Dyson Pure Cool Me review: It's all about you

Dyson has a wide range of fans - or rather 'air treatment products' - to choose from, with the Pure Cool Me sitting at the bottom of the range. 

As the name suggests, this product is about keeping you cool. It's a personal fan rather than something designed to chill the whole room. 

But is this pricey fan worth the outlay?

Design

• Dimensions: 401 x 247 x 254mm / Weight: 2.7kg
• Most parts are replaceable

The cylindrical base of the Cool Me will be familiar to anyone who has spied a Dyson fan before. Wrapped in a perforated plastic shell, within this cylinder lies the HEPA filter (high-efficiency particulate air) - used to trap pollutants, to ease allergies such as hayfever - through which the air is drawn, earning this device its Pure name. 

The air is projected out of the top, with an unusual sliced-ball aesthetic, which at one end of the scale looks a bit like a dustbin lid, or at the other perhaps some sort of friendly personal robot. Dyson calls it Core Flow Technology and the idea is all about focusing the jet of air by speeding it up and forcing it out across a curved surface - which we'll get to in a minute.

There's a small colour display at the bottom of the Cool Me that will show you the fan speed, but also display information when prompted by the accompanying remote. That includes a sleep timer - 30 minutes; 1, 2, 4  or 8 hours - as well as letting you check the status of the filter, so you know it needs replacing. 

To keep things tidy, the remote will magnetically attach to the front of the fan so you always know where it is - and you'll need to keep track of it, because it's essential to get the most out of your fan. You can buy a replacement, however, if you lose it. 

That's true of most parts of this fan: Dyson will sell you spares, from the (oversized) power supply, through to replacing the entire oscillating head, or the rubber feet on the bottom. Yes, this is expensive, but if you break something, you can at least replace it. 

There's no avoiding that this is a pretty big lump. It's going to dominate the surface you put it on and that slightly jars with the notion of this being for personal cooling - it's not "personal" in the sense that you can slip into a bag and whip it out when you need it. 

How it keeps you cool

• Directional airflow
• Oscillation
• Fan speed control 

The surface at the top of the fan is like a sliding disc that you can move to refine the angle that the air is fired out. Slide it up and the air is projected upwards, slide it down and the jet comes back to the horizontal.

You can, effectively, choose the precise direction of the airflow, which really characterises the Dyson Pure Cool Me as a personal device. It doesn't give you a wall of air like regular fan does, so in many ways, it's not a substitute for a much simpler fan at a fraction of the cost that will cool a much larger area.

However, before you dismiss the Dyson Pure Cool Me as an expensive gimmick, it's actually very effective. Set it on your bedside table and you can have the air directed right towards you. Sit it on the corner of a desk - as indeed it is while writing this review in 35C heat - and it's precise. Sure, a regular fan will do the same job, but it's the precision that shines here. 

Thanks to that remote control you can change the fan speed - it's a 10-speed scale, rather than a three speed option you might get elsewhere. You can have low speeds in the morning and turn it up as the sun climbs.

That also means you can set it at a speed so you're happy with the volume. All you'll hear here is the white noise, there's no clanging, reverberation or creaking. That's great when you turn on the oscillation (something you can only do using the remote) which is where the quality shows. Again, there's no change in the noise, unlike most cheaper fans that will rattle and vibrate as they sweep from side to side. The Dyson is solid and stable.

What's great about having the oscillation on a remote control is that you can start it and stop it in exactly the right place. If you've moved your chair, you can hit the button, wait until you have the jet of air pointing towards you and press it again to stop things. Once again, it's about precision, so you can get exactly the result that you want. 

It's cleaning the air too

• HEPA filter
• 12 months life based on 12 hours a day 

While many will be interested in how this fan will keep you cool, the purification that it provides accounts for a large part of its asking price. The argument here is that you're cooling yourself with purified air rather than dirty air. 

Whether or not you think that matters will come down to your personal circumstances, where you live, whether you have any allergies and so on. The filter contains both activated charcoal and glass HEPA layer, which Dyson says will filter 99.95 per cent of ultra-fine particles from the air - that's filtration down to 0.1µm (0.1 microns). 

That's going to include things like pollen, bacteria, fungal spores, and other dusts and gases that you don't want to be breathing in. For someone living in an urban environment, this can provide real air filtration on the small scale. This will also take care of things like cooking odours. If you live in the countryside you might be more interested in the pollen filtration, for those living in an inner city appartment, it will filter out traffic pollutants and other nasties.   

Dyson says that the filter should last about 12 months, using it on average 12 hours a day, although this figure depends on your circumstances and how polluted the air is that you're passing through it. A replacement filter is £65/$69.99 from Dyson, so there is an ongoing cost to maintaining this device and to keep it working at its most efficient. At the same time, that's a small price to pay for filtration, although you may also want to consider a larger device if you have an air quality problem in your home.

It's also worth noting that you don't get the full air purifier experience that other more costly Dyson Pure devices offer. This partly because of the personal nature of this fan, rather than having any designs on purifying the air for an entire room - and that might make this seem rather expensive as there are air purifiers you can get at lower prices. Dyson's argument is that you don't need to double up on gadgets - but at the same time, you're paying for that convenience.

There's no air quality sensor on the Pure Cool Me and there's no Dyson Link app either to get more information from this Dyson device. This is very much a standalone product, designed to purify air and cool you down on balmy days.