Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier (2022)
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
The table version is nice because, assuming you place it somewhere you want a table, it takes up no room. The regular version is awkwardly large, so placement is a bit more of a challenge.
The killer feature for me is that its air quality measurements and controls are all exposed via Zigbee, and it works very well with Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant.
Related to this, IKEA has recently brought out the VINDSTRYKA[2] air quality sensor. Unfortunately the PM2.5 measurement (as reported by Zigbee2MQTT/Home Assistant) doesn't seem to match up with the same measurement reported by the STARKVIND. To be fair this is just a feeling, I have NOT conducted head-to-head testing.
[0] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/starkvind-air-purifier-white-sm...
[1] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/starkvind-table-with-air-purifi...
[2] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vindstyrka-air-quality-sensor-s...
I suspect that if you keep it away from the purifier, and closer to where you sit in the room, it's a more real representation of the air quality. Usually the air around the purifier would be purer than other parts of the room until an equilibrium has reached.
I haven't done extensive testing to validate this theory either, just a hunch. Let me know if my hunch is incorrect.
My plan is to put the sensor near one of my STARKVINDs and see how the numbers compare. This will tell me if they're measuring the same thing and reporting it at the same scale. Once I understand what the sensor is telling me a bit better, I'll put it in a more useful place. Your suggestion of putting it closer to where you sit is a very good one.
Measured with an Airthings sensor, in my 1970s house, low-speed mode just clears temporary indoor-source pollutants marginally faster than having no air purifiers. In the case of exterior-source pollutants (i.e. wildfire smoke), low-speed mode is insufficient to keep PM2.5 in an acceptable range.
And this is with five air purifiers throughout the house that are sized for a significantly larger space.
In my 2008 house, two air purifiers on low are sufficient to keep AQI at 0 and in the single digits during wildfires. They're rated for about 350 square feet each, while the house is about 1500 square feet.
I've long wished for "smart" inwards-blowing window fans that took filters and conditionally only turned on when the air outside was an appropriate temperature - wouldn't be appropriate in all climates/seasons/times, but in my geography would pump clean air in into the house for months out of the year.
https://naturescoolingsolutions.com/ecobreeze-2-1-smart-wind... exists, but is pricey and isn't from a major-enough manufacturer to make me confident of after-sales support.
The other one is in my home office and serves mostly as a step to help the cats get to the window, the short height is a definite benefit here!
22” is pretty typical for an end table next to a sofa. For someone with a relatively low height bed it might make sense as a bedside table too.
I got one of these as well, and I recommend them with the extra carbon filter. Very, very nice thing to have in a kitchen, if you're a smoker or if you have cats. The carbon filter takes out a lot of nasty smells, enough to not smell anything food-y even in a directly adjacent room while running a frying pan and chopping onions, or when smoking a cigarette on the open window. And the "plain" filter picks up a loooot of the fur that you'd find everywhere including in your food when your cat decides it's time to go and shed everywhere she can.
I made my own filters with over 2-3x the carbon by weight (bought from Amazon) in them, and they last about 2-3 months before they start emitting an odd smell (but they still seem to reduce odor, but they are no doubt trading new smells for older ones as they fill up).
I usually change the filters as soon as the smell becomes odd, in my case, the smell is like a slightly sour and damp version of the fresh and dry chocolatey smell that they sometimes have when new.
Thanks for the info!
Even though I don't even smell it. These sensors are just incredibly sensitive.
Another example: burning one candle increases PM 2.5 considerably and after blowing it out the wick gives a little wisp of smoke that makes it peak from a normal 1 to 50 or so.
It's very enlightening. Even a single push of spray deodorant releases a crazy amount of particles and makes the purifier go crazy for a short while.
Just having an ultrasonic humidifier in the bedroom makes the PM25 counter jump from 1-2 to 200-250.
I would avoid using them unless, perhaps, I ran the output through a filter. Or I would use an evaporative humidifier instead.
"The case against ultrasonic humidifiers."
If you absolutely need more humidity in your home, get something like the Venta LW45 which has a half-submerged rotating disk and blows air over the still wet surface. Works with tap water (requires regular cleaning and a special additive).
