Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
For other stuff, I usually check Wirecutter and cross-reference it with Reddit reviews.
I also have noticed that Wirecutter seems.. less qualitative (?) since they got bought by The NY Times.
Here's a good video detailing some of why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa1y9JRip68
Head-fi is full of woo that thinks that you need a four digit power cable, and a rare wood volume knob.
Some of the videos from High End - audio show in Berlin right now are just mind blowing.
$12,000 power cables. Speakers that are $345,000 - each. Preamps that are the size of 4U rack servers. "This device streams from Tidal and Qobuz to your system. It's $39,000."
I cannot recommend audio science review[0] enough. They're the opposite. All about objective measurements and rigor. None of the bullshit.
It's really bad for HDR monitors, where an edge lit "fake HDR" monitor can get a 7, while failing the basics that are necessary to give a proper HDR experience. Something like TFTCentral or HardwareUnboxed's HDR checklists, and just straight up failing monitors that don't meet all the requirements would be much better than their current (imo misleading) system that can give good SDR monitors high HDR scores, when they're terrible at HDR.
Personally, I don't trust reviews unless I personally know the reviewer. Too much garbage out there.
I bought a subscription a few months ago because I needed to buy several large appliances for my home, but all I found behind that paywall curtain was computer-generated tables of star ratings and statistics about mechanical reliability. Which is probably useful to somebody, but isn't something I found valuable.
I ended up ignoring CR's data tables, cancelling my subscription, and buying the same models of appliances my parents have because at least I could try those out in person and verify that they worked decently well without any glaring flaws.
Apparently, each air purifier which can handle a large room is big, heavy and loud. And the air purifiers that score highly on being quiet have the downside that they can only handle small rooms. Oh, and they did measure the CADR, and will tell you that "this air purifier scored five stars on our CADR test".
What you're paying for is basically three things: a design that looks acceptable in a room, a fan that's reasonably quiet, and ability to source filters in the future.
I wish they would release a smaller machine that was a bit cheaper and could compete in price and energy usage with mid-sized Coway models.
Some of this can't be entirely determined until years after the product is released but you can check the company.
As for me, I went with SpeedQueen for the washer/dryer and wish I could find an equivalent company for refrigerators, but I basically consider those disposable.
Built in fridge: GE monogram;
Dish washer: anything that is quiet (below 42 dB);
Dryer: anything with turn-timers; and,
HVAC: American Standard.
As the Farmer's Insurance jingle goes, "They know a thing, because they've seen a thing."
Every service tech I've ever asked has immediately had a "Never buy {popular brand}, because they all {have shoddy part | catastrophic design error}."
And it's night and day between what service techs all know vs what even the most detailed internet sleuthing would give you, because they actually see a representative sample size.
My repair guy would bring other techs over to my house to see our Staber washing machine. Nothing else comes close.
It's a cage-like drum that rotates on horizontal axis, much like any front-loader. But it's a top loader; the cage has a door that you open to load or unload. The drum is supported like a wheel, both front and back of the washer.
A neighbor told us that this style is seen in Germany, but I'd never seen a setup like this. It's very simple and quite durable.
I don't have any connection to Staber. Just after ten years of in home daycare, 200 miles from anything resembling a city, I was quite thrilled to finally be able to check off the clothes washer as a problem solved.
It's much more focused on enthusiast computer hardware, but Gamers Nexus[0] is doing good things in this space too. Their style is much more dry and data-dense than LMG's though, which isn't everybody's cup of tea.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChIs72whgZI9w6d6FhwGGHA
(To be frank, I think LMG labs is very much inspired by what GN has been doing over the last year or two.)
I go with Gamer's Nexus if I want to know if a GPU used the wrong kind of thermal interface for their VRMs and what effect that has on core clocks second by second, backed by rigorous scientific benchmarks producing huge amounts of data, summarized in highly detailed graphs.
The visual size comparison tool is also extremely handy for comparing something you're about to buy, with something you already have access to. It gives you a much better sense of how much bigger/smaller this thing is.
For screens I use displaycheck.
It was DisplayMate, not DisplayCheck. https://www.displaymate.com/mobile.html#Latest
Their display "shootouts" are unparallelled in my opinion. For example they look at colour accuracy not only at high brightness but also at really low brightness, where displays often 'cheat' by reducing the contrast when they reach the limit of their backlight dimming. Which significantly impacts colour fidelity.
They also do many other types besides mobile displays, I just linked to that as an example.
PS: Sorry for calling out Linux for his showmanship but I just dislike this generation of Youtube "celebrity" that appeals to the mainstream over getting out of the way of high quality content. The only one I really have time for is Dave from EEVblog. Despite being quite the showman he really has the brains and doesn't hold back on technical info.
Thanks for linking DisplayMate, at first glance it's something I'll be needing to dive deeper into soon.
i.e. this came up when he was talking about the wall tv. he couldn't just bill it to lmb and store it at home, he would have to pay for it out of pocket and then charge LMG for every time they used it.
Their coverage of the Nvidia cooler design change was really interesting to watch, and they went into depth on their testing methodology with both its strengths and weaknesses.
Their channel really convinced me to take a more critical look at other “reviews” and how they conduct them with either lazily held thermal camera or smoke machines.
In LMG videos the graphs could be really crazy, though I haven't watched them for a while now.
I really hope LMG does videos in these styles with their lab
There really are brands out there that charge 200% more for a shittier product to just get carried by brand recognition alone.
Audio Science Review was posting deep-dive technical reviews of amps, dacs, daps, iems, and headphones, years before crinacle made a post on headfi, and I say that as a member of the latter since ‘02. Many audio engineers and enthusiasts have attempted to remove the “reality distortion field” that permeates the prominent audiophile communities (headfi, audiogon) for years; ASR was one of the first to successfully to so (excluding sites dedicated to specialized equipment).
I don't think he outwardly lies (at least not in a way that matters), or anything, but he's got pretty good soft selling skills which he definitely uses for evil/to make money.
All LMG channels are great. But to me anyways, they're great because they're basically comedies.
Yes sir, very Atomic. I miss that era.
Just watched a video [0] where he clearly comes across as being pro workers rights, and against passing prop 22 in California. He seems to be generally pro-union while still trying to point out some general issues with them. He also says he would be "offended" if his employees unionized at LMG, which while maybe is a bit stupid to say, I don't think counts as anti-union.
He’s pro-union - he just hopes he is a good enough boss that his employees don’t feel like they need to unionize. He clarified his viewpoint in later videos. Offended was probably not the best choice of word - and he admits that too. I don’t recall the video but someone can find it. (I’m on mobile and on vacation - idk why I’m even here)
That's the kinda double speak I'm talking about.
As for unions, everyone should unionize. It's literally the only way to even out the power dynamic. Good companies, bad companies - it makes no difference. There goal is to pay you as little as they can, so yours should be to get paid as much as you can. Unions make that process easier for the majority of people.
This is absolutely untrue. A kind of propaganda talking point that paints unions like some kind of vicious weapon that you want workers to have if they absolutely need to defend themselves against assault, but you'd rather not have the assault take place at all.
Unions give workers concentrated power to balance against the concentrated power of corporations. That's it. They are one side of the scale.
Pro-choice means every pregnant woman should have the choice and a real chance to abort their pregnancy if they choose. It's kind of right there in the name.
In the same way people say pro-union - they mean "pro-choice" as in you should have the choice and freedom to form and be part of a union easily.
I hope you’re trolling — you’re comment made me lol when I first read it because it’s so misguided.
Someone saying they'd rather not have their workers form a union is not pro-union. That's like saying you support workers sharing information but you would be offended if your workers talked about their salaries because that would infer that they don't trust you to be fair.
Unions are a tool to give individual workers more leverage in negotiations that almost always favour employers / managers.
A side note: Linus could be a great day-to-day manager, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a bad “ceo” if that’s what he calls himself. He can be incredibly personable and kind and supportive, but also have unreasonable expectations about work hours, employee’s social media activities, compensation, etc.
As for not having a YouTube channel, i find that a reasonable demand for employees of a company running YouTube channels. They are allowed to do game streaming stream on Twitch and stuff like that.
In the end he's still a CEO and the others are his employees, not his friends. For that, he doesn't appear to be a terrible boss.
I like the show(s). They're fun. But I don't use them to determine which CPU to buy or whatever. Their opinion changes depending on who is sponsoring them, no?
No, to the extent humanly possible. They have reviews, which are not sponsored by anyone having anything to do with the product being reviewed. Those are their actual opinions and evaluations of products.
Separately they have sponsored showcase videos, or whatever they call them, where they won't say anything untrue, but they're just showing off whatever it is, not really evaluating it deeply. These videos are _very_ obviously different, and very obviously labelled.
LTT has top tier policies and openness about these issues compared to really anyone on youtube or anywhere.
More anecdotally, I've seen them give takes on previous or current sponsors that were _very_ not in their financial best interests. If sponsors are paying for easy coverage, they're not getting their money's worth.
> Well, no, it would work way better if he had no bias.
That would just be lying. There are no humans without biases.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4 is probably a good summary on Linus's thoughts on sponsors/funding. If you trust what he says or not is up to you. I do though.
Edit: thanks for the link to the video.
Certainly feel free to evaluate differently for yourself.
I watch a lot of their content. Mostly it's just fun, but I do trust them to have pretty good takes on things when I'm considering buying something as well.
I do always check others though, mostly for the real gritty details that LTT doesn't usually focus on. I'm hoping that their Labs project starts providing a lot more of those too.
My fav part of the channel is the rest of the team. One thing you can't fault Linus for is his ability to hire entertaining characters and promote a fun environment. That is a great skill. There's at least 5 other people there who could be YouTube empires all on their own.
Yeah, agreed, it's a bit absurd to me how they've managed to collect so many actually talented, entertaining people.
He gives praise where praise is due, that isn't bias. Many times on the WAN show he's reminded viewers and especially Red/Green/Blue fanboys that none of these companies are your friend. And big deal if he's more productive using Windows than Linux.
I'm in no way defending Linus, there's a bunch of stuff him and another staffer get up to that's utterly cringeworthy. But as to the rest of your comment I think it's your own biases that are playing in your head.
Narcissist is probably the word.
Again, I like the shows (well until his rabid fanboyism or petulance comes out). I mostly just don't trust him to review things.
Every one of their videos clearly mention who the sponsors are i.e. the "sponsored showcase" videos. And when they're not those types of videos, but just have regular advertising, they say out loud and clear "and this segway's to our sponsor...".
I'm not shilling for the fella but their content is some of the best when it comes to being transparent about who's paying for their videos. He can't risk getting that wrong.
> Narcissist is probably the word.
He's clearly offended you somehow and sometime in the past so why continue to watch their content? If a content creator offended me this much then I'd just walk away.
Goodnight and good luck to you too.
Heck, even the Wirecutter, owned by the NYTs, is known to push products based on sponsorships...
This is a silly take. Tech evolves and companies release more than one product at a time. It would be weird if LTT /didn't/ have "flip-flopping" takes on various companies.
You can't just sling mud baselessly and expect people to take you seriously.
This mud-slinging idea you continue to push (with zero evidence) is contrary to their financials and directly contrary to their business model.
Why on earth would Linus leverage his entire business in debt to buy a huge facility to produce hardware reviews if that would mean "his sponsors" (your salacious claim) would abandon him or force him to change?
It literally doesn't make sense. If they were truly bought and paid for and producing faux-content that is actually advertising, they would have legitimately zero need to spend millions of dollars on hardware testing labs.
I get it. You disagree with me. I hope you are right because he's got quite a bit of power these days.
I don't "disagree with you", I dismiss you. I provided an accurate description of their financials and incentives and demonstrated that your salacious claims literally don't make sense.
This is good and normal! We should always dismiss peoples feelings especially when they directly contradict all available evidence. However, I happily await your evidence demonstrating that Linus has been corrupted by a hardware partner into producing devious advertising! We'd all love for you to back your claims up.
(See?)
Oh c'mon. The guy is just a YouTube celeb like hundreds of others and easily disposable, what is this "power" he wields?
If he wielded the power himself (encouraged that behavior) that's one thing, but fanbases of scale will eventually always have a subset of people that behave poorly like this despite even being directly told not to by the person they're supposedly a fan of...
In the recent video they did on their most profitable videos Linus explicitly said money from YouTube is only a small fraction of their revenue. I don't imagine Floatplane is much of a profit centre either...
It's kind of rediculous to claim he's a fanboy in one sentence then claim he's just a shill in the next when the evidence contradicts your first statement.
