Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gonehome 1482 days ago
Your intuition is correct - it’s bullshit.

In the summer of 2019, we purchased a Molekule Air (the flagship model) and tested it. We bought an Air Mini that fall and tested it in February 2020. At the time we tested the Molekule Air, the company claimed that its “scientifically-proven nanotechnology outperforms HEPA filters in every category of pollutant.”

Our tests proved otherwise. And by mid-2020, that language had been withdrawn, after many of the company’s claims were ruled against in a case before the National Advertising Division and upheld in a later appeal before the National Advertising Review Board. The Molekule Air turned in the worst performance on particulates of any purifier, of any size, of any price, that we have tested in the eight years that we have been producing this guide. The Air Mini outperformed it, but that’s not saying much: It still produced the second-worst performance we’ve ever seen.

Guide author Tim Heffernan asked Molekule CEO Dilip Goswami why the language was removed. He answered, “The point about ‘in all categories’ is that we see a device that outperforms across all of the categories. Right? So we’re not trying to say that individually, on any particular metric, we would be number one. Right? What we’re saying is, when you look across all the categories, we outperform HEPA. Right? And that’s what we’re attempting to convey with that. And so—it’s fair to say that we needed to re-examine some of the language to make sure that it’s saying what we’re intending to say.”

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-purifier...

1 comments

Thanks for sharing some background on Molekule, I did not know about this.
That said though, the Molekule team themselves have said that their device is not optimized for filtering particulate matter, but rather for denaturing mold, viruses, and bacteria. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/molekule/comments/6u7d5y/putting_mo...

This is reflected as well in the testing on Molekule's own website: https://molekule.cdn.prismic.io/molekule/4ec92005-d806-4991-...

And, I will say that they have numerous tests by independent labs. They did do some testing with their own lab and with a lab affiliated with them, but this is far from all the testing they have done. So to say that all their tests were tainted or affiliated with them is simply not true. See: https://molekule.com/papers