[0] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/assembly_instructions/foernuftig-...
I wish that all modern buildings had properly sized FTX / air handling units. These exchange the old air with new air using the heat from the old to warm up the new air and at the same time can have HEPA filters for cleaning the air.
(This is from memory)
We got a lot of interesting results placing sensors in a bunch of commercial buildings. Most rooms in all buildings we measured couldn't keep the CO2 levels below 1000ppm. In fact, most meeting rooms we measured would struggle to keep below 1200-1300ppm when in use and we regularly saw much worse numbers. In one building all meeting rooms we measured would quickly blow past 1200ppm when in use -- except the meeting room management used. Which tended to hover between 600ppm when not in use and about 800ppm when used (though it was big and rarely more than at 1/4 capacity). I guess that explains why complaints about low air quality fell on deaf ears.
We also discovered why the meeting rooms in the basement were so awful for late meetings. At around 1800 hours or so in the evening, the HVAC shuts down. From what I gather, in a tall building, there are supposed to be mechanisms to prevent air from moving back and CO2 dropping down the HVAC system and pooling in the basement. This one didn't. (In fact, ALL the buildings on the campus had the same problem since they were all built at the same time by the same company). So over a few hours CO2 levels would rise to a level where the sensors max out their range and get saturated. They would stay that way until a couple of hours after the HVAC got switched on in the morning.
People would sometimes use those meeting rooms until late in the evening.
If you use consumer air quality measurement devices, beware that they're not terribly good. CO2 sensors tend to have cross sensitivity to lots of other gases. And cheap (eg less than $400 for just the sensor component) particle sensors tend to be fairly crap.
A lot of sensors we found in HVAC systems are even lower quality than consumer grade stuff I've seen in products.
[1] The sensors we used are often found in premium consumer air quality measurement products. So they aren't dirt cheap, but they also aren't that great.
I basically have to keep the window in my bedroom open 24/7, even when it’s cold outside, just to keep my CO2 levels in the healthy range otherwise it will be pushing 2000ppm in the morning.
They're from a reputable manufacturer, are HEPA filters, and best of all, they only cost $14.99 CAD (price may vary in your country). This makes them great as *replacement filters for other air purifiers*. This is one of the things I love the most about IKEA - hackable IKEA products are available worldwide and can be easily sourced and adapted as "materials" instead of "products".
The Starkvind air purifier appears to be airflow-constrained on the fan, and not the filters they used. I put its filter (with some cardboard glued to the edges to seal the difference in size) in a Coway Mighty AP-1512HH (often recommended) and have not noticed a huge decrease in airflow at all, even though technically there is less filter area. Based on rudimentary measurements with an anemometer, the airflow is acceptable, and after about a year or more of continuous use, it's lost about 10% of the airflow after I recently changed it.
Even better, if you are so inclined, you can buy several STARKVIND filters and cut them to size/merge multiple if your purifier takes different size filters. And if you have a smaller purifier, IKEA also has the FORNUFTIG (thinner) filter for $7 that you can similarly hack.
Got to love their product names, as a Norwegian.
Meanwhile I have 2x AX90s in my place. Love them! Got the 2nd when I realised the special it was on was not too far from a single filter change, so it'll be fun when they're both up for refresh.
I'm addition to appreciating clean indoor air, I'm kind of preparing for the next bushfire in Melbourne - can still remember the last one, which was very very bad. I think it might happen next year, and be even worse than last time given current fuel build up. I might check out the IKEA ones to keep the AX90 filters fresh, if the IKEA filters are much cheaper to replace / run on an everyday basis.
(The Samsung units have an amazing ability to go from a very silent idle to a really bloody high CFM, on auto - currently mainly experienced when cooking).
Edit: They are stupidly cheap, found the Australian prices! Will definitely pick up a few in due time. https://www.ikea.com/au/en/cat/air-purifiers-filters-49081/
I wanted to add a screen to the VINDRIKTNING[0] air quality sensor, and thanks to an existing project[1] I was able get it working[2].
[0] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vindriktning-air-quality-sensor...
[1] https://github.com/Hypfer/esp8266-vindriktning-particle-sens...
>Except—what’s the logic here? This difference is core to Wirecutter’s dismissal of the IKEA purifier.
