my new quest to find a cheap air purifier. As always, my first stop was Epinions.com, but I did not at all like what I saw.

Let’s see, I can either skip eating for two months or I can breathe cleaner air…decisions, decisions.

All I could find were these reviews of $350+ HEPA air cleaners that required $60+ worth of replacement filters every 3-6 months. Sure, if you break it all down and figure out the weekly cost of buying and owning one of those behemoths over a 5-year period, it doesn’t seem that expensive. On the other hand, when you’re a poor college student who is working two jobs, planning to graduate and possibly move somewhere else in another 2 or 3 years, and trying not to go into eternal debt, that’s way too much money.

Why bother looking at something nobody else has even heard of?

To be honest, I don’t remember how I came across the OAC100 air cleaner. Maybe it was from a product listing or advertisement on epinions, or maybe I figured that since makes window insulation kits, tape, and sandpaper, they must make air cleaners. :-p Maybe I remembered seeing my parents replace their central air/furnace filters with Filtrete filters once or twice.

The important thing is that I found this air cleaner that had good enough specs to compete with the expensive HEPA filtration systems, had not had its ratings and features buried under a mountain of marketing blitz (”Buy this because it will make you breathe better, run faster, and jump higher!!!”), has a large area of coverage, and had an up-front cost of less than half the price of a decent HEPA system.

Yeah, whatever, just get on with it…so how well does it work?

Even though the OAC100 air cleaner is not HEPA-certified, claims that it can remove contaminants as small as 0.01 micron–that’s 3 times smaller than the smallest particles HEPA systems can remove. does not do this by using super-fine filters that capture even smaller contaminants than HEPA filters do. No, does it by blasting ionized air throughout the room, forcing contaminants to seek out refuge on the nearest wall, floor, or furniture. This means that you may end up with a little more dust on the floor and furniture than usual, but you probably won’t be able to tell a difference. That’s not to say the OAC100’s air filter is just for looks; it does, after all, still capture a lot of dust, smoke, and other contaminants.

Speaking of smoke, my air cleaner has drastically reduced the amount of smoke that reaches me when my downstairs neighbors (both the present ones and my previous ones) kindly donate clouds of it through the bores and cracks in their ceiling and my floor. My clothes no longer have that fresh “carton-o-Marlboro” scent, and I don’t gag every time I come home or take a deep breath when I wake up and stretch in the morning.

The air cleaner has two 3-way switches for controls. The first switch has settings for low, off, and high fan speed (in that order). The second switch has settings for low, off, and high ionization. I assume if the fan is off, the ionization is effectively disabled, since the ionized air isn’t being blasted through the room.

By the way, when I say this thing blasts air, I mean it. The noise output of the air cleaner comes almost entirely from the rush of air flowing through it. That’s a good thing, because the noise from many fans comes from the whistles and vibrations the fans make as they blow air. This air cleaner sounds kind of like those white-noise generators that some offices use. If you haven’t heard a white-noise generator or don’t know what one is, don’t worry–it’s nothing to get excited about.

I don’t know how loud a HEPA cleaner is, but the OAC100 is loud enough that you may want to turn it off while you talk on the phone. Still, it’s not obnoxiously loud. It’s no louder than the fan in my window air conditioner (a small, 3-year-old model #25371055001).

Some other stuff you might like to know.

I run my air cleaner virtually non-stop and it costs about $3 in electricity each month. For comparison (because electric rates are different everywhere), when I changed 3 of my 75W light bulbs from incandescent bulbs to compact flourescents that put out about the same amount of light, my electric bill went down $20/month. Including filters, I suppose the cost to operate the OAC100 ranges anywhere from $5-$10 a month depending on how frequently I need to replace the filter.

The filters cost $25 each if you get a good deal on them and last 3 months each if you run the air cleaner constantly at the high fan speed. Naturally, they can last much longer if you run the air cleaner at the lower fan speed or if your air isn’t very dirty.

Replacing the filter is easy. You pull off the back panel, pull out the old filter and throw it in the trash, pop the new filter in, and snap the back panel back in place. I remember reading about several HEPA air cleaning systems that required two or more filters (one filter to remove the big chunks of stuff from your air, and one or more of the expensive HEPA-certified filters to remove the smaller stuff).

I don’t know of any local stores that carry the OAC100RF replacement filters, but I haven’t looked very hard. I buy my filters online, 4 or 5 at a time, to save on shipping.

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