Because from what I see he's both called Intel on it's bullshit and still worked with them on a professional level.
Same for amd.
As for apple, they funded a whole new Apple channel without Linus precisely because he knows he couldn't be unbias.
Linus DOES hate a lot of what Apple does; cases where they make things more unrepairable for no real reason, or various socio-political causes (like opposing Right to Repair or unions or whatever).
Regardless of that though, I would trust a Linus review of a new iPhone or iPad a lot more than I would trust a lot of other sites, because I know he's not going in with Apple fanboyism (the way I would, for example), and he gives reasons for all his opinions.
Fundamentally, he always comes across as principled. If he has an opinion he'll tell you, and he'll give you a reason. He'll admit that he was wrong when he (believes he) was wrong. He'll contextualize his thoughts so you can decide if this or that opinion is really relevant to your situation.
As far as I've seen, his AMD/Intel/nvidia opinion changes follow along with the facts. He's pretty PO'ed at Intel for basically just sitting around with their fingers up their asses for however many years, and only actually trying to make good products at good prices (and largely failing) when AMD suddenly stepped everything up.
nvidia makes great video cards, the best on the market, but he's not going to avoid calling them out for shady or anti-consumer business practices. AMD makes great CPUs and good video cards, but if they have a disingenuous benchmark or claim he's going to say something about it.
I dunno, no one is entirely unbiased, but from what I've seen over the years, I can trust Linus more than most other people.
Welcome to the age of misinformation.
Though I do find it amusing that Linus has often commented negatively on companies that don't want their employes to unionise, when Linus does much the same thing. In the case of LMG, Linus employs emotional threats, publicly warning his employees that forming a union would represent a declaration of "personal failure". Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% with Linus here. Unionising is what you do in response to exploitation, not as a default state of affairs. I just wish he could see the parallel when commenting on other companies which aren't currently unionised.
[Edit: just noticed that this exact point was already discussed to death elsewhere in this sub-thread.]
Mostly in the US, it seems. Unions in Europe are healthy and effective. The key difference IMO is the interest people show in democracy and holding delegates accountable.
But unfortunately the Netherlands is the country with the most Anglo-Saxon model that is still in the EU. So it was bound to happen.
I think it's reasonable to argue against corruption but if you're argument against almost any human institution is just that it is corrupt, then you are arguing against the majority of human institutions ever. Which simply isn't practical.
You're not from France I can tell ;)
But yeah if people in such a small company start organising it means stuff is wrong
He is not without flaws, but I think he is fair, balanced and very well-intentioned.
If you go by what LMG says on their podcast it sounds like the intent is for the lab to give them credibility and to act as an eyeball funnel, even if it needs to be subsidized by the entertainment side of the business. They've already shown that it's possible to make entertaining reviews if you keep the technical details light, so what they really need is hard data to back them up when they trash a product or get accused of being a corporate puppet.
I personally find their videos to be entertaining, so if I'm looking to buy something and I know they evaluate tech products, I'll go to their labs site, look for entertainment videos that are produced from that data, and watch those videos. Then when I find something I think looks like a good fit for me I'll jump back to the labs side to look at the details.
IMO the thing that might make LMG's effort different is that they're going into the space as a new participant. I think they realize the technical aspect of the lab is basically going to be content that needs to exist, but that no one reads (enough to be profitable) and their monetization is set up to accommodate that scenario. Compare that to traditional reviewers (and SEO spammers) that rely on page views for their revenue.
The whole review industry is going to keep shifting towards video and the low cost, low value SEO spam sites are a big part of that. Any existing review businesses that aren't shifting towards a hybrid model like the LMG / Labs plan are going to get crushed IMO. Even if it's not LMG doing it, it's going to happen eventually.
I actually came across a "why I'm shutting down my channel" video a while back in which the host showed emails from the company whose product she was reviewing (it was a drawing tablet or something like that) pressuring her to show the product in a more favorable light.
It's so hard to tell who's actually objective in those review videos and who's censoring themselves at the request of a vendor.
I'm sure Linus does just fine in this regard, but the underlying problem still stands: if my Youtube channel's success is dependent on getting that kind of access to products early (as most top-tier reviewers do), I'm always going to have to decide between being as objective as possible and not biting the hand that feeds me.
If you've watched a handful of review videos on YT at this point, there's a pretty good chance at least one of them was pre-approved by the vendor of the product being reviewed and you just don't know it.
So you might have (made up example) an Electrolux vacuum getting a score of 73, but a Dyson gets a score of 74 and wins their "recommended buy" then you see the Dyson is, like, twice the price.
I can see they might do the review price-blind, but it does make one suspicious that they get some sort of financial benefit from having top picks be vastly more expensive products.
Useful reviews though.
It's one thing for some shady website with little to no reputation to lie about these things, but Which is an old company whose model is entirely based on trust.
In your example, you can see very plainly that the Electrolux is a much better buy. If they'd included cost in the rating, you'd probably be left wondering whether the Dyson was worth the extra.
But it's not all tools and often aren't super detailed.
AvE also reviews tools in slightly unorthodox ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpWsuUItrA&list=PLvgS71fU12...
Terry Love has toilets: https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm
Whoops, missed FCC vs FTC. Anyways, there are similar regulations from the FTC.
Or specific categories like America’s Test Kitchen for kitchen stuff.
Why is the accounts karma important for something like that? Does the Reddit algorithm favor high karma accounts when deciding what posts to rank higher?
And as with other social media companies, the company behind it is fine with it; bot engagement and bot content is still content, people still watch it, upvote it, and ads and other things are still sold.
I would say even Wirecutter doesn't always do this. I recall doing research on some products before and encountering a Wirecutter article and the research was essentially just what they themselves pieced together from online sources. They didn't actually try any of the products themselves (they admitted as much in the article). It was very strange and very disappointing.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-conditio...
> I’m going to dissent here on this thread because I’m not seeing any references.
OK, here's one such reference in "The Best Baby Formula" [1]:
> We didn’t do any testing for this guide, because babies have minds of their own, and it would be impossible to control for all of the variables that might make a baby prefer one formula over another.
Now there might be various reasons why actually testing the product is difficult or unnecessary to produce a helpful, well-researched review article, but there are definitely examples of this.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-baby-formula...
> It was very strange and very disappointing.
To which I replied that Wirecutter delivers on many occasions and is still a good review site that does do research on most staple consumer products.
> a Wirecutter article and the research was essentially just what they themselves pieced together from online sources. They didn't actually try any of the products themselves.
They are saying research is trying the product aka testing…
I've lost a lot of faith in Wirecutter after NYT bought them out. This is my own very subjective feel on the topic and this article has vindicated my feelings.
I think you can simplify that to "in general, quality tends to drop."
It isn't malicious; it's reversion to the mean. An organization's reputation comes from its high-water mark of making the most impact and having the widest reach, and being solidly average after that looks like a step back.
This correlates to buyouts because would-be corporate parents (obviously and understandably) want to associate themselves with the prestigious up-and-comer.
However, replacement-level output doesn't compare to the historic highs. This is made more visible because the buyout acts as a nice "before/after" marker even if it has no structural impact, and it remains in the public eye because a high-profile corporate overlord can't let their new acquisition fade into obscurity.
See also the results of Electronic Arts' independent studio buyouts, where they buy out a developer at the top of their game only to see quality fade before corporate meddling sets in.
[1]: https://www.bbb.org/us/il/chicago/profile/air-purification-s...
I like America's Test Kitchen for kitchen-y stuff.
Project Farm (on YouTube) for tools / DIY stuff perhaps.
However, I would say that's the price you pay for an independent reviewer these days. He's (presumably) not simply reading a carefully prepared script by the vendor. That he actually pays for all the things he reviews is astonishing. Likewise, I'll forgive him the occasional bad video.
Speaking of, in the electrical tape video you mention, he tests for things he cares about. Presumably you would have want him to test resistance I presume? I would think so too, but in doing some research while responding to your post, that doesn't seem what anybody actually cares about. Most tapes advertise heat resistance only. I can't actually find a mention of tape in the NFPA, aside from checking it for heat-damage, which makes sense as in house wiring you would be using wirenuts, not tape to actually bridge and insulate connections.
Frankly, I can't think of a single time I've ever cared about it being an insulator since I was a kid hacking together batteries and wires. All that said, on second thought, I guess his video is fine after all; in my book, at least.
Things that matter in electrical tape to me is flexability when wrapping wires. And how well it lasts in the sun. I get that the later test takes awhile. He has done a of couple year long tests but I get why thats rare.
It is hard to explain the difference in cheap electrical tape but if I was to take cheap tape and super 33 (or 88 which is a bit thicker) and wrap something with it the difference in how well they conform is night and day. And the adhesive itself is also a lot better.
I would also recommend The Torque Test Channel as very similar in approach to Project Farm, maybe a bit more technical and thorough. Their focus was on impact drivers, but they have branched out into other power tools, LED lights and hand tools.
It seems like the only way to really get a review is to find someone on youtube who shows the product being used in a way you plan to use it, or someone who does a re-review after a period of time like a year etc
For me, America’s Test Kitchen compromises on quality too much for the sake of convenience. And perhaps that is their target audience, but they dismissed Demeyere’s cookware out of hand for being too heavy and unwieldy, whereas a site like centurylife uses IR cameras and probe thermometers to actually measure heat distribution and retention across different cookware sets.
I don’t understand the “too heavy” complaint anyway; people cook with cast iron (Lodge / Le Creuset) all the time, and it is significantly heavier than Demeyere.
Yes, and they have reviews for cast iron for people that (a) can deal with the weight, and (b) want the thermal 'inertia' of all the extra mass.
But plenty of folks (i) aren't strong enough, or (ii) want something more responsive to heat adjustments.
They have testers of all shapes and sizes: (five-foot-nothing?) Lisa McManus and (six-foot?) Adam Ried would handle things differently:
* https://www.americastestkitchen.com/tour
If something is heavy/unwieldy, and you have hot oil in it, then it can become a safety hazard. There are trade-offs in any engineering decision.
> One of the principal objects of the invention is the provision of a recess in the head of a screw which is particularly adapted for firm engagement with a correspondingly shaped driving tool or screw driver, and in such a way that there will be no tendency of the driver to cam out of the recess when united in operative engagement with each other. (https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search?q=pn%3DUS20468...)
And the patent for the drive (I don't know why under patent law several consecutive patents mostly saying the same thing had to be filed) uses the word to refer to the ejection of trapped debris instead of the driver:
> This same angular formation of both elements is especially designed to also create what might be termed a camming action during the approach of these angular faces toward one another with respect to any substances which might have become lodged within the recess of the screw. (https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search?q=pn%3DUS20468...)
Edit: Wikipedia notes that a later patent acknowledged the tendency to cam out and its effect of preventing damage to screw heads...perhaps meaning that the head would be saved from snapping off--the drive itself surely isn't!
I'll agree that Project Farm's videos can be a little formulaic and my least favorite thing about the presentation is that he shouts instead of talks.
However, he's WAY ahead most YouTube tool reviewers because he does NOT accept free tools for review, and he puts the tools to real work, often ending in the destruction of the tool in order to find its limits. I find his tests to be very well designed. He only has limited time to test so many things, but he generally hits the important points. He goes MUCH farther than any other reviewer I've ever seen and his home brew-rigs and testing methodology are an order of magnitude better than anything I've ever seen out of a "professional" outfit like Consumer Reports.
The only thing I _wish_ he would add regularly to his videos is tool teardowns so we can see and compare how cheaply various tools are made. (Although we all know these days, they are all made like crap due to the race to the bottom.)
This also goes to the other themes in the discussion here; there's few to no sources with singularly "good" reviews anymore, at best you have to synthesize from multiple reviewers and at times hope you can buy from a merchant with a good return policy.
Usually you can see where corners were cut and suss out whether those corners matter in your use case.
I don't care too much about his review portions, more on the teardown part.
For example I bought hiking boots based on their recommendation. They were the most comfortable hiking boots I've ever worn but their terrible traction literally nearly got me killed despite their claims of having excellent traction. I angrily returned those boots.
I also bought a backpack based on their recommendation. They have this volume test filling a backpack with pingpong balls. It sounded like a great objective test in theory and my new pack had a higher volume than my old pack but I couldn't fit everything into it as the shape changed too much with a sleeping back and bear can in it reducing usable volume.
Finally I gave up on them when I was looking to buy a new headlamp. They ranked a headlamp lower because it's battery life was less than all the other headlamps being tested. But that headlamp max brightness was 3x the lumens of the other, batter life should have been tested at a comparable brightness level.