According to this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA#Specifications
H13 is HEPA, everything below is EPA. Or simpler, if it starts with an H it's HEPA, if it starts with an E it's EPA.
Just a few sentences later the author states "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."
This is explicitly wrong! According to the author's own source that they linked above! "HEPA filters, as defined by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) standard adopted by most American industries, remove at least 99.97% of aerosols 0.3 micrometers (μm) in diameter."
I also feel these semantics are evading the real point of the "what's the logic" comment, which was
> we are never given a reason why H13 is good enough, but E12 isn’t. Surely it’s not just that higher numbers are better?
Companies need some way to help consumers differentiate filters which meet HEPA requirements from those which don't.
I don't understand how companies are allowed to add an intensifying or strengthening adjectives to a noun and ends up with a weaken definition of the noun. For example, Full Self Driving is less than Self Driving and now true-HEPA is less than HEPA. Could I advertise that a product as Perfect-HIPPA compliant then?
I mean I know what it is. affected apple marketing fluff for "an audio file that is not music.", basically, "we created a category for talk shows on the ipod. and gave it a stupid appleesque name". but i find it weird that people don't just call them talk shows.
Talk show to me feels like it describes the content and not the format. And the dictionaries I have checked agree: “a radio or television programme on which famous guests are asked questions about themselves, or members of the public discuss a particular subject” (cambridge dictionary)
Some podcasts are documentaries content wise, some podcasts are newsreels, some are actual play ttrpg, some are radio drama. And yeah, many are indeed talk shows, but that doesn’t mean it is one and the same.
It kind of like how many TV shows are sitcoms, but not all TV shows are sitcom.
Some years ago if someone said a talk show I would think TV or radio which might be prerecorded but was still broadcasted at specific time.
Not all podcasts are talk shows. Some podcasts have more of news update format, they are still called podcasts due to technical format, but you wouldn't call them talk shows. There are also more educational podcasts, with single person informing people about some topic that isn't news.
When podcasts started a distinguishing feature was that you would download them (at time of your chose) and later play them at time of your choice. Another factor is since it isn't radio or TV, medium was a lot more accessible to many creators. This allows creation of much wider variety of shows for niche interests compared to what you would get on TV or radio.
Now that a lot of media is consumed on demand through various streaming services like Youtube, Netflix, Spotify but TV and Radio usage has significantly decreased that's not unique anymore. Even traditional media companies might be publishing parts of their shows either on their own or existing platforms after the initial broadcast, thus allowing on demand access to their content.
One more change that has reduced podcast standout features is overall internet speed access. Internet largely has become fast enough that directly streaming audio is easy, there is little need to predownload it. Not only it has become fast, through the mobile networks it's accessible on the go. For a long while even if internet speed was fast enough for audio streaming, mobile internet was quite expensive thus encouraging to download stuff at home for later listening on the go.
On the topic ease of creation. While there might some podcasts which are now quite popular and the budget that exceeds smaller talk shows on TV and many on radio, the lower bound for podcasts is still much lower. TV and radio has limited broadcast time available, so there will always be some lower bound of budget (depending on size of TV channel) which will likely be above most podcasts (in terms of amount published, not necessary amount of listeners).
Limited broadcast time has another interesting implication - limits on length. You will unlikely see talk show on TV that's much longer than an 1.5 hours, and anything shorter than 15min will likely be part of bigger show. Podcasts can be as short as 5 minutes (usually for news update style podcasts) and up to 2.5h or longer. Even a single podcast can significantly vary in length between episodes depending on guest, you can't do that on TV or radio where you have specific time slot.
Names aren't always about content but often also various technical details and loosely defined common properties. Why do we need separate words for CD, vinyl record or Radio, for saying "I was listening a CD", when we could just say listening a song regardless of how it happens. Having more words allows expressing more information. An when you say that you listened a vinyl record that implies a lot more than listening a song.
the "spec" was made so that itunes - or whatever else - could fetch new content by itself and load it onto your portable music device the next time you synced it with your computer.
Now it's a push notification on an app on your phone that a new file is available to listen to.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
Growing up i always heard "cheese food" isn't cheese, but if it's made from curds and whey...
