The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? They've seem to have all been killed off. When I'm researching some category of product, I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing. I know we've all had the experience googling "reviews of X" only to get overwhelmed with SEO spam. Forget finding something written by somebody who has experience with it. It's hard enough to find something written by a human.
It will be interesting if LMG can pull off what Linus is aiming for with the massive investment in a laboratory environment. There are huge parts of the tech market where the most critical reviewing you can find is anecdotal accounts of if the reviewer liked a product or not (or the more clinical reviews are drowned out by the anecdotal noise).
Just in case not everyone are in the loop, LMG is Linus Media Group [1] which is the publishing agency behind the popular YouTube channel "Linus Tech Tips" [2]. It is a different Linus, not Torvalds. :)
I'm hopeful for LMG's lab too. It's still a bit of a gamble, but from the sound of it the company is set up such that they can review products in an objective, data-backed way and tank any blowback from manufacturers that occurs as a result.
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.
Second this. Whenever I'm looking up a review for a notebook, my default search term is "<model> notebookcheck" to see if they've done a review.
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.
Yeah they're great and in-depth and without the stupid showmanship of Linus. Just the info without the hot air :) Always the site I go for, wish they did more types of products.
Hey, maybe the showman ship isn't for you, but what Linus and his Media Group have done is create the Top Gear of Enthusiast computer hardware. Tremendous entertainment value, exposure for niche sects of the culture, and an easy entry into the space for newcomers and young folks. That's gotta be good for something.
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.
Thank you for the link. And there is no reason to apologize. You are not incorrect in your interpretation. I subscribe to LTT on YouTube, but it's for entertainment.
I go with LTT if I want to know if a laptop is good to use or not.
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.
On a tangential note, I prefer GN for their understated delivery and heavy use of data and charts. On some channels the emphasis is clearly more on the -tainment part of infotainment. The default tech video is is now produced with the same template: little jokes between presenters, background history, open ended questions, Netflix type camera shots on the couch, post processing, visual effects etc. With GN at least it's easy to FF to see a graph and listen to conclusions. Other channels require me to be emotionally invested in the content and delivey method and it gets very tiring after a while.
There is no denying that "Linus (Torvalds) Tech Tips" would not be extremely entertaining though. I would love to see him just go off on everything. :)
Do you trust Linus, though? He often promotes himself as without bias, but he very clearly hates Apple (except the watch). He also loves things he already understands (anything Microsoft). He's got heavy duty fanboyitis. And he's clearly someone you can buy demonstrated by his flip flopping AMD/Intel/NVidia praise.
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.
As an Apple fanboy, I can easily say that Linus does not hate Apple.
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.
As an Apple apologist, I also concur with most of the above.
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.]
Not to mention that if you wait to unionize until you are being exploited, you will have far less power to resist coercion. Striking when you have some money under the mattress is a lot easier than doing so after you've eaten the last of the shoe leather.
Which is great in theory, until you realise that unions can and do exploit workers too. Collectives of people (whether corporations, unions, or entire countries) tend towards corruption as they scale. History has shown that large unions are similarly prone to exploitation and corruption.
If you're part of a union, you don't gain negotiating power, you trade away individual negotiating power for collective negotiating power. Sometimes this is a good trade. It depends on the context, on the industry, on the sort of work you do.
> History has shown that large unions are similarly prone to exploitation and corruption.
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.
Here is my experience with "public" unions. When I was working at a public research institute, employees were kind of forced to enter a union. It seemed ok because union's cut was paid by government. Government just wants to look cute to public eye and EU. That union were more or less useless and just collecting huge sums of money. Where does that money goes nobody dares to check. My wife also had to enter a Teacher's union and that is a much larger scam. IMO, Most public unions are parasites living on free government money.
It's also somwehat moot. Unions in the U.S. get their workers better pay and better benefits pretty much regardless of corruption and did so even at the peak of their influence and corruption.
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.
In the Netherlands they've also become corrupted. The big union leaders have become so used to sitting at the executive table that they've lost track of the people they represent. Of course there's exceptions but I feel that they listen to corporate concerns way too much.
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.
You also unionise to prevent exploitation, it's not just a reactionary option. Yes, it can get unnecessarily adversarial. We'd be better off if unions were the default but were only adversarial where necessary. I believe countries like Germany do a bit better at this?
As someone who loathes Apple, I disagree. But I do agree that there's basically no place to get a trustworthy resource on Apple. Because, for the same reason I don't trust Linus, money is involved.
It is unreasonable to expect any one source to be consistently reliable. The "trustworthy resource" is multiple sources with diverse views. Combine your LMG diet with some Rene Ritchie, Hoeg Law, etc.
Thats was true some time ago, but isn't anymore - for every authentic review you will find hundreds of fake SEO article/comments. This means that by simply increasing n you're basically guaranteed to be less informed.
> And he's clearly someone you can buy demonstrated by his flip flopping AMD/Intel/NVidia praise.
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.
Maybe, but those WAN show lectures are often starkly mirroerd by strongly worded submarine advertisement playing as segments on his various shows. He basically does a thing, then says that people shouldn't do that. To put it gently, it's exactly what someone with soft sales skills would do. He deflects like a politician. Even if he's wrong, and admitting it, he's very skilled at making it sound like its everyone who was wrong, or he's the hero for admitting it.
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.
> Maybe, but those WAN show lectures are often starkly mirroerd[sic] by strongly worded submarine advertisement playing as segments on his various shows.
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.
How do you know what he's saying isn't only half truths? You just trust him. I have seen enough of his behaviour over the years to prefer to see his videos as comedy. That's all.
He's also vocally anti-union and actively tried to stop his employees from marketing themselves on personal social media (to stop them from building a following and then leaving, I'm guessing), so I refuse to watch any of his content or support his business in any way now.
I know this is completely subjective, and his millions of subscribers tell me my opinion is far from ubiquitous, but he's also just straight up obnoxious to me. One of those people whose voice, demeanor, appearance, everything, just immediately turns me off.
Do you mind sharing some links to back up these claims?
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.
People should also understand why he said he would be offended. He would be offended because it meant they didn’t talk to him and work with him - and that he did such a bad job as a manager that they decided to unionize.
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)
Anyone who is truly “pro-union” would recognize that seeing yourself as a good manager/boss doesn’t mean you don’t take advantage of your employees. Furthermore, there is ALWAYS a power dynamic at play that makes it difficult for individuals to speak up about their concerns or ideas for improving working conditions — even “nice” managers will disagree or see certain things as pointless / unnecessary / frivolous. Not to mention, Linus is both the owner AND the manager of LMG, making the relationship between employer / employee even more complex and unbalanced.
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.
Do you have a source for the work hours? I had the impression that he very much tries to not ask for more then he pays for. Do you have a source that the compensations at LTT are somehow unreasonable?
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.
No, that would mean you support each woman who wants to have one and you probably shouldn't tell them it offends you if they do. Especially if they depend on you financially and you can break up with them without consequence.
I interpret it closer to being pro-choice while hoping to not personally need an abortion. Unions form when workers feel they aren't being heard and aren't being properly represented. Having a union form at your own company is an indication that you failed your employees in one way or another. You can be pro-union while hoping to personally never need one or have to sit across the table from one.
> Having a union form at your own company is an indication that you failed your employees in one way or another.
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.
That's a wrong way to view unions though, a propagandized American way. Unions should really be default and not imply some sort of moral failing about the employer. Sadly they are viewed as such.
Yeah, pro-choice but hoping not to have an abortion is probably a lot of people's position. But then telling your partner who depends on you financially that it would disappoint you if they had one sorta changes things, dont you agree? Especially if theyre already pregnant.
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.
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.
This is an extremely American -- and misinformed -- view of unions. Where I'm from unions are the default, not formed as a last resort to unjust treatment but a natural counterbalance to corporate/institutional power.
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.
I watch one of his employees stream on twitch, I found out about his channel from a Linus tech tips video, I don't think your second claim is all that true.
a lot of LMG employees have personal social media and either YouTube or Twitch streams, often getting viewers from fans of their persona on LMG videos. I think the issue is only with competing content and/or leveraging the LMG platform. For example, if an employee started a GPU review channel and called it out in an LMG video, like ok yeah probably not. More like non-compete than some draconian restrictions
Honestly, I would expect that from him as CEO. He only makes money off people watching the channel and subscription numbers are hugely important. Any efforts by employees to gain subscribers for their channels could dilute visitor numbers and subscribers to LMG. And obviously he doesn't want to create competition.
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.
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.
I disagree that it's silly. I think that's unfairly dismissive of a valid point when he is paid money to advertise for those companies and we are discussing the validity of his reviews of that equipment.
It's silly because it isn't a valid point. Linus flip flopping on those brands is precisely why he isn't suffering from fanboyitis.
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.
Yes, and I agree that you can see those actions as being contrary to my proposed scenario. I sort of see them as evidence in the other direction, but it's good to hear it said out loud. Makes good food for thought.
LTT makes almost all of it's money from floatplane, youtube premium, and youtube advertisements. The "deals" they work with companies are almost entirely outside of the product space they review.
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.
>LTT makes almost all of it's money from floatplane, youtube premium, and youtube advertisements
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...
Linus did a video on how much money they make from youtube premium/ads and the numbers can get as high as $50k-$100k/video for their most popular streams. It's not nothing. Floatplane is profitable because it's a subscription based system, and that's where the money always is. Hence patreon.
