I don't really care about airborne germs, spores or exhaust particulates, but our basement collects a TON of dust that looks like dryer lint and requires a daily sweep with a vacuum cleaner. I wonder if the ikea and similar air purifiers are overkill for that and if there's a solution that is more effective for this kind of dust but with less noise/less power.
A box fan with the cheapest furnace filter you can find at the hardware store. Just one on its lowest setting will handle large particulates in a basement. If that’s inadequate, since you mentioned noise as a concern, two box fans with filters on low is better than one box fan with a filter on medium, and filters even more air.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
If esthetics are of utmost importance this Ikea unit will be pleasant, but then again if actually cleaning the air is the priority there is no better device than a simple box fan with a high quality furnace filter taped to it, as CBC Marketplace's laboratory tests confirmed:
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.
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.
> 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.
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 have a couple of blu air purifiers. They really cut down on the amount of dust in the room. We used to have to dust weekly, in the rooms where we have the purifiers we dust maybe every other month now and you can't tell a difference.
Protip: you can turn a box fan into an incredibly effective air purifier[0] (particle measurements in thread). The one they show is pretty elaborate, using 4 filters and some construction, but you can also use a single filter and slap it on the back of the box fan and have similar results. The air purifier industry is more about aesthetics than it is function.
Yeah, same thought. Something like the Coway air filter ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxiDrEnjYEo ) regularly sells for under $200, and it is going to be much quieter than this option. It also has been tested fairly extensively from what I've seen, it's EnergyStar approved, etc, and it has a built in sensor. It doesn't look too bad either.
But I understand the point, especially in times when you can't find a purifier.
Keep in mind air purifiers are just a fan with filters in front of it. A box fan with a furnace filter strapped to it, while ugly, will do similarly for reducing the amount of particles in the room.
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 think IKEA is on the right track with their lower efficiency filter. For a standalone air filter, you care about the rate of removal of contaminants, which is roughly (concentration of contaminants) · (flow rate) · (filter efficiency), and you probably end up caring the most about the particle size at which the filter is least efficient. So a real HEPA filter has .9995 for that last factor, and .99 is barely worse. Even MERV 13 at 75% or so isn’t so bad.
For a given amount of power consumption, you end up with (concentration of contaminants) · (flow rate) · (filter efficiency) / (power), which is (at fixed contaminant level and a fixed quality of fan) roughly proportional to (filter efficiency) / (pressure drop at design flow rate) and this is where IKEA is making the right tradeoff: those non-HEPA filters have considerably less pressure drop and only fail to filter a percent or so of the air going through.
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.
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.
I personally own a 1008-DH, which has much better filtration than the 1512 reviewed there.
Previous reviews at The Sweet Home also analyzed IQAir, which is probably even better as it filters particles down to ~0.1 microns. I'd love to see an unbiased review testing ultra-small particles.
reply