Westinghouse 1804 Portable Air Purifier Review

Looking For A Portable HEPA Air Purifier?

Westinghouse recently reached out to Legit Reviews to see if we wanted to take a look at one of their most recent air purifiers. They have a model called the Westinghouse 1804 portable air purifier that runs off a battery pack and can be taken anywhere. Many places have added air purifiers since the COVID-19 global pandemic began, but something like this seems like it would be appealing for business travelers.

We have had a few companies ask when we’d be ready to travel again and if we’ve gotten the vaccine yet. It seems like we might be traveling by air again in 2021 and that means we’ll be back to spending many nights in hotel rooms. Something like the Westinghouse 1804 might come in handy as it claims to purify 99.97% of harmful air and kill up to 99.99% of bacteria and viruses. It also lasts up to 8 hours with the built-in 3000 mAH Lithium rechargeable battery.

How does it clean the air so well? The Westinghouse 1804 uses a patented NCCO 3-stage air cleaning solution. This solution uses an active oxygen generator to produce ozone that sanitizes, a medical grade HEPA filter to trap bad stuff, and finally a nano-technology reactor to catalyze and decompose pollutants. The end result is clean air in an area of up to 100 square feet or 9.3 meters squared.

The Westinghouse 1804 is currently priced at $127.49 shipped over at Amazon. The H13 medical grade HEPA filter can last up to 3,000 hours and come in packs of 4 for $35 (buy on Amazon). The NCCO filter lasts around 10,000 hours and we were unable to find replacements online. The NCCO filter will likely never need to be replaced as it should last nearly 3.5 years if used 8 hours every day. It comes with all the filters that you need to get started, but the grade and cost of replacement filters is a big deal when picking out an air purifier!

Inside the box you get the air purifier, NCCO Reactor, HEPA filter, power cord, wall power adapter, Philips screw driver, mounting strap and the operation manual.

The HEPA filter is actually inside the unit and you’ll see it when you take off the front cover. This is done by pressing a release button on the side of the unit. No tools are needed to access the filters and this makes filter replacement as easy as it gets.

The Nano Confined Catalytic Oxidizer (NCCO) Reactor comes in sealed bag that will need to be opened up and installed before the first use. The NCCO Reactor is made of zeolite and does not contain Erionite, which is a known carcinogen.

The NECO Reactor housing has space for the HEPA filter to be placed in and then the entire filter it placed into the air purifier housing.

There are two holes in the Westinghouse 1804 that lines up with two standoffs on the filter assembly, so be sure that you have it orientated correctly.

Once you are done it will look like the image above and you can put the top cover back on. The enclosure is pretty small at 6.3″ x 6.3″ x 3.5″ and it weighs 2.12 pounds. This ensures it is highly portable and able to be used by any age group.

Powering on the Westinghouse 1804

The power button is located on the top of the unit. Pressing it once will turn the unit on with the low fan speed setting. The LED light in the power button will be white in low fan speed mode. If you press the button again it will go to the high fan speed and the LED light will be blue. Pressing the button again will turn off the air purifier.

• Low Speed – 1.3W of power, 34 dB sound level, 7.06 CFM of airflow
• High Speed – 2.5W of power, 38 dB sound level, 14.71 CFM of airflow

Dirty air is sucked in through the top of the unit, pulled through the filter, and then clean air exits out of one side of the unit. Westinghouse recommends cleaning the air inlet and outlet with a soft brush of vacuum cleaner periodically.

The wall charger for the Westinghouse 1804 has a standard USB Type-A power output on it, but the end that connects to the unit uses a round barrel type plug. To make matters worse it connects into a recessed hold on the bottom of the unit. For a portable USB powered device it would have been nice to some sort of USB connector on the side of the unit. This unique cable design forces you to bring another cable with you and that is something we don’t like to do. The good news is the battery is rated to last 8 hours and we were able to get it to last that long in our testing.

A quick check with a USB power tester showed we were pulling about 4.5 Watts of power from the 10 Watt power adapter. This was with the unit running on high fan mode and the battery pulling a charge. The Lithium Battery inside of the Westinghouse 1804 portable air purifier is hard wired and not user replicable. To access the Lithium battery you need a triangle head security bit to remove the bottom of the case. Once inside you’ll need to physically cut out the three lead wires to properly dispose of the battery.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The Westinghouse 1804 air purifier seems to be good way to remove most of the harmful and unhealthy elements in areas of up to 100 square feet. Replacement HEPA filters are sold in 4-packs at a cost of under $9 per filter and the NCCO reactor should never need to be replaced. Right now the Westinghouse 1804 runs $127.49 shipped over at Amazon and is backed by a 3-year warranty. That price point makes it a bit more than an impulse buy, so hopefully this review answers some of your questions.

It would have been nice if the Lithium battery was user replicable and that it used a normal USB charging cable. No product is perfect and those are the two biggest gripes that we have with the Westinghouse 1804. The box highlights that the air purifier can be used in the car, bathroom, kitchen, hotel room, office, workshop or an airplane. We’d be careful leaving it in a hot car in the summer as temperatures over 40C (104F) have shown to do irreversible damage to battery packs over time. If you travel on an airplane you’ll need to keep this with you in your carry-on luggage and follow Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) guidelines.

We’ll wrap up this review with two YouTube videos that Westinghouse published on the 1804 air purifier.