Hotels, restaurants, retail, salons, gyms and buildings

A lobby smell during humid weeks, a salon that reeks of acrylic by 3pm

Most enquiries in this category start with a specific room, not a whole building. A hotel duty manager notices the lobby smells stale during a humid week. A salon owner gets a comment about acrylic fumes. A gym operator wants the studio to feel less like a locker room by the second class of the evening. None of these are the same problem, and none of them are solved by buying the same unit as last time for a bigger room. The first question is always which space, at what size, doing what job — a dining room's cooking odour is not a lobby's stuffiness, and a nail salon's chemical fumes need a different filter stage entirely (see cutting through nail salon chemical fumes).

Working out what a space actually needs

The arithmetic is the same everywhere: required CADR in m³/h equals floor area in m² multiplied by ceiling height in m multiplied by your target air changes per hour (ACH). A 45 m² boutique hotel lobby with a 2.8 m ceiling, targeting the US CDC's benchmark of 5 clean-air changes per hour for occupied spaces, needs 45 × 2.8 × 5 = 630 m³/h of clean-air delivery — closer to a Pro 800S than a Classic 400S once you allow for open-plan spill into an adjoining lounge. A 20 m² nail salon booth at 2.6 m and the same 5 ACH needs only 20 × 2.6 × 5 = 260 m³/h, but the filter stage matters more than the raw number there. Dining rooms and kitchens split into two separate calculations rather than one — see air purifiers for restaurants and, separately, filtration versus exhaust hood in F&B kitchens. A whole-building rollout across a new condo development multiplies the same formula unit by unit rather than using one blanket spec, which is the mistake covered in whole-building air purification for new condo developments. Run your own numbers with the sizing calculator before asking for a quote.

Matching the unit to the room

Once the CADR figure is set, equipment choice is mostly a size and noise question. The Fillo Plus covers rooms up to about 30 m² at a CADR of 300 m³/h and under 53 dB, which suits a salon booth or a small retail shop floor (see does a small retail shop need its own air purifier). The Classic 400S handles 31–54 m² at CADR 480. The Pro 800S steps up to 56–96 m² at CADR 800, with castors and a PM2.5 sensor, which is usually what a hotel lobby, a function room or a higher-exertion gym studio ends up specified with — a consumer-grade unit tends to fall short in that kind of space, for reasons set out in gym studios: why consumer units fall short. A yoga or pilates studio that feels stuffier by the third back-to-back class is often a CO2 and ventilation issue rather than a filtration one, which yoga and pilates studios: why stuffiness isn't always a filtration fix walks through before you spend on a bigger unit than the room needs.

Procurement, rental and getting it installed on notice

Units are quoted after sizing, either for purchase or as a serviced rental that bundles filters, parts, preventive visits and two-way delivery — there is no published rate card, because the right configuration depends on room count and ACH target, not a single line item. A one-month rental pilot is available where a committee or general manager wants to trial a specification before committing. For MCST common areas, a resident request for a lobby unit needs to become a documented committee decision covering the gym and function room separately rather than one purchase order — see MCST common areas: scoping air purifiers as a committee, and the same logic applies to a places-of-worship facilities committee, covered in what the facilities committee should document. Where notice is short — a client walkthrough booked for tomorrow — same-day and next-day setup can cover a lobby and gym realistically but not a full-floor rollout; see fast air purifier setup for a serviced apartment ahead of a client visit and, more broadly, air quality for hotels and serviced apartments. Servicing runs on a schedule rather than a call-out, since a lobby unit at 630 m³/h loses effective CADR as its filter loads, quietly, long before anyone notices the smell come back.

What we will not claim

A room purifier does not replace a kitchen exhaust hood. Cooking effluent — grease, smoke, heat — needs mechanical extraction; filtration only helps the dining room and the smells that drift past the pass, which is why kitchen and dining room are treated as two separate specifications rather than one. A hotel also cannot describe its air as "purified" or "sterile," and we won't write marketing copy that says so: the honest version states the equipment installed and its rated clean-air delivery, nothing about outcomes. Chamber testing shows the units eliminate over 99.99% of tested organisms (E. coli, Staphylococcus albus, Influenza A) within 60 minutes under chamber-test conditions, against roughly 4 hours 23 minutes of passive decay for a plain-HEPA comparison run — but a chamber is not an occupied lobby, and we say so rather than translate that figure into a claim about guest health or fewer sick days. Certification wording follows the same discipline: an FDA Class 2 medical device listing held by the manufacturer, H13 HEPA specification, CE, RoHS and ISO 9001/14001 management systems — never "FDA approved" or "MOH approved," because neither is accurate. How we hold ourselves to that is set out in how we verify our claims.

Getting a number instead of a guess

A floor plan gives an estimate; a site visit gives a specification. The Clinic Air Report is S$150 per site visit, covers a minimum of two rooms, and every room is measured on site rather than extrapolated from one. The report arrives by email within two working days, sized to the ACH target you're working to, and it carries a sized-right guarantee: if the specified unit doesn't reach the report's air-change figure once installed, we upgrade or add a unit at no extra cost. From there it's a straightforward choice between a serviced rental and outright purchase, weighed up in rental versus buying, or browse the full range on the products page or see how the pieces fit together on solutions. Get in touch to book the visit.