(I guess "cheese food" as you call it - I'm not familiar with that term, but also not American.)
It's fine as a thing to eat, if it's a flavor and texture you like. Personally I avoid it, but it's passably ok as a part of a sandwich where there are other flavors around it. If I just want to eat some cheese (with or without some delivery mechanism like a cracker), American Cheese is the farthest thing from my mind.
There are higher quality actual American Cheeses, that can actually call themselves cheese unqualified, brands such as Kretshcmar, Boar's Head, etc. Kraft does make a somewhat lower end version under the Deli Deluxe label. They are produced from a combination of Cheddar and Colby.
But its not just gatekeeping there is a wide latitude in the quality and constitution of the various products marketed as "American" cheese ..., some of them don't contain any milk! This type of market segmentation isn't as common with better quality cheese varieties for a number of reasons. At the extreme the "American" label gets put on dollar store imitation "cheese" singles. Whereas I don't know of much imitation provolone sold anywhere.
And mass-produced has little to do with it. Most deli cheeses are mass produced but people tend to have strong preferences for alternatives to American irrespective.
This goes into detail better than I could without just quoting it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cheese#Regulation
Guess what, I KNOW this tub of mostly cookie dough isn't made out of just cream and sugar and cold. I prefer it that way in fact!
Be assured, Americans buy A LOT of cheese and Wisconsin will have strong words to say if you act like Americans don't "know" cheese
Give it another decade or so and people will have the same false snobbery around whether their canned alcoholic beverage of choice is a "real seltzer" or a "spiked soda" or....
It's made out of real cheese though.
- Kraft and maybe a couple other brands of “not cheese” slices and blocks
- A larger selection of real cheese blocks and pre-sliced, pre-shredded options (I know dust parm and some shredded have filler that we’d probably also not count as real cheese)
- A whole deli counter on the other side of the store of all “real” cheese options.
Now, maybe consumption is 80% those Kraft slices, idk the stats, but just in terms of shelf space, it’s like 80-90% real cheeses.
The infamous Corsi–Rosenthal Box uses filters which are far below HEPA standards (MERV-13) but since it's moving so much air, it performs better overall with a higher CADR.
20"x20" is ~$30 iirc. for people interested in this style of filter the fans don't last very long, maybe a year or two. They are ~$20+ each. I was buying the highest MERV without carbon for a long time, then i switched to carbon and fiber washable ones, then K&N.
Not an endorsement of K&N in particular, i just know the brand and use them.
> call into question the Wirecutter write-up
Nothing is being questioned, it is thoroughly debunked.
Two of their "also great" recommendations are Blueair purifiers, which do not have HEPA-rated filters.
The actual problem is the usage of “which.” If they’re Blueair purifiers that happen to not have HEPA filters, they should have made the clause essential/restrictive. If all Blueair filters lack a HEPA filter, then adding that they don’t have HEPA filters as clarification is non-essential.
So I understand your confusion, it’s just not for the reason you said it was.
> If there was an iota of intent to have someone at Wirecutter see this, being this aggressive only serves to have them dig their heels in.
That's their problem, though!
The article is specifically a rebuttal to a Wirecutter review, so the target audience is really anyone who cares what Wirecutter thinks about purifiers (a lot of people rely on it to guide their buying decisions, after all), and perhaps the staff at Wirecutter.
I can't speak to the article's technical accuracy, but it appears to do a good job of systematically breaking down their analysis using technical arguments, visualizations, and math.
"Well, perhaps we should, I don’t know, read the IKEA website?"
"...that totally coincidentally happens to pay affiliate marketing commissions."
"Maybe we should be generous and ignore all the errors and misstatements above."
"...then congratulations—you understand air filters better than the Wirecutter."
is it not accurate? also no.
is it vulgar or offensive? no. unless you get easily offended, in which case you probably shouldn't spend too much time on the internet?
I think a lot of our mainstream media is so bad because nobody is calling out the shoddy reporting.
It's this kind of writing that is unfortunately endemic in the "internet rationalist" space, which doubly unfortunately has a lot of crossover with users on hn. Hence why you're being dogpiled by the most annoying people online.
