Dyson Hot + Cool AM09 review: the smartest heater and fan in the world, but is it worth it?

It's undeniably clever and beautiful — but how clever and beautiful does a fan heater need to be?

The new AM09, which comes in a range of colours (Dyson)

Fans and electric heaters have long been symbols of discomfort — the whirring and flapping fans of a too-hot summer’s day, or the electrified orange glow and slight burnt smell of cold winters.

Dyson’s Hot + Cool heater fans, the newest of which is released today, want to put an end to that.

The company’s bladeless fans use similar technology to the stuff that powers the company’s vacuums. And you can tell — they’re built out of the same slim, high-quality plastic and are designed with a similar comfortingly industrial look.

It comes at a similarly upper-end price tag, retailing at £399.99 direct from Dyson.

The look is the first thing that greets you when you open the box. Instead of blades, the fan features an empty oblong through which the hot or cold air is sent; that’s mounted on top of a cylindrical base which can shift around to ensure that the air is distributed evenly throughout the room.

It does that distribution using the big technology that the company is trumpeting for this version of the fan — “Dyson Jet Focus Technology”. That uses the Coanda effect, where air moves as it travels over a surface, and which the company says is also used to separate streams of blood in the medical world as well as in the development of Formula 1 Cars the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III.

Dyson's Jet Focus technology means that hot or cold air is sent directly to you, rather than wasted in the rest of the room. Picture: Dyson (Dyson)

Older versions of the fan sent air throughout the room through one aperture. But the new one uses that focusing technology to give the option to blast it out in a much narrower band, which is perfect for when there’s only one person in the room and you don’t want to waste time or money heating parts where you’re not sitting.

But the fan can still heat up a whole room quickly and efficiently, if you want it to. While, even at it’s hottest settings, sitting next to the fan is still not uncomfortably hot, it can kick out enough heat and air to ensure that even a big, quite cold room can be warmed up in just a few minutes.

It’s that distribution that sets the AM09 apart from competing — and much cheaper — electric heaters. While those with large panels can keep you warm by sitting next to them, moving across the room means venturing back out into the cold; the new Dyson fan fixes that.

Kicking out such air isn’t quiet. While Dyson says that the AM09 is 75 per cent quieter than its other fan heaters, it’s still fairly noisy at its highest settings. It’s fine on its colder settings or when lightly heating the room, but perhaps slightly distracting when it’s at full go.

Controlling those different settings is done from a remote, which can attach magnetically to the top of the fan when it’s not being used. That or buttons on the front can be used to make changes that are shown on a small screen on the front of the base. The fan can be set to go for a short timem adjusted from 10 different power settings and you can choose what temperature it will go at.

The fan is about knee high, standing on its swivelling base. That sometimes means that for it to really do its work, you have to place it on another surface like a table. But it does tip back, so can still be happily used while sat on the floor.

Dyson’s new fan and heater is the smartest and most beautiful you can get of either appliance, let alone both. Whether it’s worth its hefty price tag is a question of whether you need your fan to be smart and beautiful — with the elegantly-engineered precision and cleverness that brings.