Salacious is an eminently accurate word for your string of source-less comments describing your feelings about their advertisements under the guise of actual accusations of wrongdoing.
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.
On the most recent wan show, his fans located and harassed an ex employee of the new facility he bought because he was mildly perturbed over the state of the building. That's some unchecked power.
Which he told them beforehand not to do, and afterwards chastised them for doing so, being clearly frustrated that his fans would so something like that and make things worse for everyone.
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...
You don't. But if I said, "I'm not being sponsored by a rival YouTube channel" would you just go ahead and believe me? What if I also linked to a bunch of videos from a rival YouTube channel while repeating that I'm not sponsored by them.
Not having bias doesn't mean not having an opinion on things. It's a review channel, it doesn't work unless he "likes" some things and "hates" others, as long as he elaborates on the /reasons/ for those opinions.
Well, no, it would work way better if he had no bias. Otherwise you have to trust that he's aware of his bias and is somehow capable of separating his opinion from reality. Otherwise how does it help anyone make a financial choice?
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?
> 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.
Same way anyone knows anything, really. I look at what they've said, look at their actions and decided if they matched. You can tell that they genuinely want and try to do good.
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.
Thanks, I have and that is where my original position comes from. Got some good alternative perspectives today though. Interesting to hear the same thing as evidence of either position.
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.
> 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.
By offering them a a better deal then starting from nothing as a YouTuber and then "hooking" them with things such as writing staff, filming locations, good equipment, good people behind the camera, credit for their work and editing staff as well as access to hardware they would not get otherwise. They surely spend mid 6 digits on their workshop for example. Mostly to make CNC machines create custom heat spreaders.
As somebody who has followed Linus for the last couple of years, I have to say I deeply disagree with your conclusion about hating apple and being for sale.
He is not without flaws, but I think he is fair, balanced and very well-intentioned.
Phones and anything Apple are reviewed to oblivion. There are some incredible consumer product review YouTube channels out there too.. The Best one imo is project farm (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vO3UX4oEnZI). If you're into headphones, Crinacle's site/YT are on a completely different level than any other review site
I really hope LMG does videos in these styles with their lab
> If you're into headphones, Crinacle's site/YT are on a completely different level than any other review site.
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 believe their intention with the lab is to focus more on written articles instead of video content? He’s complained on his podcast (in the context of talking about the lab) about the decrease in quality print journalism in the tech space.
I’m curious about this too. He did a breakdown of how much money they get from ads and it’s not much considering how many employees they have. They have a lot of sponsorships and selling swag but I’m just not sure what their maximum size is as just another YouTube channel, even one with lots of revenue streams.
Dude literally has a brand new house where he wrote off all the renovation as business expense as he was filming it for his channel. He's totally fine.
I dont think he wrote off the renovations, as that would be problematic from a tax perspective. what he probably does is charge LMG what would be considered a reasonable rate to film on at his home and he makes money back that way.
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.
The big problem with most YouTube review channels is that they're reliant on the vendors to provide them with free test units and other forms of access in order to grow their channels, and Linus is no exception.
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.
Maybe not, but those channels still largely rely on regular access from these companies, which always presents a conflict of interest.
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.
I think the review industry is so bad that even a mediocre quality endeavor could gain a ton of traction. The problem with the current tech review industry IMO is that it seems like the benchmarking and review part of it are treated like separate business units that need to be self sustaining / profitable.
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.
It will be nice if they do come up with an experiment based approach to reviews. Personally I really enjoy Gamer Nexus since they already do this.
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.
What's the profit model for LMG? Ads? I'm not sure how long that will sustain even a smallish channel with no expenses, let alone electronic testing equipment and products to test.
Gamersnexus has been similarly expanding their capabilities with very expensive fan testing equipment. They seem to be one of the better sources of consumer tech journalism these days.
> The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else?
I like America's Test Kitchen for kitchen-y stuff.
Project Farm (on YouTube) for tools / DIY stuff perhaps.
And they include best picks that have actually been tested if you might not be able to afford the number 1. So many channels might make a passing comment about a cheaper option, but you never know if the quality is kind of close or just the best option for them to make some affiliate revenue off of. At least ATK has the pedigree to backup their testing claims and anecdotal evidence. Their best pick spatula for example, I've seen in every commercial kitchen I've worked in.
I like a lot of project farm's videos but his electrical tape video was far off the mark of what actually matters. They were good tests for tape but bad tests for Electrical tape.
Fair, and I'd also say that many of the tests he does could really use more data points. For example, testing torque using bolts- I've had a few bad bolts in my life that were weaker than they should have been. I really hope he does that but edits it out.
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.
Not resistance. More along the line of usability. (I will gladly admit that I am a fan of super 33+ and will pay the $5 a roll any day. My thoughts are a bit skewed.)
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.
It depends on what it's being used for. Adhesion across the expected temperature range is likely the most relevant factor to consumers. The NFPA would likely not call it out specifically, and rather rely on NRTL approval for acceptability. For reference electrical equipment for use in ordinary locations (ANSI 61010), insulating tapes list UL standard 510, CSA no. 197, and IEC 60454.
I already mentioned it above, but repeating it here.
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.
Project Farm rules for the types of products he tests, which is pretty narrow.
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
> I like America's Test Kitchen for kitchen-y stuff.
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.
> 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:
> I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing
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.
I’m going to dissent here on this thread because I’m not seeing any references. I personally feel the quality of Wirecutter has gone down since NY Times just a bit. However, after almost a decade of reading Wirecutter they have overwhelming provided a decent “why you should trust us” section for staple consumer items. There is a good example from just today. [1] You can always say they should do more, but honestly they do more research that many others in the space.
>> They didn't actually try any of the products themselves (they admitted as much in the article).
> 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.
That seems justified. (IMO I’d want a review of the ingredients, then it’s up to my kid to prefer flavours.) That choice isn’t related to the choices for products for adults, which is what we care about.
Eh, it'd be easy enough to give samples to 10 different babies to at least see if they have any flavors they prefer. Obviously digestive issues are another matter but your kid drinking it without hassle is the first hurdle.
The only point was to confirm that Wirecutter doesn't always actually test all of the products they review, regardless of whether it's (arguably) justified in each individual case.
This actually speaks a lot in favor of Wirecutter. I wish more guides would be upfront about limitations like this and this is a very reasonable justification.
> 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…
In general, when a company gets bought out, quality tends to drop. Maybe not immediately, but definitely with time. The new owners have to make back their money and they'll start to cut corners wherever they can. These cuts, even if small, eventually have a negative impact.
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.
> In general, when a company gets bought out, quality tends to drop.
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.
"Why you should trust us" or not, I take issue with Wirecutter specifically with their air purifier reviews. They've continued to recommend Blueair and Coway despite being faced with complaints. I don't care why Wirecutter claims you should trust them but I do care when they just stick their head in the ground WRT feedback.
I actually subscribe to Which a UK consumer reports guide. And mostly it's kind of like subscribing to the Guardian newspaper - putting a few quid where my shrivelled liberal conscience used to sit.
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 actually subscribe to Which a UK consumer reports guide."
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.
I wish rtings had a Boolean on tvs so we could search explicitly for non smart models. That is basically the only thing else I’d want from that site, it’s really good.
I think the main problem is probably finding any mainstream consumer TVs that are non-smart. I have looked and beyond some obscure brands or short of incredibly expensive commercial models there are barely any options.
I haven't bought a TV in about ten years and I've started shopping recently, knowing I'll probably have to get one soon. What I'm interested in, knowing I'll probably have to do this (smart TV with no internet), is what the out-of-box experience is without internet.
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?
From personal experience, Roku OS TVs (TCL mostly) have a very good non-internet user experience, with a dedicated mode for being a dumb display. WebOS (LG) is decent. Tizen (Samsung) ones are okay, although the one I have is from before they started putting ads in the menus so I don’t know if there are placeholders. None of them have disabled any features or nagged me, or tried to sneakily connect to the internet. Google/Android/whatever-it’s-called-this-year TV (Sony) might not even be usable without internet, I’m not sure. It’s also terrible.
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.
I'll give you my anecdotal experience with a TV that has Amazon's FireTV built-in. It is disconnected from any network. It allowed me to set a setting that says "remember last input" so it always looks at a particular HDMI input for signal when it's turned on (because I always have it set to viewing input, not the smart interface itself). Set like this, it essentially acts as a non-smart TV.
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
Sadly, that assumes the TV will behave and not connect to open networks, or use companies' mesh networks (like Amazon Sidewalk), and that they'll never include their own SIM cards.
Granted, none of this has happened yet... but when it happens, I'll start busting open my devices to disconnect any and all antennas.
I've recently read (in HN), that Samsung's appliances mesh network with other Samsung appliances with the hope of reaching the internet. So it's around the corner, it seems.
Even if the "smart" features of a TV are rendered nonfunctional by not giving it a network connection, you're still stuck with a TV that takes a while to boot up (yes, really), and which may be built around a UI designed to navigate its smart features (like booting to a home screen instead of passing through HDMI input).
I have a Sceptre TV from a few years ago that takes about 15 seconds from power-on to even display a boot screen. It takes another 10 seconds or so after that to actually become usable.
Maybe it's just an outlier? It's certainly slow, though.
It boggles my mind that anyone would connect a TV to the Internet (!)
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
Not really, my Vizio has no connection to anything (firewall drops it's traffic, and it's on a separate VLAN). It takes 15 seconds to respond to input changes after waking it up.
