My Months-Long Journey to Get Rid of the Secondhand Smoke Smell in My Apartment

Late last November, as a winter chill started creeping into the New York City air, something other than a cold front began to waft into my apartment: the noxious stench of cigarette smoke. It crept up slowly and then all at once; what I initially assumed was a neighbor puffing a cig on an adjacent balcony evolved, in the span of about an hour, into a full-on assault, giving my living room the scent and air quality of the Off-Track Betting where my mom works, circa 1992. It smelled like the Brooklyn warehouse parties I frequented in the early 2000s. It smelled like the Joker moved into my building, and was exacting toxic revenge.

The city of New York banned smoking inside public buildings in 2018, but I live in a co-op, where cigarettes are banned in common areas, but it’s up to the discretion of anyone who wants to rip through a pack of bogies a day inside their cribs. And while there is a floor in my building so rife with chainsmokers that it actually stinks up the elevator every time it stops there, I have never had a problem with smelling any of my neighbors’ toxic fumes. When the stench continued into the next day, I began my investigation, rapping on the door of all neighbors adjacent, above, and below to figure out whether someone was just having some saucy family members over for Thanksgiving; I could ask them politely to smoke outside or even out the window, we’re all cooperators here, and it would be done. But nobody was having my problem, nor was anyone smoking. Building management had no idea what was going on, either, nor did they have real solutions. By the time I realized the stench was coming up through the radiator vents into my living room, bedroom, and—ugh—into the vanity beneath my bathroom sink, I was keeping an hourly log of when the smoke was entering my apartment and how it was affecting me, which made me feel like Homeland’s Clare Danes depicting Carrie off her meds, all wild-eyed and conspiratorial. An example:

Weds Nov 26

11:59 a.m. cigarettes in living room

2:44 p.m. cigarettes

3:55 p.m. cigarettes

4:58 p.m. cigarettes

Terrible headache, stinging eyes, four Advil by 5 p.m. Went outside for air.

7:01 p.m. cigarettes

7:15 p.m. cigarettes in bedroom

Headache continues. Hair smells like smoke, as does all furniture.

10:19 p.m. cigarettes

11:19 p.m. cigarettes

11:54 p.m. cigarettes

Went to bed with window open, 40-degree weather. 

I had placed large bowls of vinegar around the apartment to absorb the scent (useless) and was running my now-discontinued BlueAir 411+ (discontinued) nonstop. While I love that air purifier’s quiet nature and clean, round aesthetic, it wasn’t cutting through the cigarettes the way it cleaned the air in my apartment during the worst of the 2023 wildfires, when the New York skyline took on the orange glow of Blade Runner 2049. Having no real recourse—but with my increase in insanity commensurate with how difficult it was for me to breathe—in December, I decided to call in the big guns, trying out two big, HEPA-grade air purifiers with specifications I gleaned I needed from various Reddit threads that were sent to me from their respective brands to test. I hoped I could attain at least a bit of relief from the actually toxic air I was breathing, and how well they might filter out the putrid stench of smoke.

The first bit of reprieve to arrive was the Airthings Renew, a smart air purifier retaining for $299.99 with design inspired by "the beauty of Nordic landscapes and interiors." Boasting four separate filters, including charcoal and HEPA-13—a high-efficiency air filter capable of capturing 99.97 percent of 0.3 micrometer-sized air particles— and two washable prefilters, it promised a "high-precision laser-based particular matter sensor," which I would later learn meant: this thing kicks into gear anytime you so much as think about cooking something in a pan on your stove.

I placed the Airthings Renew in my 500-square-foot, open plan living room/kitchen, where I spend most of my time. It comes in a discrete steely gray, and while its filter side does in fact look like a high-end speaker in a fancy recording studio, perched on my living room floor it also resembled a much nicer version of the computer tower where I logged into Yahoo circa 1999. (It would look best mounted on a wall, but my smoke frenzy tossed aesthetics out the window.) It was also a relief to see that the Renew had a cute cable compartment to keep the potentially unwieldy electrical cord in neat order. I initially had some trouble installing the app that serves as a mobile remote and allows you to track your air quality. If you have an older iPhone, or do not want to upgrade to a more recent iOS, you might have to operate the Renew without the stats. And the stats, generated from the AirThings app, are granular and a bit hard to parse without a little research, though in theory I appreciated the ability to check in on, say, the pollen forecast. While installing the app was a little frustrating—I had to update my OS on my laptop because it didn’t work on my older phone—once the monitor finally started working I became obsessed with checking it, following the little graph line whenever it spiked and sniffing my radiators to see if the dreaded cigarette smoke was emitting from the vents.