For similar reasons I've used things like Yelp less and less and tried to use professionally editorialized reviews (Eater, The Infatuation, Bon Appetit, etc) for food, well-known travel sites/bloggers for hotels, etc. There's still some paid incentives there too obviously but I can at least calibrate it to how much I align with the publication.
All reviewers are not created equal.
In the early days before mass-SEO, you at least got the benefit of most reviewers being authentic, even if inept.
Now, we have the worst of all possible words: mass fake reviews + a public trained to expect only amateur-level reviews.
For better or for worse, my reviews about banks and their products have now been replaced by 10 links in a row to different sub-pages of the bank’s domain.
At least it used to make sure a blog article and a forum would appear on most search term’s top10.
I get it for my “XYZ Bank’s Phone Number - talk to a human now” pages. They probably shouldn’t have out-ranked the bank’s own official site, but the bank’s own website was much less user friendly than my own despite the abuse potential.
"My gadget just arrived today and I haven't even used it yet but it looks well-made and I'm sure it will last forever. Five stars!"
Just last night I was eating some of my favorite organic roasted seaweed from Costco and spit it out half-way when I read that they are laced with lead, cadmium and arsenic, which was confirmed by independent third party testing [0].
This website has opened my eyes that many foods and supplements we have access to are deceptively unsafe.
[0] https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/seaweed-snacks-and-foods...
> All of the products contained the heavy metals lead, cadmium, and arsenic at levels often exceeding tolerable upper intake levels. It is no secret that there are heavy metals in seaweed snacks, in fact, many have warning labels indicating that they may pose a risk of reproductive harm or cancer (typically due to lead), as this is a legal requirement for products sold in California under its Prop 65 law. However, labels don't tell you how much lead or other heavy metals are present in a product. We even found that one product without a warning was more contaminated than one with a warning. Our report shows exactly how much iodine and heavy metal contamination we found in each product (see What CL Found).
Individual concentrations can be found in their product table for paying customers. The subscription cost is worth more than its weight in gold.
Run by one guy but he tests really well, bought my relatively cheap 32" few years ago and its great for both work and gaming with VRR.
Will it have preloaded ads that will never change because it can't download new ones? Will there be huge gray boxes where the ads should be in the UI? Will it try to connect to open WiFi or use HDMI to share my streaming box's internet connection? Will it nag me with an alert box in the middle of the screen asking me to connect it? Will it disable features if I don't give it internet access? Will there be bugs and performance problems requiring me to update the firmware, and if I do, will that firmware update introduce any of the above?
Generally, firmware updates on modern TVs are used for creating bugs and performance problems, rather than fixing them. They also add advertisements. Don’t ever connect it to the internet, and it’ll be fine.
The only downsides are that, being a smartTV, even in this pseudo-non-smart mode, if the TV loses power (rather than just being in an "off/standby" state) then it takes a bit longer for the TV to start up the next time. I wish I could avoid a TV having a "boot sequence", but my experience is close enough to a non-smart TV that it works for me
Maybe it's just an outlier? It's certainly slow, though.
Granted, none of this has happened yet... but when it happens, I'll start busting open my devices to disconnect any and all antennas.
Although it wouldn't surprise me at some point if Samsung or other makers started bundling cellular modems in or had deals to have them automatically log into the "free wifi" for the major cable internet providers :p
I'll agree on Samsung's end though. Everyone's Samsung TV I've ever tried has been stupidly laggy.
He's made a pretty lucrative career of great reviews, without selling his soul.
I tend to be heavily Apple-biased, myself (I write native Swift software for Apple devices). Other sites tend to be heavily biased towards Intel/AMD (usually gaming review sites).
I am with you, but that's a hell of a niche to fill.
Most TV these days is so "nails on chalkboard" omg-turn-it-off-quickly that I wonder how they make money.
Perhaps they get paid to give viewers anxiety.
In many countries there are similar consumer reports organizations.
Outdoor Gear Lab for outdoor product reviews: https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/topics/camping-and-hiking/bes...
Oddly there is a episode on this on BBC podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-bottom-line/id2643...
This podcast is not the best (it's often too lightweight and too frightened to dig deep, or the format is wrong or something). But anyway this week was particularly terrible - hardly any teeth at all. But in amoung at all the annoying self serving justifications of the guests, it did try to raise the fundamental problem - truth, trust, and a sea of opinions, mendacious or not. How do we deal with it all?
I used to too, for quite a few years.
However, their IT related reviews boiled down to "Windows PC: Good, Apple: Pretty, Linux and Open Source: Not on my watch". A Consumer Forum "for good" completely ignores Open Source - why? Personally I think it is down to a lack of imagination rather than anything politically motivated.
I did find many of their reviews useful - you get some great details on their working and they spend a decent amount of time on reviewing non IT stuff. The content articles were also often very decent, well written and often thought provoking. Their consumer campaigning has got as far as making changes to Laws too in the past so I do think Which is a general force for good.
I just got pissed off that as soon as a laptop or desktop or software article came along, the usual turgid crap would come out. Perhaps this has improved since around 2015 when I ditched them after being a subscriber for over 10 years.
Because for general consumers, most of it really isn't suitable compared to their competition.
Today’s modern review sites are skewed in favour of whoever pays the most commission. It warps recommendations which is a problem Which never had.
Anyways, how specifically is it "highly flawed" though?
They're only useful for a specific set of popular products.
There are too many categories where the content says "sorry, we stopped testing this category, this information is old."
* Real energy consumption and performance when the filter is a bit dirty
* Fan noise and vibrations when the device has already been in use for a year or two
For example, in my experience, the top pick from Wirecutter (Coway) excels on the first item but fans tens to become misaligned after a while and vibrate a lot at low speeds. It happened to 2/2 units I bought.
choice.com.au (Australian context, Aus version of consumer reports) Their reviews just seem to miss the mark sometimes, but at least you can count on the fact its an honest take so you can kind of pick specific facts from the reviews and take them as true, maybe don't rely on their overall recommendations though. funded through magazine/web subscritoions
rtings.com - tech stuff, detailed and with a good table tool for comparison. funded through subscriptions
notebookcheck.com - funded by ads, but does a very good job of highly detailed and consistent reviews. same as choice where you don't necessarily follow their recommendation, but they give you lots of information that you can compare. Their model is a red flag, but my impression is of general trustworthiness.
I subscribe to choice and rtings to support them because honest brokers are so rare in this space.
Having been on their private list where they resell items that I purchased I can say that they do purchase and touch every single item that they’ve used.
I also find the reviews tend towards a higher priced end of the spectrum because it is affiliate paid. Nevertheless, I was pretty impressed by how much they put everything through its paces.
For the record, I haven’t talked to anyone there since 2016 and have no reason to pump them.
We Bought Apple's Old Acoustic Testing Mini-Chamber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n97ot-gXXVw
This Thing is Huge: Fan Tester Setup, Install, & Overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikRcG1xE3xs
The owner can go into obsessive detail about equipment features that I, at least, have never thought about, like knurling on barbells [2]. I have learned a lot from his videos.
I find „site:Reddit.com“ a much much much better source of actual information that isn’t SEO spam.
Also, to use Amazon I search for the 1/2/3-star reviews and see if I disagree with the given reason for the low review. If I disagree, I will contemplate buying the product.
> googling "reviews of X"
DDG produces somewhat better results, or at least does not rank the seo spam, generated garbage up to the first page. Also, I do not have ads following me everywhere for the next week.
We need a better place than reddit where a wide variety of users can congregate and honestly discuss their experiences with products. Very hard problem when the market is basically at odds with what consumers want, in this regard.
It’s pretty obvious that the Wirecutter has used HEPA standard filters as a filter for whittling down the many air purifiers that exist in the world. They eliminated the IKEA filters because they do not meet HEPA standards (this blog’s focus on he true-HEPA marketing term is misguided, because the authors own referenced wiki link shows that E12 is not considered HEPA). However, they also reached out to IKEA about this, and the IKEA spokesperson told them their focus is on PM2.5.
They don’t recommend the IKEA filter based not on its inability to capturer finer particles, but because it’s not AS efficient as capturing finer particles as HEPA filters, AND because of its lower CADR.
It doesn’t meet the standards they set, so they don’t include it for price comparisons.
Maybe they haven’t set the right standards. Maybe they should have allowed for lower CADRs or for filters that meet lower filtration standards than HEPA.
However, the insinuation this article makes that they don’t seem to understand what they’re talking about is completely wrong.
Maybe this author should try reviewing over 20-30+ different air purifiers at a minimum without setting arbitrary thresholds up front and then get back to the Wirecutter folks.
That is due to MPPS - the only thing that matters is the actual reference particle size, not larger or smaller particles, as these are ultimately easier to filter. That is, particles between 0.2 and 0.3 microns are the most difficult to effectively filter out.
> their focus is on PM2.5
Which doesn't mean it doesn't trap 0.3 micron particles, as PM2.5 is Particulate Matter up to 2.5 microns in size, not 2.5 microns and up.
There are inconsistencies between their main air filter recommendation article and the specific review; if you haven't, read the article about the IKEA filter here: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/ikea-fornuftig-air-p...
> But it isn’t a true-HEPA purifier, or a very powerful purifier, period. It’s designed to capture PM2.5—that is, particles 2.5 microns in diameter and above, in contrast to the 0.3-micron HEPA standard. That means it’s optimized for larger airborne particles such as pollen and mold spores, rather than for very fine particulates like wildfire smoke, as HEPA filters are.
First, "True-HEPA" has no legal or scientific meaning, so that's not a great look.
Second, and a minor point, the 0.3-micron standard related to the US HEPA standard, not the EU one. It is true that acording to IKEA it doesn't meet the EU standard for HEPA (barely), but we don't know whether it meets the US one. Eliding the difference between different standards isn't helpful
Third, and more seriously, PM2.5 means particles 2.5 microns in diameter and smaller, not larger, and PM2.5 filters are designed to capture particles 2.5 microns and smaller. Mold spores are mostly 4 to 20 microns, pollen averages around 25 microns, so while the IKEA unit may or may not be good at filtering wildfire smoke, it is not optimised for mold and pollen and is probably terrible at it, so that entire line of analysis is just backwards.
That's a lot of errors to pack into a short passage, and it really gives the impression that the author doesn't really understand or care about the topic.
As for CADRs, the linked post digs into the tests pretty well, and I agree with the conclusion - they're not credible. Note specifically that they get a variance of over 2.4 times between tests, and in somes cases measure a CADR vastly higher than the manufacturers claimed CADR. If you're reading a benchmark of a new graphics card and someone ran a benchmark twice and got 100 FPS once and 240 FPS the second time, and they just shrug and pick the number most convenient for their conclusion, you'd probably think something was up.
(That being said, the linked post is a bit iffy too. I'd call out specifically that they could have done a better job of acknowledging that US HEPA standards are a thing, that PM2.5 filters are a thing even if they're not a standard, and that technically E12 filters aren't HEPA, even if that's an arbitrary distinction most people ignore. But they're quite right that the Wirecutter - on the review of the IKEA unit - does in fact seem to think air filters work like sieves. Certainly I can't think of any other explanation for that passage about PM2.5 being good for pollen!)
Wikipedia cites this statement:
> Common standards require that a HEPA air filter must remove—from the air that passes through—at least 99.95% (ISO, European Standard) [...] of particles whose diameter is equal to 0.3 μm
to "European Standard EN 1822-1:2009, "High efficiency air filters (EPA, HEPA and ULPA)", 2009". Have they made a mistake? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA )
The same sentence goes on to note that the American standard is similar, but more strict, requiring filtration of 99.97% of 0.3 μm particles. As such, it is not possible to meet the American standard while failing to meet the European standard, so there's no need to discuss the American standard separately.
> The specification used in the European Union: European Standard EN 1822-1:2009, from which ISO 29463 is derived,[4] defines several classes of filters by their retention at the given most penetrating particle size (MPPS): Efficient Particulate Air filters (EPA), HEPA and Ultra Low Particulate Air filters (ULPA).
The Wikipedia citation goes to a specification which is, annoyingly, not freely available, but Google seems to confirm that Wikipedia is correct. Many sources confirm that EU standards measure penetration at the MPPS, I can find nothing suggesting they use 0.3 microns for anything.
I think the introduction paragraph for that Wikipedia page is simply wrong, and it's conflating two different standards. The actual section on HEPA specifications, however, is much clearer.
