Briiv Air Filter: The stylish, sustainable solution for a healthy home

This blog has been sponsored by Briiv, but the words and opinions are all mine.

I live in London, and the air is known not to be the cleanest. I have often suffered with rhinitis and taken steroids over the years to help with this. My son also has asthma and therefore it’s important to me to try to keep the air in our house as clean as possible. In my journey toward creating a healthy home, I have added plenty of houseplants known to purify the air. I also use a humidifier. This blog is all about creating your healthiest space and why you need a Briiv Air Filter in your home.

What is a ‘healthy home’

We often consider the aesthetics of our home in isolation. Blogs like mine are all about how to make your space beautiful. But to get the very best out of your home, you need also to consider how to make your space a healthy one. I have developed a keen interest in biophilic design and generally creating a considered home that helps calm the mind. I highly recommend the book, Design a Healthy Home by Oliver Heath to help you get started in this now hugely popular area of interior design.

As my own interest grew, I learned that there are many every day items within our homes that can have a detrimental affect on our health. I am all for bringing in new technology that can help keep us healthy at home.

Invisible toxins

We know that walking around a traffic-congested city centre isn’t great for our health, but you may not be so aware of the toxins that could impact your health in your own home. Ironically, even cleaning our homes will release particles into the air that need mopping up. This is true too of burning candles and sharing our homes with furry friends. You have probably heard about VOCs – volatile organic compounds. They sound scary, but they are actually are being released into the air in our homes all the time: from cooking a bacon sandwich in the morning, to refreshing a room with a lick of paint, your home is a hotbed of VOCs!

Whilst the VOCs released when you cook a bacon sandwich are unlikely to cause you any significant harm, it’s worth being aware of the air quality in our homes and what we can do to improve on it. Especially the keen DIYers amongst us, as paint, stripper, caulk and everything in between will be letting off chemicals into the air. You know that MDF smell? It’s formaldehyde! Air purification is therefore something we need to have at the top of our list of considerations when undertaking some DIY.

I’ve noticed an improvement in my rhinitis since I turned my house into a scaled down version of the Kew Gardens glasshouse. I have also added humidifers (largely intended to benefit the plants) which have made a positive impact when it comes to my permanently blocked nose. Adding an air filter was the next logical step, especially when considering my son’s asthma and that we will soon be sharing our home with a puppy (and his dander). I chose the Briiv Air Filter. Let me tell you why.

Why choose a Briiv Air Filter?

Serious purifying capabilities

I have mentioned that I’ve been using houseplants as a way to help improve air quality in my home. Think of a Briiv Air Filter as houseplant action on steroids! The purifying capabilities of the Briiv Air Filter is equivalent to having 3,043 houseplants in your home! I thought I had a lot with 63. Just imagine how much formaldehyde the Briiv is mopping up.

Running Briiv for just an hour in your home will improve air quality in that room. As a keen DIYer often, I feel a lot happier knowing that I am doing what I can to make the air we breathe at home as clean as possible.

Sustainable to the core

Briiv isn’t just about cleaning the air. We also have a social responsibility to be making sustainable choices wherever possible. In 2019, 15 million air filters were purchased, that sounds great in principle – people are taking air quality seriously. But these typically require a new filter every 6-8 months. Therefore, whilst you might be improving the air quality at home, that’s an awful lot of used filters heading to landfill. In fact, 6,000 tonnes of HEPA filters (that stands for ‘high efficiency particular air’ filters) are sent to landfill each year. To put that into context, it’s the equivalent of 500 London buses – and they are not biodegradable.

Made in the UK and powered by plants, the Briiv is the most sustainable choice you can make for an air filter. Comprised of four biodegradable filters, the Briiv Air Filter uses moss, coconut, carbon and silk to purify the air (sounds like a Simon & Garfunkle son). The filter in Briiv contains no plastic and breaks down naturally in a matter of months.

Beautifully designed

I love nothing more than when the utilitarian and the beautiful collide to create something magical. The Briiv Air Filter succeeds in turning a practical home device into a thing of beauty. It looks like a terrarium and will blend seamlessly into your home.

A lot of thought has gone into the design of the Briiv Air Filter (winning a coveted Red Dot award no less) which looks like a little terrarium. The coconut filter is like the soil with the moss bringing the green of plants into the curved glass body of the Briiv Air Filter.

Whether your house is modern and minimal or eclectic and maximalist, there will be a spot for Briiv.

How easy is it to use the Briiv Air Filter?

I’m a technophobe. I actively recoil and the thought of bringing yet more technology into the home, so I was pleasantly surprised by how easy Briiv Air Filter is to set up and use.

Initial set-up

Briiv comes beautifully packaged in cardboard materials that can go straight in your home compost bin. It takes no more than five minutes to set up ready for use. It is light, portable and works with mains electricity using a USB cable.

All you need to do is add the moss into the glass compartment, plug in and go. It’s as simple as that. The first time you use the Briiv Air Filter, it will release some mossy (not unpleasant) smells into the room, but those disappear after a few uses.

How the Briiv Air Filter works

The USB cable can be plugged into mains electricity or even the USB port on your laptop.

To activate, you simply tap the black base of your Briiv Air Filter to wake it up and use the + and – symbols to decide on the setting. I don’t find it too noisy, even on the highest setting. You can’t hear it at all when on the lowest.

You can easily set the Briiv to work for a ‘one hour cleanse’ by tapping the ‘1’ symbol on the left hand side.

The Briiv App

In a move all the techie folk out there will love, Briiv have created an app which allows you to integrate your Briiv Air Filter with your Alexa or Google Assistant.

You can use the app anywhere. You can turn your Briiv on to clean up the air in your home ready for your arrival.

How I use my Briiv Air Filter

I have got into the habit of using my Briiv mostly in the following ways:

Cleaning the house

On ‘cleaning day’ I set my Briiv Air Filter up in the room being cleaned. It draws in dust and particles released by cleaning products. Result? Both the surfaces and the air end up super clean.

For DIY projects

Whenever I’m working on a DIY project, such as painting, I have Briiv on in the same room. It draws in any of the VOC nasties which might be released during the process.

In the office

I have the Briiv running in my office during the day to help me keep a clear head whilst working.

Before bed

I set my Briiv up in the bedroom to run for an hour before bed. This helps clean the air up for a better night’s sleep.

As the Briiv Air Filter itself is very light and portable, it’s easy to move from room to room and use all around the house.