I'm with you, but I wonder if this is the sort of "only people on this site care and the vast majority of the readership wouldn't use it" thing ... I'm not sure it is, but it could be, and I wonder if somebody with their ear to the ground/access to more analytics knows.
Just going to throw out https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/ as a solid option for the climbing, hiking, and outdoor sport equipment they review. Most reviews involve real-world subjective testing, which is really what you need when you're trying to figure out whether a jacket is warm or a rain shell keeps you dry, etc.
I haven't trusted them for years, their testing is too subjective and the "objective" tests aren't considering the right things.
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.
I like to read their subjective discussions as one point of view but its really hard to get much use from their rankings. One obvious example is at one point in time all their highest ranked ultralight sleeping bags were quilts (ie. open back, no zippers) and then all of a sudden the quilts dropped to the bottom and were replaced with more traditional zip up bags. I assume the reviewer changed and simply doesn't like quilts, which is totally reasonable, they don't work for everyone but it wasn't clear how the rankings are useful when they just shuffled so drastically.
Agreed on the challenges with subjectivity and I probably should have clarified - I like their full-length testimonials. Never did figure out how their star rating and badges worked...
These guys were the first thing I thought of but to be honest for me, their suggestions have been a bit off. Ofc it's all subjective but I remember distinctly buying two full face helmets they had on their list because their ratings were so different from the concensus from reviews. I could'nt tell who to trust. The gearlab suggestion was very obviously inferior beyond first impressions
I like this site as well. I trust them because I feel they are upfront with the level of subjectivity they are introducing. Also, it seems they at least buy and try out the gear.
It's absolutely rampant on any social media platform, and most blogs. I'm guessing it's extremely rare anyone is prosecuted for violating the disclosure laws. Some choose to do it to keep their viewers trust, but one big problem as platforms go all-in on algorithms, it's less about having a trusting audience and more about doing what you can to get random videos/posts picked up by the algorithm, regardless of content.
I feel like the crowd-sourcing / SEOing / optimization of reviews on the internet has, for all its benefits, made everything too noisy and untrustworthy. I know myself and a lot of other people first search reddit now instead of google because it's impossible to get anything written by a real nonbiased human otherwise.
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.
Heh. The biggest problem I have with Amazon isn't even the fake reviews, it's the people who leave reviews and don't even know what a review is, which is almost all of them.
"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!"
I see this ALLOT on AliExpress. I mean what can you expect, but somehow I expected more.
Like why even bother posting if you havn't even opened the package up yet?!
It doesn’t help that google has largely de-prioritized smaller sites.
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.
I trust their measurements, I just don't like how they score things, and people tend to just use their scores instead of looking at the pros+cons and measurements. (they weight all the different subscores, and add them up, so eg. if there was an excellent monitor except it had a 100:1 contrast ratio, it'd still get great scores despite having such a huge flaw that most people would consider it to be essentially unusable).
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.
Not really. If any single category is "good enough" then the weights are reasonably correct. It's just when a single category is a deal breaker that the simple metric of adding them up doesn't work.
Agreed, minus the headphones. Their headphone reviews are a joke. It's also worth noting some products have a lot of variation due to poor QC (PC monitors) and they may get an unusually good/bad unit from time to time, skewing the review.
Nope. Head-fi is audiowoo fairy land. Members generally loathe scientific testing and subjective, unsubstantiated claims are regularly made. There's even a cable forum, that, last time I went there, banned double-blind testing completely.
Headfi wasn’t always that way. There was a mass exodus of their scientific-minded members, who dedicated themselves to posting objective, and double-blind tests. Naturally, this created a problem with their advertisers, and most left en masse. Now, the site’s little more than a dumpster dive of anecdotal evidence masquerading as reputable sources.
I don't like head-fi either, but scientific testing/measurements are (mostly) worthless. Really, the only useful test is an in-home trial in my view. If you like it, buy it. If not, don't.
Sure. Ultimately what works best in your listening environment is what works best. But that's the result, not the means to the end.
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 agree. Lots of things make a difference (including power) but they are often quite negligible. Is a dedicated digital source better than a PC? By many miles. Is a $10k source better than a $200 source? Not by nearly as much. Do line-level and speaker cables make a difference? Sure. But it's really subtle and most setups would be hard-pressed to hear anything in a blind test. If you have money to burn and the test of the setup is 10's of thousands, a cable costing a couple hundred isn't that egregious.
Hell no. They are audiophool degenerates. They literally reject any semblance of objective measurements, to focus on non-rigorous (i.e. not done with ABX) subjective evaluations.
I cannot recommend audio science review[0] enough. They're the opposite. All about objective measurements and rigor. None of the bullshit.
Crinacle is probably the best, but for headphones I think it's the kind of thing you actually need to try out yourselves: the comfort varies so much for people, as does the preference for different sound signature (and knowing how well headphones handle when they're EQ'd to your preferences).
Consumerlab.com is a paid but excellent resource for obtaining information about various foods and supplements that we can find on the shelves.
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.
> 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.
I used to subscribe and they were generally good, but they made no account of cost.
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.
Which? annoys me in various ways, but not taking the cost into account in their ratings is I think actually one of their better moves.
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.
It is good to be sceptical, but Which? is a charity that doesn't take advertising money, and keeps afloat with paid subscriptions. If it got out that they were taking kickbacks, even setting aside the probable illegality, they'd never sell a subscription again.
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.
I used to subscribe to Consumer Reports back in the day, and basically regretted it. They rarely described their testing methodologies and more often than now, when they did, I wasn't impressed. Their testing usually just boiled down to whether or not the specs met the manufacturers claims, not anything useful like how well it was built and how long it is likely to last.
I wouldn't use Reddit for anything but general product usage information. You can get some honest reviews from Reddit users, but I find a lot of it is people justifying their purchase instead of honest feedback.
It regularly gets gamed very hard. You can sell old high karma accounts for quite a lot of money, because those are best for such things. It's also a thin line between astroturfing and fill on spamming products. But I have no doubts that some reviews on Reddit are payed for.
> You can sell old high karma accounts for quite a lot of money, because those are best for such things.
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?
Just speculating, but if you create a new account and then spam some positive reviews people will notice and downvote / get you banned from the sub-reddit. If you have some built up history it looks more legit to the other community members.
I'm guessing here, but a lot of subreddits have a minimum karma requirement to make posts or comments (it's a decent anti-spam measure, but easily gamed by low effort bots reposting content every month or so, pretty high chance a lot of people won't have seen it before).
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.
Video is terrible as a medium though. Can't skim, can't grep, not trivial to index. I hate that more and more content is moving to video (or podcast) format.
Also once its removed due to whatever (copyright, owner is removed from youtube, reported, million other reasons) its gone. No archive.org, google cache or anything left.
I watched a few of these a while ago and I can somewhat see why they’re popular as they have this fast-paced data-dump look-at-all-this-testing format but I didn’t really think they were very good. I thought many of the tests were likely poor metrics for actual quality and that results would therefore be misleading. A stupid example would be trying to measure how much torque a Phillips head screwdriver can apply before camming out because the point of the screw design is that screw drivers should cam out at a certain torque (so better screw drivers shouldn’t necessarily let you go tighter).
Re: Phillips drive, it's actually a common misconception that this was an intentional feature of the design. The original patent for the driver[1] specifically describes resistance to "camming out" (seemingly in the modern sense of the phrase). Omitting some of the verbose context:
> 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!
It's a myth that Phillips screws designed or intended to cam out at a certain torque. Not least of all because, the correct amount of torque varies wildly by application, even for the same fastener.
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.)
BOLTR is ok if you take the review with a huge grain of salt, basically just as a proxy for having and disassembling the tool yourself. I largely disregard whatever AvE says and make my own conclusions from what is visually apparent. His standards for what makes a good tool are too focused on physical resilience - basically "if it can't survive being dropped into a mine shaft and beaten to hell, it's shit" is unrealistic for most people. Plus there's been reviews where he broke the tool during disassembly and reassembly and then blamed poor performance on the tool itself - the Ryobi Airstrike staplers come to mind.
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.
I'll also agree that his reviews aren't perfect, but the one on automotive scratch removers was enlightening. I had used a random product before that basically did nothing. I bought Meguiar's ultimate compound on his recommendation, and it did indeed work surprisingly well (with just hand polishing, no buffer) on the multitude of surface scratches as I was preparing a car for resale.
To add to that: most sites just compare the features at best. I’m interested in actual usability and durability, things you might need more than five minutes or just reading the specs to find out. E.g. how do headphones handle multiple devices, how long will the battery survive, what are the options when they are broken?
Yes, assessing devices is far from trivial. In case of air purifier reviews, there's little focus on two crucial elements:
* 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.
I had the privilege of working in a co-working space in Tahoe that also subleted out to outdoorgearlab.com/techgearlab.com.
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.
He's great at getting there first with the unboxing or review with insane visuals and editing, but the content itself is very lacking. He's very heavily biased towards Apple devices, and doesn't dig deep at a technical level, preferring more subjective judgements which are difficult to compare across devices. I don't find his advice any more objective than a Reddit comment.
I tend to use reviews as a "try this door" kind of thing, and do my own research. Probably the most awesome review site that I used to rely on was DPReview[0]. I haven't really looked at that site, in the last five years, but they used to be absolutely top-shelf, and full of geek value.