More importantly though, writing like this is self-defeating, for the author, for wirecutter, and for everyone else who has to inflict it upon themselves just so the author can get to the point.
There are much better ways to communicate about issues, about anything, if you're actually interested in helping an organization do better ("Wirecutter, let me help you.") or even just want to inform people that wirecutter might not be the most reliable source for product recommendations.
This kind of writing though is about the same tier of bad as the loud and annoying youtube takedown videos where they put somebody "on blast". It doesn't surprise me at all that such writing is equally popular on hn. Outrage drives engagement, no matter how far up their own asses your audience is. (Example one: me and my comment).
> I am not the subject of this ridicule yet I am somehow the recipient of it.
This line though is really what I wanted to write a comment about. I love this. Some weirdos will try to twist this feeling into being "personally offended by reading" but no, your feelings are valid. This kind of writing is exhausting. It's a waste of my time. The author clearly has a point to make, and everyone would be better served if they would just make it and leave the shitflinging out. Could you imagine having to be around someone who communicated this way irl?
All that to say, thanks for sharing. I'll take my beating now.
The guarantee is not that they remove x% of particles at y size, instantly, but that they settle at that efficiency after z level of loading
That also likely accounts for differences in some results - nobody seems to have taken this into accounts
(There are filter rating systems where z=0, for example n95 filters. That is rare in HVAC and general air purification though)
[0]: https://dynomight.net/air/#things-that-create-particles-indo...
[1]: https://smartairfilters.com/en/product/sqair-air-purifier/
On top of that, living near a highway might not show issues on your PM2.5 / PM10 monitor, but it still shows in health statistics according to studies.
I stay in a city with considerably high air pollution 2/3rds of the year, and this has done a wonderful job of cleaning the air.
Plus, Ikea sells a tiny air quality sensor separately, so you can measure the quality of the air near where you're sitting, not where the purifier is.
Maybe try the STARKVIND one instead.
The more expensive round one (STARKVIND) doesn’t use its fabric covered front as the pre-filter (it’s actually solid) and instead has a separate fine mesh (not that fine though) layer underneath. To clean that, you have to take the front side off first, which takes a bit longer.
Try the usual low-tech stuff: wash bedding in hot water. Encase your mattress and pillows in appropriate material (very fine mesh or a membrane — there are products sold for this exact purpose, and mattress spill protectors work too). Wash those protectors occasionally in hot water as well.
Fit a HEPA filter on your vacuum and vacuum regularly. Wear a mask while cleaning.
Also, dust mites need quite high relative humidity to grow and moderately high RH to even survive. This is relative humidity where the dust mites are. So if you can arrange to keep any rugs and carpets that you have warm, they will have lower RH and fewer dust mites.
I use the Wirecutter's Coway unit recommendation mostly. I have not tried the larger IKEA unit but at least it seemed to mitigate the above.
Good notes, thanks for sharing, I do already take those precautions, mop weekly, no rugs, prefer ample fresh air (ERV or window), and now mostly rely on HEPA filters for extra relief during exercise (kicked up dust), when I'm struggling, or in pollen season. The new nasal azelastine antihistamine also helpful.
Even true HEPA filters can also get inundated a bit too quickly (1-5 mo) in my house otherwise and if I don't notice that, it's worse than nothing. So excepting pollen season, fresh air has a better failure mode.
To affect relative humidity to <50% for mites, unfortunately as far as I can tell, high humidity requires kilowatts of electricity to drop in older buildings in rainy climates, esp. without sealing and compromising air quality in other ways (CO2 too).
Maybe the Coway throws the filtered air in a more useful place for your use case?
(Also, and this is utterly silly but I’ve gotten this wrong myself: the IKEA filters come with a plastic wrap on the filter. You need to open it up and remove the plastic. If you skip this step, you have a somewhat noisier than expected think that looks like a filter but provides no filtration whatsoever. Whoops.)
P.S. Azelastine is not new at all. What is new is “Astepro”, which is the same thing, plus sucralose, and it’s OTC. The version without sucralose can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the US with a prescription, as a generic or a name brand product.
I haven't trusted Wirecutter since they were offering recommendations for kickbacks.