But obviously measurement is not actually done at the most penetrating particle size, because retention at that size would be indistinguishable from zero. It isn't clear what they mean when they say "most penetrating particle size".
> defines several classes of filters by their retention at the given most penetrating particle size
If the MPPS is given... what is it?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Retention is a U shaped curve, with the local minima (aka the MPPS) around (as near as I can google), the 0.2 to 0.3 micron range. As a practical matter, because the MPPS seems to not vary much between filters, and is always quite close (although apparently always slightly smaller than the 0.3 micron US standard?) nobody really seems to stress about the exact MPPS size, and it doesn't seem to ever really be reported.
(Implicitly this entire discussion is taking place in the context of airborne particulates. Obviouslly no air filter is going to work very well against, say, gamma radiation. Or a car.)
Which does mean it is possible that you could have a filter that doesn't qualify as HEPA under the EU standard if, say, it hits 99.94% at a MPPS of 0.2 microns, but does qualify as HEPA under the US standard (if it hits 99.97% at 0.3 microns). Or conversely, it could hit 99.95% at an MPPS of 0.25 microns (thus being HEPA by the EU standard), but only 99.96% at 0.3 microns (thus not being HEPA by the US standard).
Which is interesting, except when you calculate the math as applied to actually filtering room air, they're all going to be effectively identical.
I'm perfectly willing to consider gamma radiation "not particulate". But if we restrict ourselves to considering particles that have mass, the retention rate at the MPPS of any usable air filter is still going to be zero. The diameter of a water molecule is 0.000265 μm. This is significantly smaller than the diameter of an oxygen molecule at 0.000346 μm. Of course, I don't expect an air filter to remove 99.95% of the oxygen in the air. But I do expect the fact that oxygen molecules are airborne particles to be taken into account when we talk about the retention rate of airborne particles. Another commenter has stated that "particles" must be identifiably liquid or solid, but you can easily have an ice crystal of 20 molecules, which -- if it were a straight line measured along its length -- would still have a "diameter" of less than 0.01 μm.
So I don't understand how appealing to "but we're only talking about particles" is supposed to save this. Particles are, at their lower reaches, very small, much too small for an air filter to address without killing the user. It seems clear to me that any workable filter standard must define a minimum particle size below which filtration is neither measured nor desired. What is that size, for European filters?
>> But obviously measurement is not actually done at the most penetrating particle size, because retention at that size would be indistinguishable from zero. [...] If the MPPS is given... what is it?
Something's gone wrong... you've run together two completely separate comments as if they were related to each other.
>>> If the MPPS is given... what is it?
You quoted a standard that specifies a certain level of retention "at the given Most Penetrating Particle Size".
That wording explicitly states that the Most Penetrating Particle Size is defined by the standard ("given"). So, what is the MPPS?
I did say particulates not particles. As someone who seems to care deeply about words, no doubt you appreciate that those are very different things.
So yes, by definition, oxygen and water vapor are gases, and thus not particulates.
(More generally, every field has its own jargon, and the sooner you recognise that and start learning it, the sooner things will start to make sense. So when, say, discussing filters, "particles" doesn't mean "atomic particles".)
> It seems clear to me that any workable filter standard must define a minimum particle size below which filtration is neither measured nor desired.
See above; no such minimum size is needed.
And I rather suspect you understand this, and are merely disagreeing with the terminology. Your disagreement, however, doesn't change the terminology used in this field.
> You quoted a standard that specifies a certain level of retention "at the given Most Penetrating Particle Size".
No. The US standard picked an arbitrary size to test at; the EU standard does not. Rather, it states that you must have a certain level of retention at the filters MPPS, but the MPPS varies from filter to filter, and determining the MPPS is part of certifying the filter.
I believe as a practical matter the filter medium tends to have an MPPS calculated, and then the filter is tested at the medium's MPPS, since if a glass fibre medium has an MPPS of 0.2 microns (or whatever), it's going to be 0.2 microns regardless of what colour the exterior case is painted, so there's no need to retest that.
In any case, the exact details are apparently spelled out in EN 1822-3 if you can't stand not knowing more!
How are you distinguishing between "particles" and "particulates" if not by size?
There's this howler:
> This passage implies that a (“true”?) HEPA filter is designed to capture particles that are 0.3 microns or larger. But an H13 filter must, by definition, capture 99.95% of particles of all sizes.
According to this guy, an H13 filter is required to capture 99.95% of neutrinos that pass through it. He's not in a position to accuse anyone of not knowing what they're talking about.
Moving to wikipedia, we see this text:
> Common standards require that a HEPA air filter must remove—from the air that passes through—at least 99.95% (ISO, European Standard) or 99.97% (ASME, U.S. DOE) of particles whose diameter is equal to 0.3 μm
I know which of those claims is more plausible. The standard described by wikipedia is theoretically capable of both being measured and being met. Neither is true of what dynomight.net says.
If you are, well, you will find that particles are contextually defined as pieces of matter in the solid or liquid phase which are suspended in the air.
I don't know if the standards body took pains to define matter in terms of atoms but if you want to run off and check? I won't stop you.
It can actually filter many types of gaseous compositions so it's really a gas filter. Have the authors even done a rudimentary PhD on filtration nomenclature? They are clearly unqualified to comment.
Seriously though I've seen enough of these sorts of Poe's that at least some of them must be serious. Must be weird living your life like that.
What is this supposed to mean? The solid or liquid phase is defined by the interaction of related molecules with each other. Suppose I have a cluster of 15 water molecules, suspended in the air, interacting with each other such that I can call them a tiny droplet of liquid water. Suppose I have one oil molecule, also suspended in the air. It is much larger than the 15 water molecules are combined. But it's not in a solid or liquid phase, because there's only one of it. The filter is required to handle the water, but there are no requirements for how it should handle the oil?
What it means is that you're trading on a half-recalled education, and trying to sound clever, but what's happening is you're being annoying in various not-even-wrong ways.
The goal is not to find the 'best' option, but minimize false positives under intense time-pressure. Their recommendation is usually the 8/10 solid option that you can blindly buy and be moderately satisfied with. In the process, they drop out or misrepresent other comparable options, but their final recommendation is never shoddy.
This is in stark contrast to other reviewers like IGN who give 10/10 to every new cash-cow game, and The-Verge that tows the 'mainstream' line to play it safe. Additionally, Wirecutter's guides are up-to-date and cover every imaginable category. Are rtings, Anandtech, LTT, Crinacle, notebookcheck, gsmarena, etc. better ? Yes, a 100%. But each of them cover a small niche and particularly leave out appliances of all types.
I agree with Dynomight on Wirecutter being mediocre. But, consistent mediocrity is incredibly hard to execute at at scale.
I would never use wirecutter unless I absolutely had to. But, often, I absolutely have to. Because no one else remotely trustable is going around reviewing humidifiers and vacuum cleaners.
Their homepage currently suggests the following:
> We independently review everything we recommend. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission [emphasis mine]
The "about" page claims:
> There’s no incentive for us to pick inferior products or to respond to pressure from manufacturers—in fact, it’s quite the opposite [emphasis mine]
That's not really true when the same person who writes the reviews is the one trying to solicit kickbacks in the background, and puts the credibility of the entire website into question. Their adjusted review could be completely legitimate but there's no way to be sure so it's better to err on the side of caution.
When they switched their recommendation to Fully, they apparently didn't have an affiliate relationship with them, either. NextDesk calls that "false" — but based on Wirecutter linking to Amazon to earn a commission. That's a bizarre conflation (although like you said it's not nothing) but it's what Wirecutter usually did regardless of the product, and they were up front about it at the time [1].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150603092537/https://thewirecu...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150518125823/http://thewirecut...
(Wirecutter used the word "kickback" here, too, so if anything it seems like they were trying to be as uncharitable as possible about their own model.)
The CEO was explicit in his email that he looks to maximise revenue on the standing desks page (and by implication, every other page on the site).
The "business team" was explicit - the editorial team doesn't act directly, they can only get review units arranged by the business team - which is refusing to receive review units because no affiliate program is in place.
Also, it's not really clear to me that "independently review" has to mean "we completely isolate any business-related decision-making from editorial functions" as Nextgrid seems to assume.
If I buy products that they recommend and they’re shit, I won’t go back and click anything again in my life. Making an extra $3 from on purchase isn’t worth it.
Frankly, for "okay" products, most of us don't need review websites. Even with the shit-show that Amazon reviews are it's usually easy enough to tell an outright bad product. The purpose of a review website (as a consumer) would be to find the absolute best product possible out of a sea of mostly "okay" ones.
Regardless of what they pick, they do not manage the affiliate links. Thats an entirely different process.
>> That's not really true when the same person who writes the reviews is the one trying to solicit kickbacks in the background
No. The person doing the review has no insight or commission on any affiliate income.
Whether you like the NYT or not, their coverage and reviews are made to the best of the abilities, and while mistakes happen, the writers are not trying to nickle and dime you.
And even if they do NOT take kickbacks, there's no financial incentive at all to "link" to a sales page that doesn't offer affiliate links, where there is one to link. And so the best way to handle this is to not review at all products that aren't available through said sites.
Think Southwest tickets not being available from aggregators.
And yet Wirecutter does this.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-stuff-from-i...
"you should instead buy a different purifier that totally coincidentally happens to pay affiliate marketing commissions."
in any case, if you really care about effective air purification, buy the largest/most powerful fan you can get (CADR tries to proxy this, but is an imperfect measure), because the critical factor is getting as much of the air volume through the filters before the dust settles (literally). filter effectiveness isn't nearly as critical as throughput.
nowadays i'd probably opt for two of the ikeas instead, and put them on opposite sides of the room (but not against a wall). that'd be cheaper and likely just as effective.
Their Amazon links are consistently broken to the point where the links don't point to products but are faulty search queries. Like, if you are going to compromise your reputation doing affiliate marketing, at least get the damn links right so I don't have to perform a Amazon search to find the actual product.
At least that's how I've always assumed the links work, not that you have to buy the exact product immediately.
As long as you end up on amazon's site, then the cookie was likely dropped and your next purchase may pay out affiliate commission to whichever publisher's links you most recently clicked through.
I also wish the Wirecutter would publish more detailed logs. They just check the particle density after half an hour, which is generally super low. Instead they could show the particle density curves, or the minute-over-minute decreases (ex: https://www.jefftk.com/p/testing-air-purifiers)
Why not? I don't know anything about HEPA, or quality, air flow, etc.
Here’s a thought experiment: Take a 1000 cubic feet room and a purifier that processes 100 cubic feet of air per minute. (I follow Wirecutter in using vulgar imperial units.) Assume pessimistically that all particles are the worst-case size. If you run that purifier with an E12 filter, the fraction of particles that will remain after one minute is
.1 × (1-.995) + .9 = 0.9005.
Meanwhile, if you run that purifier with an H13 filter instead then the fraction of particles that remain will be
.1 × (1-.9995) + .9 = 0.90005.
The moment I read that I checked out on the rest of the authors opinions.
It's a 10x difference.
The author's "I'll just times .1 by the percent of flow, and produce very small numbers that look fine! See! The numbers are so small!" trick is just … wrong.
The author implies that the difference can be made up by the volume of air being processed, but that would only be true of a sealed environment, where no new pollutants are added to the air.
Setting aside the basic misunderstanding of probability, and ignoring that home purifiers don't operate in sealed environments, the IKEA unit does not process 10x the amount of air as the other units, so the point is mute.
In this case they are measuring the % of particles captured (an amount), not the likelihood a particle is captured (a probability). The parent is right, it’s a tiny difference.
An H13 filter filters out 99.95% of particles above 0.3 microns.
Assuming a volume of 10000 particles above 0.3 microns:
An E12 filter will leave 50 particles.
An H13 filter will leave 5 particles.
The "rootlocus" filter would leave 0.5 particles.
So yes, I would say your filter is 100x better because it literally is.
That volume is not the same volume processed by all filters in the same amount of time.
In the first minute:
E12 filters 10000 particles @ 99.5% performance -> removes 9950, leaves 50
H13 filters 10000 particles @ 99.95% performance -> removes 9995, leaves 5
RLv1 filters 10 particles @ 99.995% performance -> removes 10, leaves 0
RLv2 filters 1000000 particles @ 99% performance -> removes 990000, leaves 10000
By your method, RLv2 is 2000x slower than H13, but in the same ammount of time filtered 99x more particles. RLv1 needs to run 99000 minutes to filter the same amount of particles RLv2 does in one minute.