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 think he is entertaining, but I don't find his reviews critical enough. He typically reads off a spec sheet and shares subjective opinions of just a few days of use. I need deeper, more critical reviews
The reviews as actual reviews are terrible. And the retro tech series - well if you know anything about the items being discussed you'll find quite a few inaccuracies. It's pure entertainment.
It's a real shame Consumer Reports were so bad at transitioning from their 20th century business model to the online era. We really need non-commercially funded reviews but it feels like CR is barely functioning anymore.
Regarding "reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing", I'm not sure Consumer Reports deserves to be listed these days either.
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.
I have a service tech for appliances. I just ask him what I should buy. He usually has suggestions from all the cost-ranges. Sometimes, I buy used through him (built-in fridge); sometimes I buy new. Since I had the opportunity to buy a bunch of equipment this year (a huge power surge from my HVAC fried appliances, and bad luck):
Built in fridge: GE monogram;
Dish washer: anything that is quiet (below 42 dB);
So much this. Find someone who does a lot of residential repairs of X. Ask a few of them for recommendations, specifically on what not to buy.
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.
The flip side of this - is that service techs are by their nature biased to failures. They don't come out to the machines that are working. This is an issue for top-selling items where they may see a lot of service calls but the overall rate is lower than something they see less frequently. In my experience I have known few technicians that have the statistical smarts to account for this.
They are meant to be user-serviceable, with common hand tools. You can take it apart and put it back together.
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.
I found similar at the UK take, Which. Everything is boiled down to star ratings and then Mail Merge creates the review text.
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".
For air purifiers, if cost is no constraint, my IQAir GC has worked like a champ. The lower three speeds are reasonably quiet, and speed 6 cleans out the room in no time when my partner burns the cooking. Comes with a 10 year warranty.
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.
Check, check and check. And also a filter quality and seal design that's been tested and proven to work (they do a QA particulate test on each individual unit before it ships https://imgur.com/a/exTrjU7).
I've noticed a tendency for them to review spec sheets; the whole point of a reviewer should be to do the in-depth checking and verification that I cannot do. I want someone to speak to how long the model has been sold, parts availability, repairability, etc.
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.
My library has a subscription to consumer reports, don't have to pay for it. I only bring this up because you said you paid for it. Worth checking if you have some local resource that has a subscription already.
CNN Underscored is trying to be a competitor with legit reviews, as I understand it, but it still feels a little "affiliaty," if you will. (Disclaimer: I work for CNN Digital).
Adding my personal beef with the majority of tech 'reviews': The lack of honest distinction between a (medium-term usage) product review, and hands-on/impressions. Even with some hard data/testing methodologies- when you're a media outlet relying on page views and advertising, and you're racing to get your 'reviews' posted sooner or at least at the same time as the other sites- the reviews are going to be based on increasingly short-term impressions.
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.
A good specialized site and YouTube channel is Garage Gym Reviews [1]. Their reviews are clear and thorough and should be useful references for people buying gym equipment for the home.
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.
Consumer Reports used to be good but it seems to have gone through change in management or something because now it is indistinguishable from the avg SEO spam site.
Nonsense. As a non-profit founded in 1926 with 50 testing labs and partnerships with outside labs, the proof is in the test after test after test after test that is unbiased and, more importantly, the criteria and testing methods are always available and reproducible! So when you don't agree with their rankings you can at least agree that there methods are clear, not based on SEO, not based on spam, not based on money, and pro-consumer.
As somebody not familiar with Wirecutter’s history or legacy, I always considered them to be one of the paid fake review websites that pretend to offer very shallow reviews, mostly just built based on referral links and information that can be harvested from product descriptions. I just don’t agree that they are a real website that does actual testing. 0/10. Would block form Google if I could.
I'm very happy that in the Netherlands we have tweakers.net. Not only do they do tech news and reviews, they also have an amazing parametric search/price watch tool that I'm reasonably sure is a major contributing cause to how competitive pricing is here compared to neighboring countries. Every time I happen to use Amazon I die a little inside because of how bad their search is.
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.
The sites I've found to be at least making an honest evaluation are:
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.
I also subscribe to choice. They do lots more than product reviews. They have general guides on how to get the best use out of products, mystery shoppers reviewing customer service, tools to compare health insurance, etc. The reason I stay subscribed is they campaign about consumer rights issues which actually cause industries as a whole to change, e.g. bank fees. They also have the shonky awards which usually gets a bit of media attention each year, where they shame companies for poor behaviour, quality, outright scams, etc. I think of it like a lobby to help us consumers out, which we need more of. Too often we are listening to the advice of the industry bodies that represent the companies rather than the consumers.
ServeTheHome does some review-like stuff, but its not entirely detailed though they do actually run the hardware and measure things like noise, power, etc.
I have no faith whatsoever in WC‘s reviews or advice anymore. I’ve bought several of their recommendations post NYT acquisition and they’ve all turned out to be flawed in a way that I’d aimed to avoid by following their recommendations.
I find „site:Reddit.com“ a much much much better source of actual information that isn’t SEO spam.
'Gamers Nexus' (gamersnexus.net) is striving to deliver reliable impartial consumer advice for Computer stuff. Unlike LTT (unless something changed and Linus started hiring people who know what they are doing) GN is leaning heavily on industry best practices instead of 'this feels good' opinions:
On the continuum between “highly flawed” and imperfect I find WC to be generally good intentioned and skewed more toward the latter than the former. Is there something that keeps it from thus threshold in your view?
RTINGS is a pretty good actual review site for electronics. Sometimes I find their focus on measurable data a bit annoying. Intangibles matter aswell. But they are exhaustive reviews and make comparing very easy.
The challenge with picking an air purifier is everyone's situation is different given the reason for purification, room(s), price, and maintenance costs. Someone who has allergies vs pets vs volatile chemicals all need something very specific, so the BS one size fits all wirecutter recommendation would have you believe it's the best. Unless you can talk to a real expert who matches up the model(s) you need, reading reviews and YT is pretty much worthless. In the world of purifiers, you definitely get what you pay for.
There is Rtings for television, and other specialised sites for other product categories. I don't think you can stick to any general review source and consistently get quality reviews.
Since some are throwing out good, more specific, gear tests. I'd like to throw out Baby Gear Lab (https://www.babygearlab.com) if you need baby stuff. They're way better than the Wirecutter because they're run by experts in baby gear. (I'm not affiliated in any way, but I'm a new parent that found it super useful.)
Yeah. I want to read about the real opinions and experiences of real people, not some paid-for marketing piece. I used to search reddit for that kind of thing but it's probably been compromised by now. I wonder if there even is a place that isn't. Real place gets created, real people start going there, marketers realize that's where the people are and immediately start working the place.
Hey at least be happy you have some options! It’s 2022 and I cannot get a single reliable suggestion on ANY product, refrigerator or cell phone, in india. Which is fine for small electronics since I can lookup Wirecutter but for anything else where the models in india don’t match American ones, there’s absolutely nothing on the internet to guide you to an informed opinion. Market opportunity?
What about Rtings? For tech stuff, I found the reviews to be of good quality and it does not seem like it’s biased or sponsored.
> 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.
I wonder if we can ever have a centralized review site that also has the subject matter expertise in each area. The future of in-depth and unbiased reviews is distributed and perhaps there is a dire need to collect all the scattered reviews on a central platform. Like a sub stack of product reviews.
For synthesizers and other music gear, there's loopop on YouTube. His reviews are so in-depth that they can often function as replacements for the product's user manual.
A lot of times, after I get a product, I disagree with the WC review on many points about a recommended product and have to end up returning it. That said, I still use it to inform my purchase decisions.
Anyways, how specifically is it "highly flawed" though?
It's not a review site, but the YouTube channel "project farm" is this. He not only has great objective comparison reviews but he shares his test setup, results and data so its clear its a great objective review.
The Project Farm channel on YouTube does a great objective and transparent set of reviews to follow along. It’s not exhaustive for every product on the market but does a reasonable sample and is a joy to watch.
Outdoor Gear Lab is another good one for outdoor gear. Actual things reviewed by real people, though perhaps flawed in the same way as wire cutter. At least it’s real people putting the products through the paces in real use cases.
>'The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one.'
Since it was bought by the NYT company I no longer trust their quality. This great air filter contra article is a great example and I appreciate the link and the person who took the time to write it
I'm also really skeptical about their impartiality; I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot of underhanded deals with whatever they review and advocate for.
This article actually makes a bunch of claims itself that are false. For example, it claims that the Wirecutter believes air filters work like sieves. Whereas the Wirecutter review page for air purifiers goes into how they do not behave like sieves and also references a NASA study that shows how HEPA filters are good at capturing both particles smaller and larger than the 0.3 micron test standard.
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.
> HEPA filters are good at capturing both particles smaller and larger than the 0.3 micron test standard
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.
> 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!)
> 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.
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.
Technically, if retention at the most penetrating particle size is 99.95%, then retention at the 0.3 micron level is at least 99.95%.
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
> 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?
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.
> Implicitly this entire discussion is taking place in the context of airborne particulates. Obviously no air filter is going to work very well against, say, gamma radiation.
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?
> 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
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!
> This article actually makes a bunch of claims itself that are false.
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.
He's just honing his HN pedantry to a razor edge so he can point out that ackshewally it's not an air filter at all because it isn't restricted to gaseous fluids in the ratio of 0.78 oxygen to 0.21 nitrogen plus trace gases.
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.
> you will find that particles are contextually defined as pieces of matter in the solid or liquid phase which are suspended in the air.
