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Appliances · Honeywell · 2013

Honeywell HPA300

Brute-force air movement for a large room, and it is not remotely subtle about it.

Throughput is cheap in a room nobody sleeps in — #2

Overall

7.8

out of 10

Axis scores

Appliances is scored on these 5 axes. The total is their plain average — nothing is weighted.

Honeywell HPA300 — axis scores out of 10Horizontal bar chart of editorial scores out of 10 across 5 axes. Bars run from a shared zero baseline; longer is better. Honeywell HPA300: Performance 8.8, Value 8.4, Durability 8.4, Ease of use 7.0, Quietness 6.4.PerformanceHoneywell HPA300 — Performance 8.8 out of 108.8ValueHoneywell HPA300 — Value 8.4 out of 108.4DurabilityHoneywell HPA300 — Durability 8.4 out of 108.4Ease of useHoneywell HPA300 — Ease of use 7.0 out of 107.0QuietnessHoneywell HPA300 — Quietness 6.4 out of 106.4Editorial score out of 10 — higher is better
  • Performance — How well it does the core job
  • Value — What the same money buys elsewhere
  • Durability — Failure and fade reports past the one-year mark
  • Ease of use — Setup, daily operation, cleaning, maintenance
  • Quietness — Operating noise — a higher score means quieter

Specs

Coverage
Large rooms
Filter
True HEPA plus carbon pre-filter
Controls
Mechanical buttons, four speeds

As published by the manufacturer. We didn't measure these ourselves.

Is it for you

Buy it if

  • Allergy season in a large room, where throughput beats finesse
  • You want mechanical controls that cannot lose firmware
  • Filters stocked in every hardware store

Skip it if

  • The unit will be anywhere near where someone sleeps
  • You want auto mode driven by a sensor

At full power it ends conversations and makes television unwatchable. Owners settle into a pattern of running it hard while the room is empty, then dropping it to the lowest setting when they come back. The pattern works. It also requires being there to carry it out.

All that noise comes from a fan with a very large filter in front of it, a design that has barely changed in a decade because it does not need to. Three separate HEPA cartridges and a wraparound carbon pre-filter sit in the airstream, and on its top setting the machine clears a large room about as fast as anything else here.

Controls are mechanical buttons. No sensor, no automation. You choose a speed and it holds that speed until you change it, which limits daily use and pays back across a long ownership period, since there is no app to be abandoned, no firmware to break, and no sensor to drift out of calibration.

Filter economics are favorable. The cartridges are a standard size stocked in general retail and available from several suppliers, and the carbon pre-filter is a cut-to-fit sheet that costs very little. Over five years this sits among the cheaper machines here to keep running, which offsets a purchase price that is not the smallest number on the shelf.

Buy it for allergy season in a large room, for a workshop, for anywhere that needs volume more than subtlety. Anyone shopping for a bedroom should look at a machine built for that job, because no setting on this one turns it into one.

Last updated . The scoring method is on how we rank.