The example is meant to show air flow totaly dominates performance, and it's not "a trick" to multiply by it. I also want to point out that comparing the amount of particles "left" (50 vs 5 vs 0 vs 10000) is nonsense and absolutely no indication of performance in any way.
(With apologies to Wayne Gretzky)
it is. that's one minute of filtration and the difference is minuscule. over time, this would trend to zero. in 10 minutes you'd expect to be near the steady state of the room. (obviously not completely steady state since you are filtering some already filtered air and probably introducing more particulates but close enough for an approximation)
In a sealed environment, you're right, you'd eventually end up with all particles filtered.
But homes are not sealed environments.
> but homes are not sealed.
Correct, but neither are they ultra high throughput (at which point any filter sitting in the room would be useless anyway, since you never get the filtered air). So "not sealed" is too vague to make any conclusion.
It's a 0.049997% difference, not a 10x difference.
In an unsealed environment, the steady state will be related to amount filtered * % filtered / amount exchanged for any given time period. The difference in % filtered is not a significant factor in the above ratio.
An H13 filter filters out 99.95% of particles above 0.3 microns.
Assuming a volume of 10000 particles above 0.3 microns:
An E12 filter will leave 50 particles.
An H13 filter will leave 5 particles.
That's a 10x difference.
That's it. Yes, one filter is 10x as efficient. It doesn't matter because in this example they aren't moving enough air relative to the room size/leakiness for it to matter.
Using small numbers to make the difference look small doesn't hide that.
If you are taking air, running it once through a filter, and using the air that comes out for an application that needs very few particles, then a 99.99% filter is “10x” as efficient as a 99.9% filter in the sense that the air coming out will have 1/10 as many particles. For example, a 99% efficient face mask is “10x” as efficient as a 90% efficient mask (assuming both fit perfectly, which they don’t, although a PAPR approximates a perfect fit).
But an air purifier doesn’t do this at all. It continuously sucks in air, removes particles from it, and sends the filtered air right back into the room to mix with all the other air. The performance of a 95% filter in this context is barely distinguishable from that of a hypothetical 100% filter. Your characterization would have the 100% air purifier being “infinitely” more efficient.
Air purifiers operate on a fraction of available air. That air supply is continually being cycled, refreshed and mixed. Particulate matter within that air is not evenly dispersed.
That, for a single minute, as a percentage of total air, a 99.5% and a 99.95% purifier produce a minor difference in total air quality is deeply irrelevant to the overall performance of the purifier over any length of time. The 10x difference, however, will matter over time.
This is why the tests, which the author dismissed without any reasoning beyond "looks wrong!", in the original WireCutter article showed such stark differences between the performance of the Förnuftig and the Levoit Core 300, over a 30 minute span.
If you were correct, over those 30 minutes, the amount of particulate in the test room would have been roughly equal for both purifiers. It wasn't. The Förnuftig removed only 64.5% of the particulate while the Levoit removed 97.4%.
Can you point to a test which shows dramatically different results than the ones the WireCutter reported?
> The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird.
When you use the author's numbers, 0.9005 and 0.90005, the implication is that you're taking the parameters of they hypothetical as given. You then go on to say that the difference between those numbers is significant. Remember that in this abstract, idealized scenario, the air filters are only able to process 1/10th of the air in the room (hence the shared 0.9, the dominant portion of the magnitude). Perhaps the room reciculates with its environment at the rate of one room volume per day, and the filters can only process 1/10th of the room per day. Given that, do you still think the difference is significant? Or are you just outright refusing to participate in the thought experiment at all? Because that's what it seems like now that you're trying to broaden the scope of your contention to the other sections of the article.
Those numbers represent percentages (90.005% and 90.0005%) and those two inputs, especially when applied to a chaotic system, will produce outsized differences over time.
And the data shows that the two filters produced outsized differences over time.
I'm not broadening the scope of my contention. I'm pointing out that my contention (there is a large difference in those numbers that is hidden by the way the author presents them) is confirmed by the data.
Note that you are talking about the 0.3 micron measurements: if we look at larger particles the difference is smaller. But that's fine!
There are two big ways that that comparison is different from what we're talking about here:
* Those two purifiers have very different capacities: 135 CFM (CADR) for the Levoit, 82 for the Förnuftig
* The filter on the Förnuftig is much less effective against very small particles. The math above is comparing filters that are 99.5% vs 99.95% effective, while in this case it's more like 70% vs 99.97%.
The author claimed the difference between the purified air, as a percentage of total air volume, was small. He used percentages expressed as a decimal to make that difference look small (0.9005 vs 0.90005). But a clever observer would translate those numbers back into their percentages (90.05 vs 90.005), start applying some math (i.e. 100000 x 0.9005 vs 0.90005), see the 10x difference, understand how that 10x different is going to multiply over time in a chaotic system, check the data to see if that's true, and then throw away the author's point.
If your goal is to play with numbers, you could raise them both to a large power. You would discover that the ratio between them increases exponentially, but this would pale in comparison to the fact that both results would exponentially approach zero much faster than the ratio would increase.
Meaning that the first filter left 5 particles vs the second filter leaving .5 particles.
A 10x difference.
The goal isn't to "play with numbers" but to understand why/if the relative effectiveness of a filter results in a substantive difference in air quality.
The data shows it does.
As noted in the article, the Wirecutter does not explain its methodology or give particularly complete data, and what explanations they do give about filtration make no sense.
I don't understand why you think more of an explanation is required?
Your comment is like observing that car A burns 87 octane gasoline and another burns 89 octane gasoline and claiming, without explanation, that one of them accelerates faster because (90-octane) is 3x lower.
hint: the bigger purifier wins because it has a more powerful, more power hungry fan pushing air through it. Its performance might be further improved (depending on the fan and motor characteristics) by putting a less efficient, lower pressure drop filter in because more air would go through it per unit time.
Meanwhile, two IKEA filters will outperform it in every measure, including cost, noise, and power consumption. But their efficiency will still be lower.
As I described above [1] the data show that the difference between 70% and 99.95% matters, not that the difference between 99.5% and 99.95% does. (And that's ignoring difference in flow rates, which is also very large.)
This is very straight-forward.
[1] (1−.995)÷(1−.9995)
[2] (1−.7)÷(1−.9995)
Can you explain, with actual math, what you’re trying to say?
There are plenty of plausible explanations for Wirecutter’s unexpected results. They could have messed up (quite likely). The difference in the behavior of the fans could be circulating the air differently (also seems reasonably likely). The conditions of the test could be such that the difference in CADR was relevant (possible but doesn’t seem likely). They could have failed to set up the IKEA filter correctly (I once failed to set up a Conway filter correctly — it was somewhat embarrassing). Or, by pure magic, the fact that the extremely clean outgoing air from the IKEA filter was less extremely clean than the extremely clean outgoing air from the other filter made a difference (seems very unlikely).
Since the air purifier intakes and exhausts in the same space (meaning filtered air gets re-filtered), all the slightly worse filter means it that you'd need to run it for a couple more minutes to get the room down to a similar concentration of particulate per unit volume... So the difference in particulate concentration would likely not be anywhere near 10x at steady state, it would be much smaller (but depends how much air leaks into the room from outside, the particulate content of the outside air, the volume of air you're getting through the purifier per unit time, etc.)
Using one small number or produce another small number, so the difference looks small, doesn't hide the 10x change.
In an operating room or chip fab, the room would be over pressure and the new air coming into the room would be filtered. The cleanliness of that air would be determined by the quality of the filter.
Also, if you need air that clean, you need to have strategies for all sorts of things besides filtering.
The point is, you need to be very careful when you put numbers on the internet, and when you read numbers on the internet. Numbers make things feel more real than they are.
For me to actually trust the numbers here, I would need to see the graphs for multiple runs of each filter.
> The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird.
We aren't talking about a situation where both filters are processing all the air in the room. We're talking about a situation where the filters are only processing 10% of the air in the room. That's the defining characteristic of the hypothetical.
You're describing a situation where the filter is on the intake, but this thread and article are about purifiers within rooms. I agree that the math is really different in your situation.
The genuine HEPA filter in a cleanroom [0] is not sitting in front of a fan in the middle of the room. It’s very carefully installed such that all the air coming into the clean area goes through it once. The calculation is entirely different. (A medical or industrial HEPA filter may well be in the exhaust, in which case the considerations are again different.)
[0] There’s none of this “true HEPA” stuff in a cleanroom. There is a filter that meets a specific standard, and that filter will have a gasket that seals with considerable force against the air handling equipment. The “true HEPA” filter in a Wirecutter-approved air purifier achieves nowhere near 99.97% due to the lack of the aforementioned gasket regardless of how amazing the filter media may be.
It is (hopefully) easy to see that e.g. a filter that removes 99.5% of particles, but moves twice as much air per minute will remove almost twice as many particles per minute as a filter that removes 99.95% of particles.
Using the numbers from TFA (20% of the room for the 99.5 rather than 10%):
.2 × (1-.995) + .8 = 0.801
.1 × (1-.9995) + .9 = 0.90005
Thanks for teaching me the name for this principle!
Or the articles about how Python is causing climate disaster while the author continues to drive an oversized SUV.
(0.9005 × .1) × (1-.995) + (0.9005 × .9)
It doesn't show: the difference is too small to notice at every stage: https://www.jefftk.com/remaining-particles-by-minute-995-vs-...
Even comparing 95% vs 99.95% it's barely noticeable: https://www.jefftk.com/remaining-particles-by-minute-95-vs-9...
Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wVIdWR0lWgZRt4gbnVaH...
This is utterly false. HEPA filters are measured at the efficiency of what’s known as the MPP (the Most Penetrating Particle size). It’s the hardest particle size to capture as it can get by the two methods used to capture large particles (impaction), and smaller particles (diffusion).
Considering almost none of the air in a room is passing through the filter at a given moment, the efficiency of the filter is less important than how much air it moves through the filter media per minute, which IKEA have favoured here.
Essentially this filter performs close to par with more expensive units, while using less energy, and having dramatically lower costs for filter replacements when due.
What they don’t do is give reviewers either kickbacks or basic physics lessons.
To be fair, it took a pandemic for me to go to the literature of mask effectiveness and finally found the "on the filtration efficiency of fiberous filters" paper that showed the u shaped curve. it's not something that they scream from the hills about in their product brochures. That said it should be screamed from the hills.
If X% is 99.95% or higher and below 99.9995%, it's technically HEPA; 99.9995% and above it's ULPA, and below 99.95% (but 85% or higher) it's EPA.
So let's say you've got an E12 filter that removes 99.6% of particles. Technically not HEPA, but after one pass through the filter and you've got 0.4% of the particles left. Two passes and you've got 0.0016% left, three passes and it's 0.0000064% left.
An H13 filter might remove 99.97% of particles. One pass and you've got 0.04% left, two passes and you've got 0.000016% left.
Or in other words, one pass through a technically HEPA filter might leave you with 25 times more particles than two passes through a technically non-HEPA filter. So if the air is cirulating back through the filter (as it would in a closed room), what matters is both how good the filter is and how much air it can filter. And since at the high end the filters are all so good, the volume of air processed dominates. A filter that processes twice as much air is vastly better than one that filters out an extra fraction of a percent of particles.
(US standards are similar, but the cutoff for HEPA is 99.97% of 0.3 micron particles, not 99.95% of "whatever the filter is worst at". But the difference is generally irrelevant.)
Except when it isn't, which is kinda the point: Its a fan and a filter, if the fan is improperly fitted, path of least resistance starts playing, if the filter is improperly fitted, blah blah
making a fan spin to the point of getting the most volume allowed through a filter, is probably the easiest bit of the entire process
There are countless examples of recommends products doing a bait and switch (changing the materials/product after the wirecutter article recommending them came out) and just cases of Wirecutter giving bad recommendations.
This is a larger problem than just Wirecutter, it would be interesting to have an industry trade body or something similar that would document when material changes have happened to the same product name/number. Sure, many would be immaterial, but there are substantial ones that happen all the time (if the product is big enough to have "fans" they notice and track this stuff).
above several people note that
> the IKEA one … is the only one in the article they don't earn a commission on when someone buys it
How do you want wirecutter to stay economically viable?
I almost did pay when they announced they were going the subscription route but after being burned or almost-burned (saved by reading reviews about a bait and switch) I decided I no longer cared about WC recommendations.