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.
You've been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately. That's seriously not ok, and we ban such accounts. I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.
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.
I find that the Wirecutter is awesome for things I will never go into stupendous depth for on my own — like spatulas. For anything more serious than that, it has increasingly been on the decline for years.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but the IKEA one which they singled out as not recommended to buy is the only one in the article they don't earn a commission on when someone buys it
i literally ran into this with wirecutter when searching for an air purifier years ago. they recommended an inferior performing coway when their own tests concluded that blueair (211+) was significantly better. they've long since removed the chart showing this discrepancy, and they still recommend coway, no doubt because that's their affiliate partner. i bought the 211+ and have been mostly satisfied with it for my studio apartment, but beware, filters are relatively expensive.
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.
You know what the messed up thing about Wirecutter's affiliate marketing is?
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.
Some might say this is intentional, the whole point for the link is to corrupt your Amazon cookie so that they get credit for the (next?) purchase you make.
At least that's how I've always assumed the links work, not that you have to buy the exact product immediately.
The product link not resolving doesn't improve this payout for the publisher. The cookie gets dropped _either way_ and when a purchase happen Amazon will check for a referral cookie and payout accordingly for whatever qualifies in that cart.
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.
https://toolguyd.com/top-tool-deals-11122020/ has some comments on what the site owner can see, things like which links work better than others, etc. Surprisingly large amounts of info could leak without anyone really realizing it, even if everything is entirely "anonymized" there's still the total dollar amount paid out, etc.
I've used the Wirecutter, so I'm not going to claim to be totally unbiased. But I'm just not seeing any nastiness there: the reason they gave for switching their recommendation (while retaining their original recommendation as an upgrade pick) seems entirely legitimate. And as much as the company wants to emphasize the use of the word "kickback" it's not really apt: Wirecutter's model has always been affiliate linking, and that's exactly what they reached out about in their first and second emails. And when turned down, they still published the recommendation and (later) still identified it as the best option if cost isn't an issue.
But the problem is that it ultimately skews the incentives and contradicts their claim that the editors are totally isolated from the commercial part of their business.
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.
Sure, and I'm not saying there's no possible influence in any direction. At the same time, I suspect things are more separate than in 2014, and I don't see that claim on their pages from back then [0][1]. In fact they seemed to have independently reviewed the desks and only then asked about an affiliate program.
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].
(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.)
Wirecutter's "business team" won't let their "editorial team" review the new iterations of the NextDesk product because if their "unbiased recommendation" is NextDesk, revenue will go down.
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.
Eight years ago, right? Are they refusing now? (Genuinely curious if you've got up-to-date info. If they are terribly biased I want to know it, so I can downgrade my trust, which is why I upvoted the OP about the air purifier.)
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.
Well it certainly calls their objectivity into question, and the objectivity is supposed to be the entire point. The way they described the better (and more expensive) desk before the shakedown made it clear that it was the best one. That they changed it to a runner-up after many attempts to solicit a kickback is a seriously bad look. I don’t trust them at all now.
They didn't change it to a runner up—they changed it to an upgrade pick, that is, still the best, but without enough marginal benefit for the substantial marginal cost. Not sure what pricing was like back then, of course, but at this point Wirecutter's recommendations run about seven hundred dollars, and NextDesk's offerings start at eighteen hundred.
They make more money from me if their reviews are accurate. If they’re are only motivated by money, then that incentive favors honest reviews.
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.
But the problem is that there's a difference between "okay" and "shit". They indeed won't make money if they recommend shit that gets returned, but a lot of products can be "okay" enough for people to keep around even if there are better products out there (that the review site doesn't recommend because the "okay" product provides better kickbacks). The standing desk situation is actually a very good example of that - the hassle of shipping and assembly means that once you've received it you are unlikely to ship it back unless it's absolutely bad despite other models being even better.
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.
Honestly, when I’m looking at buying something OK is usually all I’m looking for. Sure getting the best widget would be nice, but I’m happy as long as it doesn’t break right away or otherwise cause me problems.
But the editors are isolated from the commercial side.
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.
A conspiracy is when people collude in secret. A conspiracy theory is a theory that some people collude in secret. Conspiracy theories are true when they correspond to true conspiracies.
People get the idea that theory means wrong or imaginary when it really means the concept of something rather than the actual thing. But the concept can be correct and fully proven like the theory of math or physics.
My point is it’s a mistake to conflate anything labeled a conspiracy theory as being automatically false, which is often what happens, or the label is applied something that’s already false. Many theories turn out to be true
Exactly, if they're true it's a conspiracy fact or just a conspiracy.
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.
Agreed: the Wirecutter's emphasis on HEPA is not right for a purifier that sits in a room. Once you get to reasonably high removal efficacy (even 90%, let alone 99.5% vs 99.97%) flow rate matters far more than filter spec.
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)
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.
That’s because 10% of the air goes through the purifier and has 99.5% of particles removed, while 90% of the air doesn’t go through the purifier at all.
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.
If you noticed that 0.9005 and 0.90005 are almost identical then congratulations—you understand air filters better than the Wirecutter. Both 99.5% and 99.95% are close enough to 100% that performance is almost entirely determined by the volume of air they process.
"the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used"
Thanks for teaching me the name for this principle!
This is how I feel every time HN suggests rewriting every website in C while ignoring the fact the database takes most of the time for average web apps.
Or the articles about how Python is causing climate disaster while the author continues to drive an oversized SUV.
I really don't like this math, no one actually stops at that point, you take the output, la, "0.9005" and re-run it
(0.9005 × .1) × (1-.995) + (0.9005 × .9)
and again, and again, etc, point being that over time it does cycle the entire room, due to entropy, and then suddenly the differences start to stack up a bit, not a lot, but when one filter is letting 10x the particles through vs the other filter, it'll show
> suddenly the differences start to stack up a bit, not a lot, but when one filter is letting 10x the particles through vs the other filter, it'll show
> The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird.
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)
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.
What? Where are you getting the 10x from? Both numbers are about 0.9 and the difference is about 0, not 10. If you are refering to the sticker number, yeah the whole point of that calculation is that a 10x sticker number does absolutely not translate to a 10x difference.
> 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.
No, a 10x difference would be between 0.9 and 0.09. What was given was about a 1.0005x difference. If you had a child that was .9005 meters tall and one that was .90005 meters tall, you couldn't tell which was taller without a precision ruler.
The only point the author was making with the 0.9005 vs 0.90005 example was that if you're only processing 10% of the air, then the efficiency of your filter doesn't matter. The entire section honestly would have been better without numbers, because they cause some amount of confusion and they don't really help make the point since it's obvious. If your room's air is recycled with outside air fully over the course of one day, and your filters take ten days to work through the volume of air in your room, then the efficiency of your filter doesn't matter.
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.
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.
I started the subthread with the comment because saying the difference between those numbers is small is weird, … because it is.
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.
The data have nothing to do with the hypothetical where the air filters process 10% of the air in the room. They also have nothing to do with the air filters in the thought experiment, which are simplified, ideal filters that have the exact characteristics we say they do. Nobody is applying the numbers in question to any "chaotic system", because this is just a simple framing designed to illustrate exactly one, utterly banal point: If you don't process most of the air, it doesn't matter how efficient you are. In fact, that's all the section should have been. That one sentence. No numbers (it doesn't need them), and very little detail. Just, "if you don't process most of the air, the efficiency doesn't matter". You can't disagree with that conditional statment. You can argue that the premise is flawed, or irrelevant, or unrealistic to the point of uselessness, but you can't argue with the totally boringly obvious statement that if you aren't processing 90% of the air at all, then your efficiency doesn't matter. It's not more controversial than saying that "if your air filters are turned off, their efficiency doesn't matter."
> 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.
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).
> 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%.
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%.
We're talking about 0.3 micron measurements because the input value for his numbers is the efficiency of the filters in removing 0.3 micron particles (99.5 vs 99.95).
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.
Multiplying .9005 and .90005 by 10000 does not actually cause a 10x difference to appear. No, really, try it!
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.
10000 x .9005 is 9,005.
10000 x .90005 is 9,000.5.
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.
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.)
The "10x" you've been referring to is about the difference in how many particles make it through filters of 99.5% vs 99.95% efficacy [1], not 70% vs 99.95%, which would be 600x [2].
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The data shows a huge difference which cannot be explained by the difference between 5 particles and 0.5 particles.
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.
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.
So? We're talking about practical effectiveness here. The difference really only matters if you only have one chance to filter the air, like the filter in a ventilation system bringing air into a cleanroom (the article goes into this).
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.)
in practice the filtration in a room goes down exponentially and quite quickly even with budget filters that only filter out 90%. even in shops where you are sanding.
The author explicitly states that it's small in the home use context. If you're talking about medical or cleanroom manufacturing contexts, yes it's a huge difference.
The difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is not huge in a medical context, or in a chip fab context, or in any other practical context. We're not talking about the difference between 0.0005 and 0.00005. The numbers in question are 0.9005 and 0.90005, and the point being made is that the 0.9 problem dwarfs the 10x efficiency difference way over in the thousandths place.
That difference is from his comments on the toy model of 1000 cubic feet room and 100 cubic feet per minute recirculating air.
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.
Yes, but in that case you wouldn't be comparing 0.9005 and 0.90005, but rather 0.0005 and 0.00005. No one is arguing that the difference in filters wouldn't matter in a cleanroom context, just that recirculating air in a home the difference in filtration is more like 0.9005 vs 0.90005, and the difference between those numbers is small (in any context to which they apply).
