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?
Having tested the DIY option versus some other air purifiers (xiaomi not levoit though), I do think that there are other considerations to take into account. A box fan with a HEPA filter bungee is loud and is very annoying to have at home.
An air filter that is much less loud for the same result, can be controlled via home assistant (I have an ESP32 connected to a VOC sensor and a decent particle sensor that I use to control when to turn on and off the air purifier) can be worth it.
Speaking of air purifiers, does anyone have recommendations for one that is quiet and still effective?
I have a pair of Electrolux EAP300s, in small rooms.
Unfortunately on the lowest manual setting ("Quiet") they hardly do anything for air quality. And they're still louder than I like. I think they really optimized for cost; these devices feel very light and plasticy, the fan sounds cheap and has an uneven tone to it, and its speed keeps oscillating back and forth. The purifier itself is also not stable and it can make an annoying noise if placed on a surface that ends up vibrating along.
I also thought about DIYing one with noctua fans (which I know are quiet, and I have plenty of them in my PCs), but I suspect they're not going to be very effective.
I don't have an air purifier myself, but I've talked to people who own air purifiers and read lots of online reviews.
All I've heard is that on the lowest setting they are very silent, but on "auto" mode they start up regularly and are not silent at all, and if your room is anywhere close to the recommended size the lowest setting doesn't do much at all.
I was mostly researching about the Mi brand air purifiers, since they are readily available in Europe and a lot cheaper than European brands, but if you have suggestions for a brand that makes purifiers that are actually silent AND effective I'd be curious to hear about them.
I've spent many hours navigating the air purifier market and it is one of the most opaque and customer-unfriendly ones I have ever seen. Beyond the advice given in the article, it's also important to check what the filter exactly is. Some filters are washable, but it often means that they are not as thorough as HEPA filters, which is a big deal if your goal is to avoid the dreaded PM2.5 that are as far as I can tell the main threat to health and the pursuit of happiness.
A more general problem is that there is a conceptual contradiction between low noise and high filtering. It will be difficult for a silent filter to be quick at filtering your room.
The good news is that even a relatively crappy, low CADR setup can still filter a bedroom over time so long as it remains closed. You will however be paying for replacements more often and it might not be worth it if you have to ventilate daily and the filter takes many hours to give you a clean environment.
I like the work that Smart Air China is doing. I am not affiliated with them, but they have essentially done and made available the same sort of research as the one highlighted in the article and have long promoted the no bullshit use of a simple box fan with filter combo for lower income and highly polluted regions.
Those IKEA purifiers are garbage in my opinion. I sent all of them back. The flat one shook all the time and was loud, as if the fan had been badly balanced or not balanced at all. I was also not convinced by the built quality compared to my Xiaomi Air purifiers.
> IKEA already has a side table that doubles as an air purifier, but now it has a way to gauge just how clean that air really is
Please note that the purifier/table combo and the standalone purifier, both called Starkvind, already have a PM2.5 sensor and are smart (Zigbee) devices.
One of my cats, who's since passed away, was asthmatic. Air purifiers throughout the house and a motion activated box fan plus furnace filter near the litterboxes resulted in an immediate and noticeable improvement in his quality of life. I've noticed a similar improvement in my own health.
I've since ended up with a variety of air cleaners:
* IKEA FÖRNUFTIG[0] is a small and relatively quiet unit. It can be wall-mounted, so it can take up virtually no space. The unit is reasonably priced. Filters are cheap.
* IKEA STARKVIND[1] is a much larger unit (also available in end table form[2] to save space), but also relatively quiet on the lower speeds. It's an interesting unit - integrates into Home Assistant (the unit speaks Zigbee), and has a PM2.5 air quality sensor. This unit is a lot more expensive than the FÖRNUFTIG, but the filters are reasonably priced.
* The box fan plus single furnace filter is incredibly noisy, but really good at dealing with cat litter dust. There is a huge range of price/quality when it comes to filters[, I just use the cheaper ones since I'm focusing on large dust particles.
* I have a couple of units that use Bionaire aer1 filters[3]. The units I have are quiet and reasonably sized, though they get louder as the filter fills up. The filters are expensive, and one of the units takes two of them which doesn't help matters. There is a variety of filters available.
There's a huge spectrum of tradeoffs between noise, size of the unit, filtration effectiveness, replacement filter cost, and extra features. I'm not convinced I've found the sweet spot yet.