You might already have a spare 120mm fan laying around - I am using a $8 ARCTIC P12 fan[1] which is very quiet and is designed to work with high static pressure. The generic filters[2] are two for $17, (supposedly) H13 grade, available from a number of suppliers, and last a very long time. You could use them one at a time but I stack the two filters on top of each other and seal them with electrical tape for more surface area.
The fan isn't super powerful (56 CFM) and the appearance is not as polished as commercial models, but it does have a certain aesthetic to it. The area where I live rarely has any air quality issues but I have noticed it really cuts down on dust.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vmh2Ip2Vxg (script in the Description)
My office is approximately 12' x 12' x 8' or 1,152 ft³. That means the room's air would (theoretically) completely pass through the filter every 20 1/2 minutes. As the article explains, even the lower quality filter in the Ikea air purifier is so close to 100% efficient that it isn't worth worrying about, so completely filtering the air three times per hour is nothing to sneeze at...
And the cost is negligible - the fan might cost $0 to $10, filters are $20/year, and electricity usage is around 2 watts or probably under $2/year.
screwhole=5; //fan screw hole diameter (5)
filterhole=92; //HEPA filter hole diameter
thickness=1.5; //Thickness of plastic layer (1.5)
insert=10; //Length of insert into filter (10)I put a layer of electric tape around the flange where the filter adapter inserts into the filter and it makes a very nice airtight fit. Finally, just print it with the big end facing down and you shouldn't need any supports.
screwhole=5; // fan screw hole diameter (5)
filterhole=59; // HEPA filter hole diameter
thickness=2; // Thickness of plastic layer (1.5)
insert=10; // Length of insert into filter (10)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDZ9yUdM2wA
It turned out that my local hardware store had a similar pre-manufactured offering with a slightly less Jerry-rigged aesthetic. We bought one for my son's allergies but I also noticed an improvement on the whole upper floor of our house. Box fans can move a lot of air. Furnace filters are cheap commodities with a large cross-sectional area that also allow a fair amount of flow.
If you live in a polluted city or are affected by wildfires, having a box fan-sized model is almost a necessity. It is going to be noisy and unsightly but undeniably more effective. Having a few furnace filters laying around for air quality emergencies is probably not a bad idea.
For day to day use in a low pollution area, where dust or pollen is the major concern, I really like the little 120mm fan purifier. It runs 24/7, unobtrusively, and is really effective for what it does.
0. https://twitter.com/LazarusLong13/status/1425517352624410627
Well, sure, to a point.
I could make my own air purifier (like the one you link) but it looks awful. I would not want that in my home. So yeah, aesthetics do matter. Its not the only thing but it is a factor.
When west coast forest fires put dangerous levels of smoke into peoples homes, box fan air filters are an extremely valuable tool for lower income families. Consider yourself extremely fortunate if you are able to choose form over function on devices like this.
I don't understand why you try to shame us for choosing to buy our own. Of course we are fortunate we can afford it. We aren't talking of a sports car here, it's few hundreds dollar, this is a perfectly fine trade off to decide to buy one.
I don't see anyone shaming anyone for choosing to buy their own. I see someone pointing out it's possible to make one, and I see someone else defending the choice to make one by pointing out not everyone can buy an expensive, pretty pre-made one.
I suspect you may have unintentionally read too much into the motivations from the comments. I didn’t see anything which resembled shaming.
"The air purifier industry is more about aesthetics than it is function"
I didn't mention anything about dangerous levels of smoke, forest fires, low income families...
I take your overall point but I think you need to keep the context of which it was said and not add a different one.
I'm not even sure what your point was. I never said aesthetics didn't matter, nor did I say it is the only factor. You seemed to feel inspired enough by the ugliness of a product to speak out against it, without recognizing why it exists.
Second, you know you can max a box yourself or hide a thin purifier under a desk or above a tall cabinet?
The restaurant industry is also there for people that don't want the time to learn to cook certain dishes themselves. And (many) restaurants are still thriving.
Are you sure you are a real IT professional?
I have the box fan and only use it when AQI is high (wildfire season)
I think this is good if you are in a wild fire scenario and air purifiers are sold out, or for your home work shop.
Otherwise I suspect it is very energy inefficient and noisy.
0. https://deohs.washington.edu/edge/blog/how-make-box-fan-filt...
All of my wives problems related to allergies or breathing have gone completely away. Guests comment at how good/clean our house smells. Stuff takes longer to mold when its left out. 10/10 would recommend.
If it's something you only use a couple days a year when your region is on fire, then absolutely go with the design with lower upfront costs. But if you're running it 24/7, it's worth thinking about the extra 40-80 watts that a box fan uses.
For me, I figure the electricity difference comes out to around $100/yr so getting a dedicated air purifier has paid for itself (although I live in an area with fairly expensive electricity). It also has some nice bonuses compared to a box fan like auto adjusting speeds and a prefilter that hopefully helps the "real" filter last longer.
Otherwise Vacuum Wars channel had an entertaining test on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QT8SQjp-y0
The channel is great in general for everything vacuum. As far as review goes they put a serious effort in them. The brief foray into air cleaners was a great parenthesis.
The point of the article is that the Wirecutter authors don't understand the physics of air filters and gives the difference more emphasis than what actually matters - it doesn't actually make a massive difference in this particular application. For a purifier that intakes and exhausts in the same space, getting more airflow through the filter per hour can mean over time it's basically the same effectiveness, and using a slightly lower spec filter can be a good design trade-off because it doesn't require as much pressure so it can use less power per unit volume of air filtered.
Of course, in other applications, like bringing air into a cleanroom, it makes a massive difference, but that's not what we're talking about.
He can (and did) argue that this distinction doesn't really matter, but the distinction is still part of a well-defined standard that The Wirecutter didn't invent.
The human element of perception is inherent to reviewing products. I might think something is genuinely better than you because it meets my needs better. Or because you got a bad part in yours through sheer bad luck. Or I had a migraine that day.
I usually just try to google whatever product I am trying to understand and read a few articles and try to at least hone in on what might be the most authentic or at least reviews that are well-written and seem to care about the product.
But there's no perfect system. I went through this whole process trying to figure out the best mattress and at some point you just gotta give up and say hey they're all basically glorified piles of hay let's just do this.
If I'm an expert in a product area, then I'll find a more specific review site or do the analysis myself, but if I'm not, then Wirecutter and CR do a pretty good job of helping me avoid duds.
> Tim tested the Förnuftig in his 200-square-foot spare room, using the methods described above. But rather than focusing on its performance on 0.3-micron particles, he noted how well it removed 3-micron particles from the air. (IKEA confirmed that this was the appropriate size to look at; it’s the closest to PM2.5 that our TSI AeroTrak particle counter can measure separately.) The Förnuftig disappointed, even when we considered that the test room was larger than the machine is meant for, as it removed just 85.2% of 3-micron particles in 30 minutes on high and 73.6% in 30 minutes on medium. Its performance on 0.3-micron particles was, as expected, worse: 64.5% removed on high and 53.5% on medium. Compared with our budget/small-space pick, the Levoit Core 300, which removed 97.4% and 92.6%, respectively, of 0.3-micron particles and virtually all 3-micron particles on the same settings, that’s very poor.
Take the 3.0-micron tests on medium, where Wirecutter claims “virtually all” particles were removed. If we take that to mean 99%, that implies a CADR of 236.2. (The math is below.) That is 75% higher than the manufacturer’s claimed performance on high.
It also contradicts the Wirecutter’s own tests. On a different page, they tested the same purifier on medium in a (smaller) 1215 ft³ room and found only 92% of particles were removed. This implies a (plausible) CADR of just 98.1.
So we can either (a) accept that the purifier’s performance randomly varies by a factor of more than 2.4 or (b) conclude that the Wirecutter did an extremely shoddy job of running these tests."
Why did you make three separate top level comments on this?
A concrete example is frequent flyer/travel blogs. I vaguely know the guy who runs the UK's largest one, I've met him in person several times, fairly nice bloke. He's worked very hard to build his site, publishes high-quality content, and is often the first to write about new places and routes of interest. His site has a thriving forum and allows comments on his posts.
He also pushes credit card offers and his site is littered with affiliate links.
Hmm, you say, that's OK, it doesn't necessarily mean he's lost his objectivity.
Except, his articles will say that the best way to book flight or hotel X is via offer Y (coincidentally in affiliate scheme Z, which is where the "book now" link sends you to). Then someone in the comments will pipe up to mention an alternative cashback route that is objectively better. He will delete that comment and any replies to it. So those who aren't aware of what's going on believe his article is the objective truth, and keep feeding the beast by clicking on his affiliate links. They miss out on all the better deals because they involve booking in ways that no-one's allowed to mention on his site.
This has happened over and over again. To me, affiliate marketing is basically a cancer.
If all the products are similarly priced and from the same retailer (ie amazon) then there isn't any incentive to recommend anything other than the best.
The only thing I'd ding them for is not having a fan speed setting in between "nearly silent" and "jet engine", but you should only need the highest setting in unusual circumstances.
Oh yeah Coway deserves a shout out for trying to sneak some binding arbitration agreement in at the end of their warranty drivel.
And I have the same sentiment as others, Wirecutter is definitely suspect, but at least for air purifiers their recommendations were spot on for me.
How does it define a HEPA filter? "High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) Filter: A throwaway, extended-medium, dry type filter with a rigid casing enclosing the full depth of the pleats. The filter shall exhibit a minimum efficiency of 99.97% when tested with an aerosol of 0.3 micrometer diameter."
So according to the standard in the target market for the review the IKEA air purifier does not use a true HEPA filter and the recommended unit does.
Edit: I looked closer at the European specification used in the article. By that specification the filter in the IKEA unit also is not a true HEPA filter but an EPA filter. The Exx designations mean it is a EPA filter and the Hxx designations mean a HEPA filter.
Also the fact air filters don't work like sieves is pretty mind blowing to me, I must confess.
"Our pick among small-space purifiers, the Levoit Core 300, is not much more expensive, is a true-HEPA machine, and has a CADR of 135, which means it’s effective in rooms up to 200 square feet."
Non-affiliate direct link to the one Wirecutter recommends:
https://levoit.com/products/core300-true-hepa-air-purifier
Just linking for information in case anyone else was curious.
Anything else: if you don't have a site you trust, then the only recourse is to look at LOTS of sites and read between the lines. By "sites" I also include "user forums."
This also applies to movie reviews, btw. Rotten Tomatoes is trash. You can't average Trash opinions and end up with anything other than Trash. What you want to learn is "what is this movie like, and will I enjoy it?" So you should find some critics whom you think are intelligent, and just read them.
That's why Wirecutter is useful: convenience. They might not have the best product recommendations, but for items they "review", they provide an easy to click button to buy the product.
No offense, but reading random review sites, reddit, yelp, forums, misc google SEO landing pages with affiliate links, etc to try to find the best product is a huge pain. If I can go to 1 review site that is good enough and just buy the thing, the convenience often wins out.
I find that if I read a whole lot of stuff, I start to get the gist.
But Rotten Tomatoes doesn't take averages. The reason so many people take issue with Rotten Tomatoes is they don't know how to read the data.
Rotten Tomatoes shows you the (number of promoters) / (number of detractors). In other words, it tells you what percent of the people like the movie. Not how much they like it. A score of 95% on RT doesn't mean it's a nearly flawless movie. It means that 95% of people/critics think it is, at the very least, good.
Taken directly from the RT About page[1]:
> The Audience Score, denoted by a popcorn bucket, represents the percentage of users who have rated a movie or TV show positively
and
> The Tomatometer score represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show
If you understand that, RT is a very useful review site.
"professional critic reviews" ?? Please.
I'll stick with what I said: get to know a few critics, and read those.
Then there's the idea that "Neither size mentioned (0.3 microns or 2.5 microns) has any relationship to either of the design specs" [the EU E12 and H13 standards]. When I google "hepa" my first hit is a US EPA page giving the specification for the most penetrating particle size of HEPA filters as 0.3 microns, rather than the 0.15 microns given in the article (from the empirical research or EU standards, I'm not sure which). This is from North America, but then, the Wirecutter is an American review site. It's worth considering this kind of (IMO) misfire in light of the article making the least charitable possible inference, that the Wirecutter deliberately set out to discredit the Ikea product because it couldn't give an affiliate link.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/what-hepa-filter
That said, in 2012, IKEA sold an amazing year-long-capacity-no-maintenance fiberglass German "Flimmer" filter like the ones they use over-head in their stores to keep products dust-free. That was incredible but wasn't marketed well and its replacement filters were discontinued in 2015: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/garden/sure-it-purifies-a...