> In an operating room or chip fab, the room would be over pressure and the new air coming into the room would be filtered.
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.
Yes, the numbers are from a toy example, one that the author used to make one uncontroversial point in one section of the post. Those are the numbers we are discussing in this subthread, which began with:
> 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.
Even in a medical context, the difference, when operated like an air purifier, is negligible.
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.
0.90005 times 10 is 9.0005, not 0.9005 (I.e. the two fractions presented are 90.005% and 90.05%). Even if you look at the complement you get 9.995% vs 9.95% which is small. One could imagine that these differences could also arise from eg obstructions to airflow or positioning in the room or the direction of the wind outside. The point is that the difference is dominated by air flow in a typical environment rather than filtering differences.
This is how it works because the room is not sealed, nor is the filter being used to filter outside air into a positive pressure area.
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
vs
.1 × (1-.9995) + .9 = 0.90005
Thus proving the point in TFA that the airflow matters more than E12 vs H13. The fact that the steady state (given that "dirty" air is being introduced somehow) is lower for the filter that moves more air follows from the fact that it removes particles at a faster rate.
The difference between 99.5% and 99.95 is the difference between an event happening 1 in 200 times and happening and 1 in 2000 times.
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.
Probabilities and amounts are not comparable even though they both use % notation.
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.
Consider a purifier that purifies 99.995%. According to your "probabilities", that's a 100x improvement. Now consider this purifier purifies 1 cubic millimeter of air per hour. That is to say, each hour 1 cubic millimeter of air is 99.995% purified (no probability). Would you say that this purifier is 100x better than the IKEA one with 99.5% purification at 1 cubic feet of air per minute? Considering air flow is not a trick.
RLv1 only filters a tiny amount of air each minute, while RLv2 filters a lot of air each minute (I've improved the flow, but drastically botched the performance)
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.
Almost all of these review sites, not understanding the physics involved, believe a HEPA filter sieves particles down to a size of 0.3 microns, which implies that anything smaller passes on through.
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.
> Almost all of these review sites, not understanding the physics involved, believe a HEPA filter sieves particles down to a size of 0.3 microns, which implies that anything smaller passes on through.
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.
HEPA makes sense if you filter all the air, ie. the filter is inline like in a laminar flow cabinet/cleanroom or directly inserted in an air stream filtering 100% of the downstream air. In those cases you care a lot about how many particles make it through since they will cause yield loss or contamination in the processes.
For EU standards, a filter removes X% of the hardest particle size to remove (called the Most Penetrating Particle Size or MPPS). That size varies between filters, but is often around 0.3 microns. Filters will do better than X% for particles both larger and smaller than the MPPS. So for the EU standard, we're saying "it'll do X% worst case, and better than X% for all other cases, meaning it'll always filter out more than X% of all particles, regardless of size".
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
Wirecutter has gone to shit and stopped being useful about 3-4 years ago. Their move to a paid subscription was very odd to me because they had also lost all my trust by that point.
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.
> There are countless examples of recommends products doing a bait and switch
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).
I'm saying that I would have paid 3-4 years ago before I lost trust in the site. I have no issue with affiliate links (if the site remains neutral which seems almost impossible) but it's clear to me WC sold their soul a while back and subscription fees are a last-ditch attempt to get some more money out of it.
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.
Big Clive made a video and wrote an OpenSCAD script[0] which allows you to 3D print a base and adapter to convert a regular 120mm computer fan into a "true" HEPA air purifier.
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.
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.
There seems to be two main use cases for a room-sized air purifier:
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.
Surprisingly, there are ultra-quite full-size fans as well. I bough Vornado fan from Amazon, and this is one of the best devices I ever had. On first two speeds it’s basically silent, I use it 24/7 to ventilate room with bad air flow in my house. It’s also Alexa integrated, but I never can remember the commands.
Thanks for sharing this! Can you provide the values of the variables for that exact linked filter and fan? I'd like to print this while I wait for Amazon shipping. I bought ASIN B07GJG285F instead - same fan, but faster shipping for me.
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)
You'll definitely want to bump thickness up to 2.0 mm for more rigidity. Otherwise just measure the diameter of your filter and maybe round up slightly.
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.
Well, my experience refutes that opinion, but yes, it sized for a smaller room or less polluted larger areas.
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.
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.
> The air purifier industry is more about aesthetics than it is function
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.
> it looks awful. I would not want that in my home.
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'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.
Of course, but nobody is preventing that information to be shared. When I looked for air purifier last year, there was tons of articles I saw on how to build your own. This isn't hidden, there's tons of good resources out there.
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 understand why you try to shame us for choosing to buy our own.
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 am being polite in explaining the low-income perspective on devices like these. Looking at a device designed for low-income people who are trying to breathe healthy air and saying, essentially, "it's ugly, I would never want that" is extremely tone deaf around why it exists in the first place: because desperate people need an inexpensive solution. If you feel shame from that alternate perspective, I would suggest it comes from within.
You're misquoting me. I never said they were extremely fortunate for choosing one model over the other, I said they were extremely fortunate for "being able to choose form over function." When wildfire season rolls around and air becomes very hazardous where I lived, local air purifiers of all kinds were completely sold out, and the box fan solution is all a lot of us had[0]. It's not just inexpensive, it's about availability of materials.
>just to try to dunk on someone
You're attributing negative intentions to my posts, which isn't appreciated.
Are you talking about emergencies, or are you talking about "the low-income perspective"?
Because you said you were doing the latter, and I was criticizing your words using that context. In that context, your words come across as judgemental.
If you're actually talking about the former, then you chose your words pretty poorly.
The low-income people are often the most impacted when an emergency hits. I'm sure if someone had $1000 for an air purifier, they could get one the next day, in most circumstances. Though I'm not low income (now), I got a reminder of it when local materials were totally gone and I would have had to pay through the nose to keep my place breathable. It was bad. The hallways in our apartment building had a haze of smoke 24/7. Fortunately the city let everyone know about the box fan solution, so that's what we did.
For me, being unprepared in a new city, and for low income people who aren't prepared, choosing form over function was a luxury.
> The low-income people are often the most impacted when an emergency hits.
Yes, but it's not relevant to low-income people in general. For someone getting an air purifier in a normal situation, they can go for an ikea model about as well as any other solution. Especially considering the box fan uses a ton of power, costing money.
>Especially considering the box fan uses a ton of power, costing money.
box fan: $40
ikea: $70
box fan electricity: 73W x 24 x 365 x $0.11kWh = $70/year
ikea electricity: 14W x 24 x 365 x $0.11kWh = $13/year
Assuming 24/7 usage, in the first year you'd save $27, and in subsequent years, $57.
But this isn't counting filters. You can get a much higher range of standard filters for a box fan, meaning you can run it much less and filter more. And when IKEA discontinues the product, you're SOL finding filters, so you have to buy something new, whereas you'll never have that problem with a box fan. All things considered, I think box fan would win on cost.
Your comment is hilarious. Buying an air purifier that looks good makes sense, making an air purifier during times of crisis also makes sense. They are not even remotely the same thing. Oh boy you're so lucky you can get a Dyson, we've got wild fires here in California! You see how ridiculous that sounds?
The funny thing is, I agree with your comment. Which is why I'm so confused about someone who sees an air purifier that is clearly made for purposes other than aesthetics and says "I don't want it because it's ugly." It's not for you, obviously.
I think the point is that aesthetics matter to you but not a lot of people care if they have a box fan + air filter stashed away in their bedroom for a cheap airfilter. Maybe if it was more prominent in the living or guest bedrooms?
First, a nice looking case does not justify the extortion prices of most purifiers. Also many people have serious allergies and don't have 200 $/euro to spare.
Second, you know you can max a box yourself or hide a thin purifier under a desk or above a tall cabinet?
I almost want to replace my old Electrolux EAP300 with an IKEA one because it looks less like shit. The EAP300 is just this big floor beheamoth with no aesthetics. Lower filter costs wouldn't be bad either (if the IKEA filters last as long as the Electrolux ones, they're under half the cost). It's just so hard to justify as long as my old air filter still functions.
Compared to a dedicated air purifier, a box fan one is louder, has higher energy consumption, and is uglier (I suppose the last one is subjective).
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.
I mean... I'm an IT professional. I have no time, energy, desire or ability to build. my own fan, maintain it, and trust that it does a good job. That's the reason I bought an air purifier.
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.
Is it really inconceivable that someone might want to pay a modest sum of money to avoid having to build and maintain a custom-made version that is uglier?
We should appreciate the diversity of the 7,903,275,000 people in the world. Everyone single one of us has different opinions, ideas, abilities and interests.
I now run a MERV 16 furnace filter (yes, my aprilair system explicitly supports it, no I will not hurt my furnace) for central air filtration alongside two box-fan filters (the easy slap on the back kind - I think I'm using something equivalent to MERV 13 on the back, can't go higher for the size) around the house and a quiet regular air-filter in our room.
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.
The problem is that on low, it’s too loud and pushes/filters too much air to be needed 24x7. It’s also bulky. I rather use a smaller profile one that can be left on all the time (even if it costs more)
I have the box fan and only use it when AQI is high (wildfire season)
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.
Thank you. This is amazing. Precisely what I've been searching for. Something cheap, affordable, and most of all, moves a large quantity of air within a short amount of time. Loudness doesn't bother me one bit since I almost always have white noise playing in the background.