> Do they make a difference? Perhaps a placebo? A must have?
It really depends on where you're coming from.
I have one of those air purifiers from Ikea (Förnuftig). It's cheap but not the cheapest. On any high dust/polen concentration level day, a minute or so with the device turned on at full blast is enough to make any problem go away in that particular room.
The article completely ignores noise. I personally have a box fan filter, but I don't pretend that it's appropriate or better for most people-- it's loud and annoying to work in the same room, and almost impossible to sleep with. And it is important that they're constantly on [0] (air quality generally reverts to normal levels in less than 2 hours), because all homes breathe to mitigate moisture and mold growth.
I have four of them in my apartment in Shanghai. They definitely work; I verified it over and over with a laser particle counter. They're loud, but simply running them in the rooms you're not occupying (e.g. in the bedroom during the day, then in the living room during the night) is already a significant gain.
If you get some for your own home, make sure to cut down on the drafts first; running your purifiers full power won't help you if polluted air is always coming in. I lined all my windows with foam tape from the hardware store.
Rather than fighting every day to keep my indoor air clean (that still doesn't do anything for me when I head out) and my internet connection to foreign servers above dialup speeds (four VPNs and counting), I've simply decided to move back to the Bay Area though. :|
The cheap IKEA air purifier has another huge benefit: you can control it with a smart socket. So hook it up to a tasmota smart plug and you will have a smart purifier.
My only issue with the IKEA filter is that it's sized too small to run quietly for any of my rooms - IKEA says 85sf on low. (My smallest room is 110sf) I guess it's okay for closets?
Also if I'm going to add an appliance to my home, why not pick the highest filtration possible? (if not unreasonably expensive)
I had considered something similar, but recently I found that Ikea has started selling air purifiers and sensors for very reasonable money.
They even sell an activated carbon filter that you can add.
Ventilation is critical, lest you get other issues such as mould which is a whole other set of problems in itself.
IKEA do some very good value devices. The Fornuftigs are nice, but quite weak. The Starkvind smart purifiers are better. They’re explicitly not HEPA and aim for less dense media / higher cycles, and they produce generally similar results at lower costs.
(There are some poorly informed reviews online that give a bad review because they’re not marketed as true HEPA filters, but this misses the point of cleaning the air you breathe rather than the air inside the unit. There was a post that corrected these reviews on HN some time back, will try to dig out and update).
Purifiers are all about the filters, anything else is pretty much just marketing BS.
On that note, Ikea has some air purifiers[0] that aren't very expensive and use HEPA filters with optional carbon filter to remove smells. They have basic ones and 'smart' ones in different form factors (even one that is a table!). We have cats and it really helped removed the cat smell from out house.
I'd recommend anyone who would like to clean the air of the home to use products from SmartAir [1] which is as inexpensive as just a fan attached to a filter, both of which they sell (although you can just buy the filter by itself and attach it to a fan you already own). I visited their office in China and received a complementary filter, which when installed in my hotel room in Beijing, definitely cleared the air and there was a noticeable difference from such a simple mechanism. Recommended for both price and effectiveness.
1. CADR is really low to the point where the unit is near useless due to #2
2. In addition to a low CADR, it has the highest noise. It looks and sounds like a jet engine when you have this thing on high, which is needed due to the low CADR. This is the loudest air purifier that I’ve ever owned
3. If you get a defective main filter, the unit will emit an unpleasant metallic smell. I haven’t tested the particles yet but I doubt the air is clean.
4. Unlike other smart air cleaners in the same price range, it’s app and smart features don’t work. You can’t even create a schedule for it
I am using a cheap Xiaomi (there's not much choice where I live), and a few PMS5003 sensors scattered around the apartment. It works fine for 25 m²-something room when it's relatively clean outside (around 100 µg/m³ or less), but you really have to push it (and suffer the resulting noise) when pollution outside goes above 300 µg/m³ or so. It's been able to keep indoor air around 20 µg/m³ with outside levels going above 800 µg/m³, but I have to use ear plugs because the noise is impossible to tolerate for more than half an hour (and it's pretty difficult to sleep next to).
If you let the heavily polluted air in (a few hundred µg/m³), then close the window and set the purifier to maximum power, it cleans the room in ~20-25 minutes.
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?
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