For me this piece leans pretty heavily on authorial confidence. But I couldn't find any indication of who the author is, or what his expertise is. I get why he's casting aspersions on their revenue model and how it might affect what they write. But then he doesn't disclose what his revenue model and personal interests might be.
I particularly loved his blogs on the homelessness[1] and drug[2] crisis in the US. He? digs deep, does the statistical due diligence and usually finds conclusions that richer-academics-media houses have yet to find. I have found his arguments to be in good faith and are generally unencumbered by the political repercussions of said findings.
[1] https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/
[2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
my 2 cents. Don't actually know him or anything.
I'm a fan of Gwern too, but who is SSC? Haven't heard of this one.
It is funny you that you have never heard of SSC. Most people I know have found Gwern through SSC.
If his incentives were aligned with money, then he'd have tried to monetize his platform far sooner than he did. If anything, a portion of the new subscription money is already being invested into weird community moonshots that would've never seen the light of day.
There is revenue that facilitates means needed to make good content; and then there cases where the revenue is the end. I have yet too see him do the latter and the former is essential to any healthy career.
It is sold either as a standalone device or integrated into a nightstand / small coffee table: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/starkvind-table-with-air-purifi...
It assumes that everything the Wirecutter says about the IKEA filters and non IKEA filters is a reflection of the difference between HEPA filters and non HEPA filters. But the wirecutter article does not imply that. It mentions the IKEA filter is not a true-HEPA filter and mentions other stuff about the IKEA filter which may or may not have derived from the true-HEPA claim.
However, it’s likely true because the IKEA spokesperson they spoke to confirmed this and said it was a deliberate design decision.
I also want to point out that this article makes a big deal of having found something on the IKEA website about its filtering capacity, but seems to miss the fairly obvious point that in the line it highlights, IKEA never states that it’s filters meet the E12 standard. It only states that it’s tested against that standard.
E12 is NOT a HEPA filter. Which is why it's called E12. HEPA starts at H13 and H14. This is right in the wikipedia page TFA links to:
> The specification used in the European Union: European Standard EN 1822-1:2009, from which ISO 29463 is derived, defines several classes of filters by their retention at the given most penetrating particle size (MPPS): Efficient Particulate Air filters (EPA), HEPA and Ultra Low Particulate Air filters (ULPA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA#Specifications
So the IKEA filter is an Efficient Particulate Air filter, but not a HEPA filter.
There is nothing wrong with The Wirecutter's review. TFA's allegation that The Wirecutter dismissed the IKEA filter because they don't get an affiliate fee from IKEA is without evidence or merit. The Wirecutter does in fact recommend other IKEA products:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-stuff-from-i...
The Wirecutter is not a perfect site, but it's where I often start my product research and it has yet to let me down.
So "Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier" means that it is an essay in opposition to the opinion of the Wirecutter.com website regarding the IKEA air purifier.
I also think in the context of having Wirecutter, a website I've never heard of afterwards, also added to the confusion. Thanks so much!
(Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contra)
Wirecutter: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/
You can vary the cost and filtration ability based on the filter. A super duper filter is like $35, and a midrange is about $20.
That said, it's very loud even at the lowest setting. It's not something you want to share a room with. I use my home automation stuff to only run it when required, based on a motion detector at the litter boxes.
Measuring performance without taking into account cost is meaningless.
Hat tip to (old) Tom's Hardware for being the first site I knew that did this well, with their cpu / gpu hierarchy, which attempted to rank the last 2 generations or so of product against each other.
It boiled it down to two columns (Intel, AMD), with gaps where each manufacturer didn't have product for that performance.
It really helped in "Should I buy previous gen +spec, or current gen -spec, given they both have the same price now?" questions.
Sadly, it seems to have devolved into this, which is less useful: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html
The true answer is often "The old version was just as good or better, don't upgrade."
But nobody gets a continual churn of review clicks and affiliate purchase cuts off of that.
Ignoring it with "price is hard" is disingenuous on the part of review sites. Notably, this was initially one of Wirecutter's key draws: presenting winners in a price-segmented manner.
If the air passed through the filter precisely once and then ended up in your room, it would be valid. But it doesn't - the air passes many times through the filter, and mixes with the room air again and again each time.
That means it is far less important to get 99.9% filtration, and far more important to get more cubic feet passing through the filter each minute. That dramatically changes the optimal design.
To see why, imagine a room of 1000 cubic feet. Now filter one of those cubic feet, and put it back into the same room. A good 99.9% filter has just removed 0.0999% of the dirt. A bad 90% filter with double the airflow removed 0.18% of the dirt. The bad filter is much better!
But I think this article, while it does present a lot of facts, is wrong about many of its conclusions.
On whether the IKEA purifier uses HEPA filters or not:
> They make a big deal about this, which is weird since “true-HEPA” has no legal or scientific meaning. Meanwhile, they refer to the IKEA purifier as using a “PM2.5 filter” which also isn’t a thing.
According to Wikipedia [1], "Common standards require that a HEPA air filter must remove—from the air that passes through—at least 99.95% (ISO, European Standard) or 99.97% (ASME, U.S. DOE) of particles whose diameter is equal to 0.3 μm, with the filtration efficiency increasing for particle diameters both less than and greater than 0.3 μm."
So that's an "H13" or better to use the terminology of the article. (The H in the name literally indicates that it's a high efficiency, or HEPA, filter.) The IKEA filter, according to the website, is a "99.5%" filter; they claim this "corresponds" to EPA 12, but Wirecutter's test results (below) may cast doubt on this. (The author mocks Wirecutter for apparently not doing this "research".) However, this just proves Wirecutter's point: IKEA's filters are not HEPA filters, and their pick's filters are. Is this important? I don't know, but score one for Wirecutter in getting the terminology right.
I'm not sure what Wirecutter is trying to say with the "PM2.5" language, but they may be trying to get across to consumers that these filters are more akin to a typical filter that you would get for your residential air conditioning unit. Notably, such filters are often categorized on the MERV scale, which does use minimum particle size effectively handled by the filter as a metric. Regardless, Wirecutter is somewhere between lazy and misleading on this, and the article is right to point this out.
I'm no expert in the physics of filters, and it sounds like this author is not either, but I'm a little skeptical that repeated applications of a lower efficiency filter are just as good as applications of a higher efficiency filter. Their charts rest on the assumption that every pass, a HEPA filter will remove 99.95% of remaining particles - even though, over time, the particles that remain in the room are the particles that the filter had "trouble" catching on previous cycles. So you should expect to see reduced efficiency on later cycles, I would think.
Regardless, what would really help is if someone had done some testing in an actual room. Oh wait, you're telling me Wirecutter did this??
> Even if we accepted all these test results (we don’t) that would just show the Wirecutter pick provides around 3.3 times as much cleaning per second.
So, even though nitpicks are in order, Wirecutter's pick costing $100 vs the $70 IKEA will clean the air 3.3 times as efficiently?? That seems like a good deal. Even if it uses more electricity and more expensive filters, I'm not going to want to purchase 3 units when 1 will do. (This efficiency difference will obviously extend to large rooms in the same way!)
> IKEA claims a CADR of 82.4 on high, and 53.0 on medium. So even taken at face value, this says that IKEA performs a bit above spec on 3.0-micron particles and a bit below spec on 0.3-micron particles.
Uh, sure. The reported result was "CADR 56.3" for 0.3 micron particles on high. Notably, 0.3 microns is supposed to be the low point for filters tested according to the standards used for HEPA. So it's worrying to see IKEA underperform the stated efficiency by this much at exactly the particle size we most care about when testing for HEPA. If I had to guess, this is probably why Wirecutter calls the IKEA filter a "PM2.5" filter: they are at or above their stated efficiency for 3 micron particles, and considerably below it for particles used in testing HEPA filters. To my thinking that's a very important fact that this article just glosses over.
At issue here is whether IKEA's claimed 99.5% efficiency, which this article touts, is only true of PM2.5 or also true for 0.3 micron particles. IKEA's product page is somewhat confusing and self-contradictory on this issue (which the article doesn't point out), but Wirecutter's test results would seem to cast doubt on the idea that the filter is 99.5% efficient by HEPA standards.
On costs: point taken, IKEA is cheaper at the per-unit level, both at point of purchase and throughout its lifespan. But given the apparent efficiency differences, discussed above, I think someone going with the Wirecutter pick is not completely unreasonable. If you want to dispute this result, I think the only way to do that is to do your own testing (which this article does not do).
The authors point is that if it takes 3 min to clean the room vs 1 min to clean the room, there’s essentially no difference. The efficiency just translates into time, and hardly much at that. Both will clean the room.
Second, I don't believe this air purifier, or really any recommended air purifier is going to use 45 watts for any extended period of time. The main power draw is simply the fan and a fan using 45 watts is going to be extremely loud.
Secondly, I think there is an argument to be made for an air purifier quickly reducing particle count and then switching back into a lower noise mode.
The suspicious CADR numbers do require more investigation on the wirecutter side though.
He probably wants to avoid possible legal harassment by the manufacturer. It's not material to his point against Wirecutter, and it would poke one other party with resources to annoy him.
Bad publicity is still publicity.
While I happily admit to use of certain products, I don't want to serve as a billboard for them.
Someone else replied to me and said it is the levoit core 300. Their fan does seem weirdly inefficient, but comparing the high mode of the levoit model to the ikea isn't really the right comparison imo.
The article says it is comparing to the Wirecutter's current "small space" pick, which since April 2022 has been the Levoit Core 300:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-purifier...
The Wirecutter measures it at “34.6 watts on medium (and 31.8 watts on low).” The manufacturer's specs give a “Rated Power” of 45W, which might correspond to the “high” setting:
https://levoit.com/products/core300-true-hepa-air-purifier
45W for high is reasonable, but the other modes are weirdly inefficient. Even the low power mode uses several times more energy than medium on the filter I have in my living room. Maybe it's using the extra power to mine bitcoin.
Why are IQAir products especially good?
They’ve helped quite a bit with a pollen allergy.
Getting good information has been a nightmare and it’s nice to see a post calling out the utter nonsense that gets spread about HEPA and filtration, with no thoughts to diffusion.
The big problem I have now is that I would like to upgrade to the Starkvind smart purifiers as they’d be ideal, save for again not being able to get any decent information on filtration and flow rate.
If the author ever reads this, I’d absolutely love a deep dive like this one on the Starkvind!
From https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/starkvind-air-purifier-white-00... "Product details" and then "Other documents" gives you
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/manuals/starkvind-air-purifier-wh...
and there the table on page 7 gives you the flow rates.
The filter is EPA12.
"The particle filter is tested according to EN 1822-1 and ISO 29463-3 which corresponds to class EPA12."
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/starkvind-2-piece-filter-set-s9...
Sadly it seems like it’s essentially giving the same not-particularly-helpful stats as listed in the authors article.
I’d love some independent particle test results for it (carried out properly as described in the article of course).
The STARKVIND is a LOT bigger than the FORNUFTIG. Assuming you're getting the standalone model, it's probably the depth of two or three FORNUFTIGs. This really surprised me. The table version is very interesting because it eliminates that problem by being a functional piece of furniture.
The STARKVIND filters are different than the FORNUFTIG, so no filter sharing. Conceptually they're the same - a paper particle filter plus an optional carbon filter. At its highest setting it's louder than the FORNUFTIG's highest setting, but at its lowest it's virtually inaudible. If you leave it in Auto mode you'll hear it ramp up when it detects particulates in the air and ramp down when the air quality returns to normal.
The main reason I bought the STARKVIND was the Zigbee interface. The IKEA Home Smart app is functional, but after the initial setup I only use Home Assistant to control it. In Home Assistant there are sensors for particulates and filter life, and controls for fan speed and mode (auto/manual). I'm using the IKEA gateway for my STARKVIND since deCONZ support wasn't completely ready at the time. Overall, it lives up to expectations as far as control goes.
Mostly though, I just want some extra power for larger rooms.
What you're asking for is 100% reasonable and easily achievable.
Has anyone used https://www.mi.com/global/mi-air-purifier-3c ? Can it achieve lower noise per CADR? IKEA one on full speed is pretty loud (I may not know what loud air purifiers are, but I get concert of sounds at home I want to minimize - refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher, electric water boiler, air purifier)
Does it work via LAN with Home-Assistant? Are they "smart" filters you are forced to change or "dumb" ones?