I haven't used that specific construction, but I have used this one[0] when I moved to a location without realizing the extent of the wildfire smoke. It worked well, but yes it is noisy on the highest setting. I continue to use it because it's inexpensive and the parts are readily available.
Probably more aggro than necessary... Wirecutter takes H13 to be the minimum level that can be considered "HEPA" because that seems to be the "H" in "H13", per the same chart that Dynomight references in Wikipedia (though they cut off that column in their own article).
The Wirecutter takes that standard to be minimum as that is the minimum necessary to be considered a HEPA filter, which the author should presumably know as that is stated in 2 articles they cited lol.
Yeah this was very bizarre to me. It seems like the author just missed the basic fact that the H13 is the same H that makes it 'true' HEPA.
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.
That's not the point though - that part is technically true (EPA filters are 'Efficient Particulate Air' filters and HEPA are 'High Efficiency Particulate Air' filters, and the E and H correspond to those respectively).
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.
I see a lot of discussion here about Wirecutter and/or Consumer Reports being untrustworthy. But I am not sure "reviews" are a solvable problem, really.
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.
People should use Wirecutter and CR to find a list of products that they'll probably be happy with. The expectation that they can identify the absolute best product for everyone is impossible and this article/discussion is probably a bit unfair.
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.
In all it’s bluster, this article forgets to add the fact that the Wirecutter actually tested the IKEA device, and didn’t just go by theoretical specs.
> 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.
Errr direct quote from the article:
"These tests… are not credible.
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?
I'm pretty skeptical (and that's putting it mildly) of any website that uses affiliate marketing links. I can't see how objectivity can survive in that environment.
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.
There are categories where the incentives are equal enough across all the products so you can maybe possibly trust the reviews more.
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.
There might be better air purifiers, but the recommended Coway purifier is really good. I've had one for 5 years, still working as well as the day I bought it. I also have a 3x more expensive high-end Alen unit, but it's not nearly as effective or quiet as the simple Coway. The filters are way more expensive too.
I bought two Coway units based off the Wirecutter reviews. Both had noisy, off balance fans (gee I wonder why there are reports of the fan blades blowing up). The newer one had a HEPA filter that reeked of VOCs and went back to the retailer because Coway refused to honor their warranty. The air purifier "review" was the thing that really soured me on Wirecutter as a source of trustworthy reviews.
Oh yeah Coway deserves a shout out for trying to sneak some binding arbitration agreement in at the end of their warranty drivel.
I have four of them to cover both floors of a two-story house. They work well (so long as you remember to clean the prefilter every month or two!) and are very quiet on the lower fan speeds.
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.
Regarding the section about whether it is or isn't a true HEPA filter, the Wirecutter is a US based website targeting mostly US based consumers so maybe we should look at the major US standard regarding HEPA filters which is DOE-STD-3020-2015. This standard was originally developed to cover HEPA filters supplied by DOE contractors in nuclear facilities.
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.
Opinions about Wirecutter notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed this article. I basically believed every singe "myth" exposed here, and especially that a better grade of filter was really important when in fact if you recirculate the air constantly it's really not a big deal.
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:
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.
> You can't average Trash opinions and end up with anything other than Trash
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.
The "percent of the people like the movie" still doesn't tell you anything about WHO those people are. Nor does (number of promoters) / (number of detractors).
"professional critic reviews" ?? Please.
I'll stick with what I said: get to know a few critics, and read those.
> 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."
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.
This article falls into the trap of conflating the Wirecutter's misapplication of filtration standards with irrelevant minutiae about which terms and diameters they cite for the filter classes. So alongside a pretty cogent description of how fine-matter filtration works by particle size, there's the claim that "a 'PM2.5 filter' … isn’t a thing," despite the PM2.5 class of fine particulate matter being the range specifically mentioned in the Ikea product description in the screenshot. A cursory search will turn up lots of results for filters which show that this is a pretty common term. Where the Wirecutter review actually goes wrong is in taking 2.5 microns as the lower bound of the particulate range, whereas it's conventionally the upper bound.
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.
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...
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.
As a reader, if I had to generalize; Dynomight is a SF-rationalist-substack-adjacent blogger with a good understanding of statistics. The 2 closest popular bloggers I associate him with are SSC and Gwern; both pretty popular on HN.
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.
SSC spent the last decade as a blogger on the side. He had a big enough following to monetize it, but actively chose against it. It was only after the whole NYT debacle, that he actually moved to blogging fulltime.
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.
Note that Ikea also sells a more powerful air filter called the Starkvind. This one is able to detect the air quality and automatically turn itself on.
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.
Saying it's 'tested' and 'corresponds to EPA12' means to say it meets the standard. They couldn't say that if they didn't mean it passes the spec for E12...
True HEPA means exactly what it says: HEPA as defined by the US EPA.
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).
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:
Can anyone tell me what 'Contra Wirecutter' means. It's like I've gone mad, everyone seems to know what this term means, both of these words mean nothing to me and I've spoken English my entire life. You're all acting like they're two words that make perfect sense. Haha. It would be really great is someone could explain the two words to me.
Dictionary definition of contra: "against; in opposition or contrast to"
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.
Oooo thank you so much! I can't believe I've never come across this word, and I love words! I thought it was a video came and that's it. I guess it's the short version of contradict?
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!
Contra wirecutter is clearly invented for this article. But in short I take it to mean that it asserts a point of view that is in disagreement with the point of view asserted on the popular wirecutter.com product review site.
I've got this setup to deal with cat litter dust. It works very well for that purpose and the filters are cheap (I get the cheapest one that's not see-through, <$10CAD I think).
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.
One thing that irks that shit out of me in reviews -- not normalizing or banding for cost.
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.
I don’t think I agree. The world gets really confusing when you take costs into account. Try buying a phone charger. The $5 one might be overflowing with 5 star reviews saying how great it is for the price, but it’s just crap. Likewise the $100 one that’s amazing but some 3 star reviews for “too expensive”.
The issue is why they completely ignore costs and legacy substitution: vendor relations and content.
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.
I wish analysis like this would stop using tests of the filter material to make any judgement about the purifier.
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!
Great points. I just scanned the article. Did Wirecutter do any actual testing? They can refute and prove the claims are wrong on paper...but it really comes down to testing. Where is Wirecutter's test data?
I'm inclined to debunk this debunking. To be clear, I do think that Wirecutter has problems. I don't like their practice of affiliate-linking. I think a review company should avoid even the "appearance of evil". But more importantly, their practices seem spotty: they tend to test only a relatively small number of models, which may not accurately reflect the market.
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).
> 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.
Looking at the wattage comparisons, the article talks about the "Wirecutter recommended air purifier" but seems to go out of its way to not mention it by name. Why?
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.
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:
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.
Sure totally, it just makes it harder for me to verify _their_ numbers though.
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.
> Looking at the wattage comparisons the article talks about the "Wirecutter recommended air purifier" but seems to go out of its way to not mention it by name. Why?
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.
I've done so much research about air purifiers that I think I could do a thesis if I were in academia. The vast majority of these devices fall under one category: rubbish. Lots of gimmicks performed when it comes to efficacy. Bending reality with borderline claims or inventing useless terms that mean nothing.
If you are serious about indoor air quality, start with IQAir. Their products are bulky, contain multiple filters and you know that you'll be able to get replacement filters 5 years later.
Blueair has some reasonable products too (ignore the smaller, cheap product lines).
Most air purifiers are a high-quality filter and a fan to move air through it. That's a solid approach, and they perform close to how you'd expect given their flow rate and filter rating.
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!
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.
This is my use case more or less. Basically I want to be able to leave the house and say "hey google, clean this mess" and it'll start my strategically placed robot vacuums and run the filters on max while that's happening to minimise particulate spread.
Mostly though, I just want some extra power for larger rooms.
I run my STARKVIND in Auto mode most of the time, but from 4PM to 9PM I have scheduled it (via Home Assistant) to run on full power - basically to clean the air, regardless of what the sensor tells it, before bedtime.
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?
I have two Fornuftigs for bedroom and office, and a Winix Zero in the living room. The Winix definitely beats Ikea in terms of noise production on max airflow, it positively sounds like a jet is taking off. It moves quite a bit more air of course. I was rather surprised that the Fornuftig is nearly perfectly quiet at the lowest setting, which is really great for a bedroom and offce, although I don't know how much or little it stil does at that setting.
Wirecutter seems to make a big deal of the fact that the IKEA purifier doesn't use a "true HEPA" filter. As far as I can tell, neither does the Blueair purifier that is one of their top picks. Blueair claims to use "HEPASilent Ultra," while carefully avoiding claiming that their filter meets HEPA standards.
> 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.
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.
Legit review sites are pretty much dead. Most of them look and say exacy the same thing. Almost none of them have any objective measurements beyond what's stated already from marketing spec sheets.
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.
I'm under the impression Wirecutter's reviews are also influenced from being paid by some manufacturers. No way to prove it, just a feeling as a consumer. Yet, I still look at them as a source occasionally.
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.
Isn't IKEA now mostly branded Chinese tat with a slightly premium pricing?
I have noticed that you can buy good quality Chinese stuff cheaper without having to pay for Western branding.
Now that Western corporations are outsourcing whatever they can to make extra profit, basically becoming a shell and investment vehicle rather that a company actually making something, I think that it is now more ethical to actually buy from Chinese corporations without Western involvement.
