What an air purifier actually costs to run in Ireland
Quick answer: At Ireland’s domestic day rate of about €0.38/kWh, the air purifiers we track cost between <€0.001 and €0.02 per hour at full power — €0.34 to €6.70 a month if you run one for 12 hours a day. On a smart-meter night rate of about €0.18/kWh the same run costs roughly half. These are ceilings: the rated figure is the top fan speed, and almost nobody runs a purifier flat out, so a real bill lands well below them.
Almost every air purifier page online tells you which one to buy and none of them tell you what it costs to keep switched on. This page is the other half: every air purifier we track, its rated power, and what that works out to per hour and per month at Irish electricity prices — with the arithmetic shown so you can redo it with your own unit rate.
Running cost of every air purifier we track
| Model | Rated power | Per hour (day) | Per hour (night) | Per month at 12 hours a day | Rated coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MELEDEN HEPA Air Purifier | 2.5 W | <€0.001 | <€0.001 | €0.34 | — |
| LEVOIT Bedroom Air Purifier (Quiet HEPA) | 7 W | €0.003 | €0.001 | €0.96 | Bedrooms |
| Philips 600 Series Air Purifier | 12 W | €0.005 | €0.002 | €1.64 | Up to 44 m² |
| Blueair Blue 511i Max Smart WiFi Air Purifier | 17 W | €0.006 | €0.003 | €2.33 | 52 m² |
| LEVOIT Smart HEPA Air Purifier (70 m²) | 37 W | €0.01 | €0.007 | €5.06 | Up to 70 m² |
| Blueair Blue Max 3450i Smart WiFi | 38 W | €0.01 | €0.007 | €5.20 | Up to 103 m² |
| AZEUS True HEPA Air Purifier (GL-FS32) | 45 W | €0.02 | €0.008 | €6.16 | Large rooms |
| Levoit Smart Air Purifier for Large Rooms | 49 W | €0.02 | €0.009 | €6.70 | — |
Tariff source: €0.38/kWh day rate and €0.18/kWh night rate, cross-checked against SEAI energy price statistics and published supplier standard rates, July 2026. Rated power and rated coverage are the manufacturers’ own published figures.
The 4 models where we could not calculate a cost
These air purifiers are in our guides, but the manufacturer does not publish a rated power figure for them, so there is no honest way to work out a cost per hour. We would rather show the gap than fill it with an estimate and present it as a measurement.
| Model | Rated coverage | Rated power |
|---|---|---|
| MIKO HEPA Air Purifier for Home | — | Not published by the manufacturer |
| MELEDEN Small Air Purifier (HEPA13, Pet) | — | Not published by the manufacturer |
| QUEENTY H13 HEPA Air Purifier with Ioniser | Medium rooms | Not published by the manufacturer |
| GoveeLife Smart Air Purifier (Large Rooms) | Up to 97 m² (1,046 ft²) | Not published by the manufacturer |
How these numbers are worked out
The whole calculation is three numbers and one multiplication, and we would rather you checked it than trusted it.
- Rated power — the wattage the manufacturer publishes for that exact model. Not a category average, not a guess from a similar unit. 8 of the 12 air purifiers in our guides publish one; the other 4 are listed separately, with no figure at all.
- Tariff — €0.38 per kWh for the day rate and €0.18 per kWh for a typical smart-meter night rate, cross-checked against SEAI energy price statistics and published supplier standard rates, July 2026. Your own unit rate is on your bill and may differ; the arithmetic below is easy to redo with it.
- Cost per hour = rated watts ÷ 1,000 × the unit rate. A 2.5 W unit is 0.003 kW, so 0.003 × 0.38 = <€0.001 an hour.
- Cost per month = cost per hour × 12 hours × 30 days. 12 hours a day is our assumption, not a measurement — scale it to how you actually run yours.
Three things these numbers are not
They are not your bill. Every figure here is a ceiling: rated draw at full power, multiplied out. The rated wattage of an air purifier is its draw on the highest fan speed. On auto or sleep mode — how most of these actually get used — a unit rated at 40 W is often pulling under 10. This is the appliance people most often assume is expensive to leave on, and the table above is the argument that it is not: even at the ceiling figure, running the most power-hungry purifier here costs less per month than the cheapest heater on this site costs in a single evening. Filters, not electricity, are what an air purifier costs you. Either way, treat the table as the worst case.
They do not include standing charges or VAT changes. The unit rate is the marginal cost of running the appliance. Your standing charge is there whether the air purifier is plugged in or not.
Using this table
Free to quote, cite or reproduce with a link back to this page. If you are writing about damp, heating or energy costs in Ireland and want the underlying figures, everything is on this page — the rated wattages, the tariff, and the arithmetic — so the numbers can be checked rather than taken on trust. Spot an error or a wattage we have wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.