After I plugged it in, the Renew sensed that I was living in the air equivalent of a 19th-century factory and kicked in hard. Within an hour, I was able to start breathing again without pressing my face to the window for oxygen, though it didn’t do much to eliminate the actual stench of cigarettes, which by that time had seeped into my furniture. (Spoiler: the cigarette problem has been resolved for about a month now and the vanity under my sink still reeks, even with an industrial-size tub of Ozium gel stuck in an enclosed, three-by-three space.) And that laser sensor was extremely sensitive; one night, while cooking a particularly odious stir-fry of onions and fried chicken, the Airthings kicked on into full gear, noting my air quality had peaked up to poor and doing everything it could to eliminate the smokiness and stank. It was so effective it got into a fight with my aromatherapy diffuser, kicking on high anytime the offending mist poisoned my air with eucalyptus essential oil scent. My guy! So picky!

The Renew’s minimalist Norwegian design would presumably look great amid a Japandi decor scheme—and, when filtering on high mode, emitted a noise low enough to not be invasive but not so low I didn’t know it was there—but as a Xennial I couldn’t quite get past the computer-tower vibes. (It also resembles a bigger version of a current-day modem.) But as it did its automatic thing, I came to appreciate it as I do my robot vacuum—this is the future we were promised, automated to make our lives just a bit easier. I loved its effectiveness, though—unlike its bumbling robot vacuum sibling, it is a dutiful soldier in the regulation of cleanliness.

The second air purifier I tried was the RabbitAir A3, an ultra high-end apparatus selling for $749.95 that offers attachable art panels along with its customized filter options so, should you hang it on the wall, it doesn’t only look like a giant box. I chose the Italian Renaissance-invoking "Vase of Flowers" art and selected the specialized odor remover filter. The RabbitAir, too, is set up for hanging—it’s generally better to mount any hangable air filter three to five feet up, though the A3 is a top-filtering purifier so it worked fine for me on the floor—but also came with a tiny level, which was both cute and useful were I going to hang it. (Adding an art option makes it more tempting, and it was nice of them to acknowledge that most air purifiers aren’t the most aesthetically pleasing devices.) The RabbitAir also runs on a user-friendly app, has a little velcro strap attached to the electrical cord for organization, and includes a selection of LED mood lighting that includes purple, cyan, yellow, or a softly shifting rainbow. (I’m a sucker for any light that invokes a rave, so I was immediately taken by this detail.)

After unplugging the Renew, the smoke had returned apace, so I was curious if the RabbitAir would do as thorough a job at removing the stench—and I was not disappointed. It, too, recognized that I was having a serious problem, letting me know my air quality was POOR and blasting on with a vengeance. It was a little quieter than the Renew—on high, I would compare it to very delicate white noise machine, barely there—and it did seem like the smoke was being removed slightly faster; the odor diminished a bit, too, though by that time I realized nothing but a professional cleaner could eliminate the smell from my couch. It worked in overtime, too, as I bleached the sink and cleaned the kitchen with a vinegar/essential oil blend. By 12:30 p.m. on the first day I tried it, the easily readable app said the air quality was FAIR; by 1:10, it had gone to EXCELLENT. I could breathe!

Like the Renew, the RabbitAir was sensitive to odors I actually wanted; both filters sped up at the hint of an aromatherapy diffuser, never mind a lit candle. This is, objectively, proof of their excellence, though I have found myself turning both off to ensure they don’t suck up my fragrance. But when it came to the smoke, both air filters were effective at cleaning up the toxic hell of the cigarette smoke. The Renew, at $299, is a better price, but if you have $769.95 to kick around and are as desperate as I was, the RabbitAir was slightly more effective and had a few more bells and whistles, like a negative ionizer.

That said, I’m in love with both of these air purifiers, which gave me relief during the long months of cigarette smoke inundation. My problem, by the way, just resolved itself—one day, the smoke just stopped, leading me to believe the problem had been a busted air vent on the roof of our building. This was great, because I was being driven to insanity and genuinely thought I might have to move. I’m still using both air filters, it’s just that now my oxygen is crisper. Friends have asked me if I think the filters are actually cleaning the air or if I am just psychosomatically convinced that they are simply because they are there. But the fact that I’m still alive and living in this apartment is proof that it’s not.

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