In my home, my husband and I never really paid attention to the air we breathed or what it smelled like. However, unlike our previous apartments that had windows and other ventilation in the kitchen area, the one we moved into last year doesn't have any of this. As a result, every time we cook, the smell just lingers.

It wasn’t that our apartment reeked horribly, but it was hard to get rid of smells that would linger after my husband would make chicken stock (which requires hours of boiling bones) or if we made any type of fish. I learned that one way to easily get rid of smells—instead of just masking them with plug-in air fresheners—is to use an air purifier with an activated carbon filter to help absorb and neutralize odors.

I got the Rabbit Air MinusA3 Ultra-Quiet Air Purifier for this exact feature, as normal air purifiers with HEPA filters simply trap particles—they don’t actually absorb or purify any odors. Additionally, I was able to select a custom odor remover filter to help with this problem further. As a result of the activated carbon filter and the custom filter working together, my apartment air has never felt—or smelled—fresher.

I don’t own an air quality monitor, and the MinusA3 doesn’t give any exact numbers or readings, so it’s difficult for me to quantify how the air quality in our apartment has improved. However, the machine does offer an air quality indicator (represented with a cloud icon) to give some idea of how much pollution is floating around.

There are four small lights above the cloud icon, each of which represents varying levels of pollution. When one light is on, that means there’s a low level of air pollution. If all four lights are on, that means there’s a high level of pollution in the air. In my experience with the Rabbit Air, we’d frequently get a four-light rating while we were cooking, either from the food’s odor or smoke.

The sensor picks up on the slightest bit of pollution in the air, too. You can adjust the sensitivity using the gear icon, which controls the Auto Mode/Sensitivity function. Like the air quality indicator function, this also has different lights that indicate different levels of sensitivity. However, instead of four lights, there are three—one is low sensitivity, two is medium, and three is high.

We left the MinusA3 on the default low setting, which means that the device will adjust the fan speed when it detects a decent level of pollutants or smells in the air. At the highest sensitivity level (three lights), the device will activate the fan the second it detects even the slightest bit of pollution in the air.

In our case, getting rid of smells and the occasional smoke from cooking was more than enough for the default option. You can even turn this off completely and just operate the fan speed manually if you’d like.

While we’re on the subject, the device’s fan is virtually silent. This is usually what makes or breaks the air purifier experience for a lot of people. It’s not to say they’re all loud, but sometimes even low humming that’s reminiscent of a running refrigerator can be irritating.

Like I mentioned, the fan on its lowest setting is almost impossible to hear. When you aren’t cooking, or if there isn’t any smoke, pollen, or other pollutants in the air, the MinusA3 will just operate at this setting, quietly filtering the air.

However, whenever we reached that level four pollution in the air, the fan did crank up the volume. The noise was definitely louder than a fridge humming, but even then, it wasn’t too disruptive.

I can say with certainty that our apartment no longer smells like food. To give you a better idea: Prior to owning the MinusA3, almost any time we made dinner, the smell of what we made the night before would linger in the air for more than a day. Ever since we started using this device, we don’t smell a whiff of dinner from the night before. I attribute this to the combination of the activated carbon and custom odor remover filters in the machine.

Usually the MinusA3 can get rid of a smell within a night—the next morning, our kitchen smells fresh. Even with particularly fragrant foods like fish or chicken stock, the entire apartment is scent-free within a few hours.

Something else that we appreciate is how fast the MinusA3 clears smoke. We rarely burn anything in the kitchen, but it doesn’t take much for our apartment to get smoky. As a result, the smoke detector in our apartment will always go off whenever there’s even the slightest bit in the air.

Since we started using the MinusA3, the smoke detector hasn’t gone off while cooking. Even when we accidentally burned a few taco shells, the MinusA3 still managed to quickly filter enough of it to keep the smoke detector silent.

The MinusA3 is not cheap at $760, but it covers an exceptional area—our apartment is roughly 750 square feet, and the machine has no problem clearing odor from it. The unit is rated to cover up to 1,070 square feet.

I can see this being ideal for those who cook a lot and want to ensure that their home doesn’t smell like food all the time. You also get the added benefit of improving your baseline air quality since the device also does everything that a normal air purifier does (removes VOCs, allergens, and smoke in the air).

However, it’s a fairly large device, coming in at 8.4 x 18.9 x 19.7 inches, or about the size of a small, under-desk filing cabinet. This may not work if you’re tight on space in your home. But if you can fit it, feel free to cook the smelliest thing you can think of without worry, because the MinusA3 will certainly handle it.

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