Levoit Core P350 Review
A pet-focused air purifier with more pong-removing power
Verdict
Levoit’s Core P350 does a good job of removing smoke and other contaminants from small and medium-sized rooms. While its controls are basic – and it misses out on smart features and air quality detection – its HEPA and carbon filter is ideal for pet owners looking to remove odours, and filter out allergens, particulates and bacteria from the home. Other than a thicker carbon layer in the filter, however, there’s little difference between this and the Levoit Core 300 – if you’ve got one of those, you can get similar performance by fitting the P350’s pet-specific filter.
Pros
- Reasonably compact
- Quiet
- Effective filter
Cons
- No air quality sensor
- No smart features
Key Features
- HEPA filter with carbon layerThis air purifier has a three-stage filter with a thicker carbon layer. It removes pet dander, pollutants, allergens and odours.
Introduction
The Levoit Core P350 is a small to mid-sized air purifier aimed specifically at households with pets. It’s physically almost the same as the Core 300 and its smart derivative the Levoit Core 300S, but it comes with a pet-specific filter.
This aims to trap more hair and allergens than the standard one and has a thicker carbon layer. This uses a patented ‘ARC’ formula, which Levoit says actively breaks down pollutants rather than just absorbing them.
The P350 is compact and reasonably smart, made from a grey plastic rather than the usual white. There’s not much setting up to do – you just unscrew its base, remove the shipping bag from the filter and you’re ready to go.
Design and features
- Compact, agreeable design
- Diffuse air output
- Timer, night, and pet lock modes
This air purifier is aimed at smaller and medium-sized rooms, particularly those such as a bedroom where a pet might spend a lot of time.
It’s quite compact, measuring only 22cm across and 36cm high, yet it packs a reasonably big filter that takes up about half the purifier’s height. Levoit states a clean air delivery rate (CADR) of 187 cubic metres per hour (m3/h), which means it might clean the air in a typical bedroom about 3-4 times an hour. That’s a little less than the Core 300S, which has a 240m3/h CADR.
Despite a reasonably strong fan, filtered air emerges in a diffuse pattern from the rakes at the top. Like most other air purifiers, this isn’t a great way to stir up a breeze you can feel.
The Levoit Core P350 doesn’t have any air quality detection, so it can’t moderate its speed in response to particulates, volatile organic compounds or any other contaminant. Based on my experience, speed one might suffice most of the time, with higher speeds useful if you’re cooking, during hayfever season, or in the presence of other pollutants.
There are no smart features here, just a comprehensive touch control panel in the centre of the air output. This offers three fan speeds plus a night mode that’s certainly quiet enough to have running in the background while you sleep. You can set an off timer in two-hour increments up to 12 hours, turn the status lights on and off, and even engage a ‘Pet Lock’, lest you should own a particularly dexterous animal. There’s also a light to alert you when the filter needs replacing.
This purifier comes with a pet-specific, three-stage air filter. Levoit says this is optimised to filter out pet fur, dander and particles. The woven top layer certainly looks to be effective for larger contaminants, quickly picking up fine hairs from our cat that had made it through the intake vent. The next stage is a HEPA 13 filter, designed to remove 99.97% of particles down to 0.3 micrometres – that includes most pet allergens, bacteria, mould spores and pollen.
It’s the final, carbon stage that’s most different to the standard Core series filters. Levoit says there’s 90 grams of carbon here, compared to 40g in the standard filter. This is ‘modified carbon’, which chemically reacts with alkaline gases such as the ammonia emitted from pet urine, neutralising rather than absorbing it. It should also be effective at removing gas contaminants such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
This specialised filter makes the P350 well suited to pet owners, but it’s worth pointing out that most air purifiers with a HEPA 13 and carbon filter will still be some help in reducing pet smells and allergens. You can also buy replacement filters separately, so you could always fit the pet-specific filter to an existing Core 300 or Core 300s. At the time of writing, the pet filter was about £5 more than a standard one.
Performance
- Quiet
- Good filtration
I test every air purifier by shutting it in a small room with a burning smoke pellet. These quickly fill the room with dense white smoke, rich in particulate matter, and we time how long it takes for the purifier to get the air quality back down to safe levels. This test sends my PM2.5 air monitor (which detects particles around 2.5 micrometres in size) literally off the scale, and it can take several minutes for it to fall back below its 999 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m3) maximum.
In my first test, the Core P350 didn’t seem to improve the air quality at all, even after 20 minutes. On examination, I realised that I’d replaced the filter upside down after removing it from its transit bag. It’s a shame this is possible, as it almost completely blocks the fan’s air intake, rendering the purifier temporarily useless.
With the filter fitted properly, the P350 performed well enough, getting the air quality from bad to moderate (<100μg/m3) in 11 minutes. In 12 minutes the air had fallen into the good (<50μg/m3) range. That’s a slight improvement on the times the Core 300S recorded in this test, but I’ve tested larger purifiers that can do it in half the time.
It’s hard to develop a similarly scientific test for odour removal, but I placed the Core P350 next to my cat’s litter tray, and it certainly seemed to help reduce the smell from fresh visits.
My sound measurements backed up my sense that this is a quiet purifier, particularly on the night setting where I recorded just 30.7dB from one metre away. Even at full chat, this only increased to 48.3dB – not even enough to make you raise your voice.
I was a bit surprised when I connected the P350 to an energy meter. While the Core 300S had proved very efficient, using between 2-19 watts (W) depending on the fan speed, the P350 was a little less so. In night mode it consumed 18W, rising to 39W at full speed. That’s still not a huge amount of power, but at a typical electricity price of 30p per kilowatt hour, it would cost you about £30 more each year to run it flat out for 12 hours a day, compared to the Core 300S.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
The Levoit Core P350 offers decent performance and controls: The is an effective air purifier that performed well in our tests.
Price: Another £30 gets you smart controls and that might be worth it to a lot of people.
Final Thoughts
The Core P350 is an effective air purifier, dealing quite well with smoke in my timed test, and filtering out hair and smells from our cat. It’s not especially powerful at this price, however.
The Levoit Core 300S costs only around £30 more, yet it offers a PM2.5 sensor and smart controls, and has similar performance. Given you can also fit it with Levoit’s pet-specific filter, it may be worth paying the extra.
How we test
Unlike other sites, we test every air purifier we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main air purifier for the review period
We test smart purifiers with their apps and we test Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility.
We time how long it takes each purifier to remove smoke from a closed room.
You might like…
FAQs
The Core P350 is a small-medium sized home air purifier. It’s designed to be particularly good at removing pet hair, dander, allergen and odours, such as from a litter tray.
It’s the filter replacement light. When it’s lit up, you need to fit a new filter to maintain performance.
Full specs
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