I'm not joking when I say the hairdryer article amounted to "trust this person because she's used hair dryers for a long time."
She was measuring airflow speed out of the hair dryers but not volume. Absolute moron.
Additionally. I am a bit weak on my physics but I think air speed has a direct relationship with evaporating liquids. I would have to see some controlled tests. but hypothesis: given the same volume of air per minute. a higher speed will evaporate water faster, with specific testing on high surface area targets(like hair) for example: them stupid dyson dryers that project a super high speed low area stream of air
does something like this exist outside of germany? Having a Stiftung Warentest subscription always strikes me particularly german.
On the other hand, if you want unbiased, quasi-scientific tests, who is gonna pay for it?
It is actually in your best interest if YOU are paying for it, since then you are the customer and not the product.
That said, it isn’t even that expensive. When I buy a washing machine, I just buy the Warentest article on washing machines first which makes the overall purchase, like, 0.5% more expensive.
[1]: https://taenk.dk/
Do you have a source for that? I don't think that's ever been true.
They've always had affiliate links, but they've also always been clear that doesn't affect their recommendations.
You might be referring to this: https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
But it was pretty totally debunked. The NYT made a lengthy reply explaining:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/our-response-to-nextdesk/
That reply just says "no we don't, trust me bro".
Of course you're free to come to whatever conclusion you want. But I don't really know what more you could ask for.
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
I don't trust for-profit review sites that have a financial incentive to pick one product over the other, like Wirecutter.
That's the standard business arrangement for almost any review site. It's how they pay their reviewers.
When nextdesk said no, they still kept it as their recommended desk for a year, and then, when they switched it, they switched to one that also didn't have an affiliate program, and still kept nextdesk as the "upgrade" pick.
It's really hard to see any evidence that the money affected their editorial decisions.
(I also like Project Farm, although I don't think of them as comprehensive.)
Best air filter would use standard home furnace filters. Those are cheap and good enough. Most of the money should be on the fan. High efficieny, high load, low noise fans are expensive.
What's left? Some underqualified millenials doing a bunch of Googling, buying some products off Amazon, chatting about them on a Slack thread, and then summarizing all the anecdata using no fewer than 10000 referral-generating words.
Suffice it to say I find their recommendations basically useless. And in several cases aggressively wrong, like they recommend a product I know from personal experience to be among the worst in its category.
The products he reviews tend to be sort of workshop oriented (tools - from basic open end wrenches up to fairly capable welders and chainsaws, lubricants, that kind of thing), but he's also done a fair bit of automotive stuff, jeans, gloves, and things like that.'
For the jeans, he tested stuff like puncture force (with a nail), abrasion resistance, belt loop strength, and breathability. He also commented on but did not score fit and comfort.
A more scientific (but more limited) would be Torque Test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKXuFwB6lo0 and even they're mainly for entertainment.
This is a are in general that has become pretty useless over the last years - the shills have won out. I'd go so far as to say that on average the first few pages of any web search for product advice result in negative value overall.
Edit: if you really are cleaning DAILY then there is something else wrong that really should be addressed. Either a clogged dryer vent, a horribly leaky HVAC system, or a completely failed building seal somewhere. The filters will certainly solve your problem but even with the cheap stuff you will be going through a lot of filters if you don’t solve the underlying issue.
Let's look at 2 situations.
One is you are running the same air through the filter all day.
The other is you are using a vacuum cleaner that is sucking up dust from the floor and pumping out that air.
I assume in the vacuum cleaner case, you are better off with a higher performing filter since you need to trap that dust on first pass through, whereas with the filter that is circulating the air all day, you get a "second chance" to capture a given particle?
Probably minimal impact on other pollutants (VOC's, NOX, CO, etc)... Many professional air purifiers don't make any claims about those either tho.
The main downsides are comparatively ugly and noisy.
This is mitigated by using four filters - constructing a frame that holds them top and sides - and the box fan goes on the bottom, with legs to hold it off the floor.
Box fans are also very noisy. The box-fan design was intended mostly for people in wildfire areas who needed something to mitigate smoke inside their homes.
The trick is that the box fan turns over the air much faster than a conventional hepa.
https://aghealth.ucdavis.edu/news/corsi-rosenthal-box-diy-bo...
