I don’t understand, the cheaper IKEA purifier (FÖRNUFTIG) uses its entire front side, covered with fabric, as the pre-filter. To clean it, you stop the purifier and vacuum clean the front side, which takes 15 seconds.
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.
I owned that IKEA purifier and it didn't clear the dust sufficiently for my dust mite allergy compared to similarly sized Coway filters. Also it wasn't as straightforward to clean off large pre-filtered dust particles. Avoid.
Starkvind means Strong wind, Fornuftig means Reasonable.
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).
I'm not qualified at all to do a deep dive, but I've got a FORNUFTIG and a STARKVIND and can give you some thoughts.
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.
> I really like this purifier's big brother, the IKEA STARKVIND, which is available in both regular[0] and table[1] versions.
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.
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).
I have both the Wirecutter pick which I've had for 7-8 years and the Förnuftig and I stopped using the Förnuftig after 2 months because it doesn't have a pre-filter and once dirty/filled, it cannot be recovered without replacing the whole filter. It also seems weak—the room can remain dusty indefinitely with it on. The Coway filter is just night-and-day more capable.
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...
> 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.
>Presumably smaller particles are also more difficult to filter
So, that may or may not be true for just passive filtering (like door and window frames), but it's actually not true for actual hepa-style filters, because the physics of particulate filtering is totally unintuitive from the macro level -- past a certain point, finer particulates actually become easier to filter, because the physics is dominated by two different effects at different sizes.
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 went with the IKEA purifiers myself (ironically the very ones dynomight, mentioned by GP, talks about here: https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier/).
I've poured a couple dozen hours into researching this space, and ultimately came back with a conclusion that what matters is:
- To have a HEPA filter, and
- Something that pushes air through it, and
- If you care about VOCs (whether for health or smell reasons), add a non-shit carbon filter (I say non-shit, as apparently some vendors sell "carbon filters" that have very little activated carbon in them).
All those purifiers that claim to have 5+ different modes of filtering are, to be very charitable here, delivering at most a very tiny improvement in some scenarios, at the cost of much inflated price. It's better to spend that money on getting more air pushed through HEPA filters faster.
I have three of the Fornuftig and am very pleased with them, save for the noise being quite bothersome at the highest setting.
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!
There is a 10x difference between (1-efficiency) for the two filter media choices. Explanation needed as to why this is at all relevant.
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.
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.
Thanks, see the sibling comment response below. I use the Wirecutter's Coway unit recommendation mostly. I have not tried the larger IKEA unit but at least it seemed to mitigate what I mention there. I did try washing the article's unit "prefilter" but it didn't seem to catch anything vs. the Coway.
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.
> 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!)
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.
I bought this air purifier after reading this article and researching more. The biggest advantage of this air purifier compared to others on the market is its cost of replacing the air filter. It's significantly cheaper than others.
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.
As an owner of a couple of Förnuftigs, I have each connected to a smart switch (which I already had) triggered over HomeKit by Eve air quality sensors (which I also had). Had the upgrade, the Starkvind, been on the market, when I got onboard, I would probably have opted for that instead, as it packs both a sensor and the ability to be controlled wirelessly over Trädfri.
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.
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.
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