Recently there was an article on HN on how someone got around this. [1]
> HealthProtect™ is equipped with HEPASilent Ultra™, our most advanced filtration technology ever. Every component is uniquely designed in Sweden to provide the maximum performance and energy efficiency. This patent-pending technology combines electrostatic and mechanical filtration to remove 99%⁴ of bacteria and remove dust, pollen, dander, mold, VOCs, and odors. HEPASilent Ultra™ delivers 50% more clean air⁵, uses 55% less energy and has a 10% lower noise than traditional true HEPA filtration⁶.
https://www.blueair.com/sg/healthprotect-family-page.html
As an aside, for air purifiers and some other items I've found the energy star site useful:
https://www.energystar.gov/productfinder/product/certified-r...
There are actual measurements and you can sort by several categories. The manufacturers submit the measurements themselves, but the tests are at least supposed to be standardized. And they actually display the wattage used by each purifier. The electricity running costs can make up a large portion of the total cost of ownership of an air purifier if you have it running consistently.
I've still had strong suspicion that even with the ones that do "objective" measurements are somehow misleading and that secretly, there are kickbacks for the top rated products.
I have hope that Linus will bring legitimacy to the review space.
When getting a air purifiers over a year ago, I read Wirecutter, Amazon, Reddit, and a few other blog-like websites and used that data to compare. For instance, Wirecutter recommends the Coway units. Yet Amazon had many recent reviews of their units breaking. And filters are expensive year after year. Wirecutter also recommends Winix as a runner up, and even says it performs better than the Coways, but they liked the Coways because it looks nicer. That tells me Coway pays them to be #1. Because other sites tell me about the breakage and expensive filter cost. Wirecutter omits that Winix has cheaper filters and doesn't have manufacturing issues. But according to them it's uglier even if it slightly out performs the Coway.
That being said, I got several Winix units and they've been great. Wirecutter served it's purpose for me.
Are you "The wirecutter"? It's not part of your domain name, if so.
"Contra", is that the series of games? Did you, Wirecutter, manage to port an old SNES game to the IKEA air purifier (like someone recently ported Doom to an IKEA lightbulb)?
I couldn't understand the title or the first few paragraphs.
I had to skim up and down the post to try to get context, in order to even understand the first paragraph.
I now believe that this is a critique of a review. A review that is not even linked to. If you don't want to link to them in any way (understandable, though I disagree) then at least define your terms.
I didn't get enough sleep last night, so I'm unusually stupid today. But I don't think I'm wrong.
The idea there is to separate molecules according to their size. So you press them through a column of porous beads. Small molecules can enter these pores, which delays them and they travel through the column slower than large molecules that cannot enter them. This is pretty counter-intuitive, especially as other similar methods work as you'd expect with smaller molecules being faster to move through the material because they don't bump into it as much as larger molecules.
What enthusiasts and authentic users say is far more valuable than an article that was made for views by some corporates. Redditors and other forum members are more interested in boosting their ego by showing their depth of knowledge on the topic (and correcting others on the topic), whereas corporate websites are more interested in raking profit by displaying (potentially) dishonest information.
I wish. I live in an area that routinely goes to 100ug/m3+ during the winter.
I picked a local brand because it had all the features I wanted: a numerical indicator, ioniser and the filter was aligned vertically, so the device doesn't occupy too much space.
It has a CADR of 300m2/h or ~ 185sq ft/min. That's enough to survive the worst smog events.
I could buy three of those IKEA ones for the price though, which is actually the recommended approach, because air purifiers generally work very locally.
Anybody did something like this?
This was just the first link that came up, but there was state-level funding going back to 2021 at least for this in some places.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-covid-funding-could-...
I haven't seen any data, agree it would be nice to know.
Moved it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31813424 sorry for those responding
Especially if they then can breakdown why it failed (and if they'd improve anything).
I don't want a turbine that cranks out the decibels 24/7 regardless of state of air
The only issue I have with the Förnuftig is the noise level, even on medium it is too loud for me. Apart from that, it is fine. It isn't as powerful and advanced as the Coway but everyone loves the look of it and asks what it is, and shows their spouses it.
Coway is big, powerful, quite silent but also clunky and in the way.
Also, the air quality sensor ALWAYS shows green. Did it show yellow or even red for anyone not living in Hotang?
An easier option is just forking over the cash for the Starkvind, which does exactly what you want and optionally comes in the form of a coffee table.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/starkvind-air-purifier-white-00...
I have had other air purifiers before, and have been happy with the Förnuftigs – the air purifying business is, IMHO, to a large degree a racket that was badly in need for disruption. I bought my two Förnuftigs with filters for less that what I would have needed to pay for a single filter change for the air purifier I used before.
My cat boxes are in an enclosed big box with a single entrance, I wanted to put the filter in front of the opening (kinda creating a walkway) to help eliminate smell and dust. It does these tasks wonderfully.
I don't think I could see myself using them for filtering an entire room, but they do a good job for what they are.
bless their hearts and billy-bookcases but they have never moved me on much else.
and i don't need my home-appliance obsolescence bar to descend even further towards flat-pack territory.
Well it's not that weird is it? It went down because CADR went down, the airflow is lower so the motor's not 'pushing so hard'.
Unfortunately, the build quality is not exceptional, so there is a bit of noise from the unit, even at the low settings, but placed far enough from the bed, it's hard to notice. The particle count is higher during the night, but not as high as with the filter completely turned off. I can even see when my sleep is interrupted, and when I go to bed and wake up from the particle count graph.
I must admit that I capture the data with the ikea "VINDRIKTNING" sensor, it has a TX pin exposed and that is easily hooked to RX on an ESP8265, which simply runs a TCP socket server that streams the reading via wifi.
Snake oil everywhere.
The only review source I trust is https://www.youtube.com/c/ProjectFarm/videos
For anything else, Consumer Reports. They don't accept advertising or commissions.
Brilliant.
I wouldn't mind investing in the Ikea ones if they are tolerable to listen to.
My take is: people currently trust their friends, and they trust influencers. They don't really trust "experts", or scientists.
What are thoughts on a social network that was simply product endorsements from your social network. You can add influencers & friends and list the products you use.
Yeah if influencers want to shill a product, that's up to them and you. If you trust them, then you trust what they shill. But if you want to see Kara Swisher uses a IQ Air or an Ikea product, you can trust them.
Thoughts?
It's amazing how much noise pollution most air purifiers create.
How can this be true? Weren't these standards produced with tax money?
They are also funded by selling access to their full standards reports. You can see a preview for the one in question here: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:29463:-1:ed-2:v1:en
It's only 88 CHF (~90 USD, I think?)
I'm a lot less familiar with the European Standards, and the ISO above is apparently derived directly from the $1148 doc mentioned in the article (https://www.emw.de/en/filter-campus/iso29463.html)
Edit: also, I’m finding Reddit to be a less useful term to append to my google searches over time. Many Reddit communities seem to attract novices who quickly learn to parrot the same frequently-upvoted claims without context, and the experts flee to niche forums instead.
Reddit is full of shills as well.
No, I'm looking at the Otto datasheet right now, and the 2MB memory expansion on my bench which has three rows of 4-bit DRAMs and a row of 1-bit DRAMS. Yes, definitely 13-bit.
No, I agree it makes no sense, but there you go.
At t=0 your room has a pm2.5 of 200 ug/m^3. At t=1min it has filtered 250 CF which is at either 0 or 15 ug/m^3. The remaining 750 CF is still at 200 ug/m^3. The air in the room is now either:
100% effective: ( 0*250 + 200*750)/1000 = 150 ug/m^3
92.5% effective: (15*250 + 200*750)/1000 = 154 ug/m^3
> the great output air of Blueair filter + 350 cfm CADR is a pretty big difference. My indoor ambient air was about 10-15 ug/m^3 compared to 30-40 using the other solutions.
My guess is your other solutions had a much lower flow rate (and hence a much lower CADR). What are you comparing to?
1. the rate at which clean air is replace with dirty air, the ventilation half-life (e.g. steady state from an outside draft, bursts from cooking)
2. the rate at which the purifier extracts particles (CADR)
3. your personal tolerance for particles.
4. (unstated in the OP) your tolerance for noise level.
Ikea arrives at that size through some form of that math, but if you live in a less polluted area, have a well sealed home, or just have a higher tolerance then it could absolutely be suitable for a larger room.
You can buy air quality sensors to test this or purchase a purifier with one built in, such as the Starkvind from Ikea. it can automatically adjust the speed to satisfy some level of pm2.5 particles (I'm not sure what that level is because I don't have it connected to anything smart). I have this in my bedroom and find that the vast majority of the time it stays on setting 1 or 2.
For simple, cheap, PM2.5 and above, the Ikea "VINDRIKTNING" is a good choice. It only offers a simple traffic-light system though, no logging and numeric readout. USB-C powered (cable and power-brick sold separately). Around $25~ including buying the USB-C cable and power-brick, $13 alone.
The rest of the article's points are good, but this one comes across as just axe grinding.
The main problem with air purifier is that they create a false sense of security while doing only part of the job, and in many cases the job can be done better by opening the windows to change the air.
The step number one if you care about your air quality, is getting an air quality monitor. They are quite cheap, and should display temperature, humidity, PM2.5, TVOC (total volatile organic compounds), and CO2.
Then you can treat the problem adequately if you have one.
If your home ventilation was well designed and you live in a non-polluted area the numbers should be OK. Then you only need an air purifier if you create some kind of dust and/or not ventilate during cooking.
If they aren't : try opening windows a little and experiment to see if you can maintain the number in the correct range throughout the day and year. If you can't you'll probably have to have some form of professional installation to get the ventilation done properly or need to move.
HEPA filters in air purifier, only remove particulates but have no effect on TVOC or CO2. HEPA filters are expensive and need to be changed regularly.
TVOC and CO2 only grow indoor, the only thing you can impact is how fast they grow, and therefore how often you will have to change your air to maintain good enough quality.
To reduce the growth rate of TVOC the first thing to do is track the sources of it and remove them (for example avoid bad paints, glues, remove clutter (the less object surfaces you have the less they emit and use inert surface materials), chemical bottles...), and then make sure that you keep temperature and humidity stable.
To remove CO2, the only way is to have adequate ventilation (either by opening the windows or by mechanical ventilation), (and you can only get as low as the CO2 concentration of the outside air (which is growing...) ).
This ventilation will bring fresh air from the outside. Then it all depends on where you live and the quality, temperature, humidity of the exterior air.
For example if you live in a cold place, opening the windows will lose lot of heat, so you can mitigate this problem by using a ventilation that recover part of the loss heat. If you live in a humid place bringing you probably need some ventilation that dry the air. But the key is to ventilate as little as possible to maintain the number in the good range.
If you live in a place where the quality of the exterior air is bad, you probably should move, but in the mean time you can use an air purifier to mitigate the PM2.5 problem.
If you live in an old place that was designed without ventilation in mind, it will be quite expensive and may create some noise, and you probably should move.
"Cheap" usually means eCO2, which isn't actually a CO2 measurement but rather an estimation based on VOC measurements. This has basically zero correlation to actual CO2 levels [0].
For CO2, you need to look at air quality monitors that cost at least $100, or which do nothing but monitor CO2. These will have real sensors in them that actually measure CO2 levels (NDIR). You should check to confirm they advertise NDIR somewhere to be sure.
You also need to be very careful with calibration. If your area has consistent low levels that don't match ambient, the calibration will be thrown off and all your readings will be garbage.
TVOC and particles don't have the same problems, there are fairly cheap sensors for them that work pretty well, it's just CO2 you have to be picky about [0].
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VVK39F7/
The replacement filters are quite expensive though.
I've had two of the very expensive ones die in the last year. Both the same kind of death where the software gets confused and it does not respond to any commands and won't boot.
Crazy that we live in an age where a fan+filter+sensor needs to boot an operating system.
Well, I'm happy except the fact that the filters have gone up in price by 40% in the past year. I suspect this must be standard industry practice; launch a new purifier and price the filters at (near) cost. Once all the reviews have been written and the initial sales start to trail off, raise the filter price considerably.
Luckily there are knockoff filters.
Why the fuck does everything turn to shit?
Fuck Google.
greed, for power, for influence, for money, etc…
when the incentives push someone to “race to the bottom” in terms of quality, this is what they do. always. over and over again.
greed leads to a race to the bottom.
Take a European brand. Add some mysterious spec numbers to the name, and turn a milquetoast product into something cool or respectable.
My favorite: the "Merkur XR4Ti" which was basically a Ford Sierra hatchback (family car) with a vaguely sporty look and slightly higher performance engine.