Still, $10 for the ikea filter seems like a good deal if you get good life out of it. 20x20x2 at filterbuy is about $16.5 x4.
Yes its not a rolls royce, but it gets %85 the way there.
The question of whether H13 vs E12 actually matters is likely to depend on application and environment. Providing factual information, perhaps taking the position that the IKEA filter is "good enough" despite the review, would have been welcome. Then each reader can evaluate all those factors for themselves.
Whenever I checked his quotes from The Wirecutter, I found that WC had it right, and blogger had it wrong. I stopped reading in detail after the first two sections, then just skimmed the rest.
Also, this is not proven. I suspect the parent is thinking about https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/18/white-n..., which cites https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870..., which found 1 study out of 38 which "suggested the noise may lead to more disrupted sleep" and concludes that more research is needed.
Of course, individuals may find white noise personally irritating or distracting, and continuous loud noise of any sort is bad. But for others, noise can also help with relaxation, concentration, and sound masking. (I personally find white noise irritating, but I like brown noise.)
proclaims that my benefit / enjoyment of something is invalid
I hate fan noise!
Even in my computers. As I get older the more I'm irritated by fan noise.
I cant run the IKEA on anything by the first setting without wearing noise cancelling headphones.
The loudness level and tone of the fan is horrible!
I'd pay more for an air filter with fans that were less obnoxious! :-)
For fan choice, Arctic P12/P14 fans tend to be recommended because they're cheap and are good on paper, but they're pretty terrible acoustically (super annoying hum in the 800-1300RPM range which tends to be the optimal level just below where you can hear 120/140mm fans). I'm also irritated by fan noise and have tried a lot of different fans over the years in computers, and I've ended up just paying the Noctua tax and buying nf-a12x25s because they're one of the quietest fans, they move a lot of air with pretty good static pressure, and they don't have any humming or other acoustic issues, just the air noise as you ramp their speeds up. Phanteks T30s are even better than the noctuas and a bit less expensive, but have a bit worse noise profile (a slight drone at higher RPMs that only super picky people will even notice).
For mine I made an uglier 3 fan version of the slim 5 fan cleanairkits design using hardboard, fan grills, wood glue, a hacksaw, a drill, and a drywall knife. I'd recommend just getting it laser/waterjet cut though instead of suffering trying to cut fan holes in hardboard with a drywall knife and a small drill bit (it takes forever, and ends up being ugly AF). For power I ended up using a USB SATA adapter (noctua PWM adapter takes SATA power, need to get one that uses an external power adapter so it can output enough power, can also steal it from the air purifier if you ever actually need a usb sata adapter) and an old UL listed 12V 1.2A barrel plug power supply I found in a box of old electronics.
But it's obviously not as cheap as the IKEA one.
Also if I'm going to add an appliance to my home, why not pick the highest filtration possible? (if not unreasonably expensive)
If you run it long enough and you’re not cycling the room air with external air constantly, it will be fine.
Yes, but they're not binary. Being slightly undersized doesn't mean it stops working altogether.
> For allergies, 4x air changes per hour is recommended.
If you have an allergy problem, the last thing you want to do is replace the filtered inside air with outside air every 15 minutes.
Air purifiers still sometimes call this "air changes" or sometimes "equivalent air changes" (e-AC/hr).
Previously...
If that's your only concern, a t-shirt over a box fan will probably do the job.
I would be rather delighted if I could go among people without looking like someone straight out of a catastrophe movie. The Halo looks weird even for someone who wears "I am not weird, I am limited edition" t-shirts regularly. The Dyson looks much better but when I did an amateur comparison the performance appeared to be much weaker than the Halo.
If you want clean air I'm afraid you'll forever have to walk around like an extra on Contagion.
I will stay with the Halo then.
Their mattress recommendations, from someone whom has spent large amounts of time trying to piece together what little exists of mattress "science", straddle the border between comical and negligent.
Consumer Reports is similar.
However, there is a discrete consistency to picking a durable mattress that has advantageous qualities such as support and whatnot, and none of those mattresses are made of quality, durable materials that will provide lasting benefits for sensitive people.