These greedy corporations are a part of the reason why Western economies are tanking. No meaningful jobs and people can't keep up paying off their debts.
They also lobbied governments to put regulations on top of regulations so only big corporations could keep up with changes and it wouldn't be possible for a small business to even start unless they also outsource to Asia.
I am sorry for quite a rant, but when I see IKEA it hits a nerve.
Feedback for the author: If you've never heard of "The wirecutter" then it's really hard to understand what you're saying.
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.
I've never thought about air filters, but the explanation on why they also filter smaller particles is very similar to size exclusion chromatography, a very common method used in a biolab. This is also a method that might appear counter-intuitive at first.
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.
Since most people are relying on Reddit for product research, this list of the most discussed air purifiers on r/AirPurifiers might be a good start too: https://looria.com/reddit/AirPurifiers/products
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.
> That’s lower, but do we care? The first level is already comparable to the least polluted cities on the planet. And most people reading this probably have less drafty windows or cleaner outside air.
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.
I am legit wondering if air purifiers wouldn't be a good addition in preschools. A classroom isn't that big and one of these things would probably be enough. A school year would require 2-3 replacements, ie. not much.
I knew that but funding was for big ventilation. I wonder if any of these home-use devices have been deployed and if there's some data with comparative results.
At the schools my kids were in, they deployed commercial-looking freestanding units. I don't know if that was intended to be a temporary measure until they got central units installed.
I haven't seen any data, agree it would be nice to know.
Project Farm is another great one for tools or anything you might find in a garage. - https://www.youtube.com/c/ProjectFarm
He buys everything himself, and does good comparisons and testing, often to failure.
"Review to failure" is a good benchmark to see if they are actually really reviewing the tool, even if the failure is obscenely beyond any normal use of the product.
Especially if they then can breakdown why it failed (and if they'd improve anything).
I have both Förnuftig (meaning sensible, great name) and a Coway Storm AP-1516D. I prefer the Coway, but it is much more powerful.
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.
If filters struggle to trap particles around some specific particle size, wouldn't it make sense to combine two filters with different ranges together?
I'm pretty sure that they all have their worst performance at roughly the same particle size, because they're all working on the same two mechanisms (discussed in the article), and that's the small area where neither mechanism works very well.
IKEA really mussed the chance to provide a way to connect their air quality sensor with the air purifier. I was hoping to have an automated system that would start the air purifier when a certain threshold is reached, but there is no way to achieve this (except with intensive hacking).
Also, the air quality sensor ALWAYS shows green. Did it show yellow or even red for anyone not living in Hotang?
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.
Home Assistant has air quality integrations although it does seem most solutions require a whole lot of hacking regardless of the sensor you choose and you would have to leave the air purifier on and use a smart plug to trigger it.
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.
I use the IKEA air purifier and love them, but I had a specific use case in mind.
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.
Ikea interested me when they worked with teenage engineering for some silly bits. But that was quickly reduced into a markup game from resellers so it lost my interest.
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.
Am I the only one to be put off by the fact that the value for filter performance - clean air diffusion rate (CADR) - is stored in the second value of the list structure?
> (Yeah, power usage goes down when you add the extra carbon filter to the IKEA purifier. I’ve confirmed this myself with a power meter. Physics is weird.)
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'.
excellent write.. I bought multiple of these airfilters after reading that review, because, honestly, I didn't believe it anyway, and my particle sensors clearly show when the filter is running.
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.
Wirecutter is just SEO spam and it makes very little sense to read it at all. You can't even go from the opposite of their recommendations as it's impossible to know which manufacturers caved in to their extortionist paid placement model
Since we are among experts here, please recommend the best air filters available to retail customers and I will gladly whatever price for the peace of mind, since I am not an expert and trust sites like Wirecutter over Amazon type of reviews.
Wirecutter was great when it was independently owned. Since it was bought by NYT it doesn’t seem as neutral. They conveniently seem to favor products sold by Amazon or Walmart where they can get referral fees.
I had a lot of trouble finding "the right" air purifier. Who knows if its even the right one. I found wirecutter (and the like) to have a bit of a feel of a fake affiliate marketing website.
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.
Sort of. I'm not super familiar with the EN, but ISO is a non-governmental organization, and is funded by 'subscriptions' from every participating nation (which are apparently based on GDP?)
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)
Wirecutter really illustrates the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Some of their recommendations are fine, but whenever they review something more niche than phone charger cables, I go to the comments/Reddit/forums to find out why their pick is overpriced/underperforming compared to whatever the community prefers.
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.
I’ve noticed that problem with reddit as well. Someone will make a comment as if it is a well known fact but it turns out it was just one youtube reviewer saying it… and they don’t provide sources.
Stupid shit like this causes urban legends that don't die. People to this day still think that setting STALKER to "master difficulty" makes the player guns do more damage. They don't.
Reddit can be a hilarious example of the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. I've had people argue with me about the exact working of various synthesizers in the synth subreddits, even when I've backed up my points with links to the extensive service documentation, circuit diagrams, and my own code disassembly of the firmware ;-) Like, yes, that's nice that you have an opinion, but here's the fat book I wrote on the topic, so let's see if we can work out who's right.
Endless back-and-forth about the Ensoniq EPS being a 13-bit sampler. Yes, "13-bit" makes no sense. Yes, "13-bit" sounds really unlikely.
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.
A bit off tangent, but Blueair purifiers was the only brand where the output air was 0 PPM2.5 during wildfire season in the Bay Area (I have the $50 uncalibrated laser PPM sensor that purpleair uses so interpret this as you want). I tried Dyson, Winix, and making a V-shape DIY purifier with a vornado fan. Nothing was able to pull the indoor air below 15 besides Blueair so I recommend it to any of my family and friends.
As the article explains, unless you're using the purifier to filter the air coming into a space, small differences in the purifier output PM2.5 level don't matter. If the output has 99% lower PM2.5 than the input vs 100% lower, that's dwarfed by all the existing particles that the output is about to be mixed back in with.
The output air of 0 vs 15 ug/m^3 is not negligible difference, especially when the air outside is 200+ during wildfires. The reality is, 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.
The difference between an output of 0 and 15 ug/m^3 with an input of 200 ug/m^3 is negligible when considering the performance of the filter in the room. Let's walk it through, imagining 1000 CF room and a flow rate of 250 CFM, and comparing something that's 100% effective (0 ug/m^3 output) vs 92.5% effective (15 ug/m^3 output).
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:
Repeat this 20 times to simulate 20min and the room is at at 0.6 ug/m^3 in the first case vs 1.1 ug/m^3 for the second. The absolute difference is never larger than 7 ug/m^3 (at minute #4), and quickly becomes tiny.
> 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?
I have the Pure and the classic. The classic is actually pretty affordable and has a built-in PPM sensor which makes me lean towards it more than the Pure.
I definitely feel like there's a bit of a Gell-Mann Amnesia effect going on with Wirecutter reviews: when they review things in areas I happen to know well, I often notice errors or missteps in their thinking in the review, but for some reason I still blindly trust their reviews in products that I know less about, even though obviously it's not particularly likely that they're uniquely inexpert in the areas I happen to know well. Posts like this are a good reminder to be skeptical of all of it.
As the OP talks about a bit (see (math) in the "On Weakness" section), the things that really matter are:
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.
To monitor what (e.g. what particular size, VOX, radon, etc)? And do you need logging? Because that almost entirely determines which one.
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.
Mainly to know when to open windows (CO2 monitor?) and to vacuum and its effect (PM2.5?) and maybe some generic stuff because why not (temperature, humidity, pressure). I probably want something more precise, that just a traffic light system, but don't plan to plot readings in Grafana either.
On the first point in the article, there is a definition for HEPA which for ISO is 99.95% efficiency. The Ikea purifier doesn't meet this. It meets the EPA standard, hence the designation of E12 (99.5%).
As noted by the sibling comment, the parent comment mischaracterizes TFA's reference to "true-HEPA." It also makes the same hash of characterizing standards as the affiliate blogspam. Read TFA, which has an interesting characterization of the tradeoffs involved and not this comment.
Which seems intentionally nitpicky given that "HEPA" is defined and the Ikea one doesn't meet it while the others do. Therefore, "true-HEPA" almost certainly just means "HEPA", and the "true" just means "is actually HEPA" not some other special definition.
The rest of the article's points are good, but this one comes across as just axe grinding.
Yeah. I'd assumed that 'true-HEPA' was a made-up term intended to trick people into thinking something is HEPA when it's actually worse. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
The Wikipedia HEPA article[1] says it's actually a reaction to people doing that -- some companies advertise "HEPA-type" or "HEPA-style", and so companies with actual HEPA filters market them as "True HEPA". It's a race to the bottom.
Glad to see some strong analysis backing up my decision to ignore wirecutter reviews for a couple of years now. Basically when they started publishing reviews for things they did not actually review.
Sorry I don't. But they were publishing various reviews based simply on product specs, or advertised/PR features. With affiliate links to buy of course. Maybe they don't do it anymore? I took a quick look across 3 random categories and didn't find any. I guess I have to apologize for the noise, since I can't back up my comment.
I am no professional but air quality as been a pet peeve of mine, here is my advice.
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.
Nothing against the rest of what you say but I wouldn't recommend a "cheap" air quality monitor for CO2.
"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].
I've been super happy with my Winnex and Coway. Pretty sure they are the ones that Wirecutter likes as well. The Levoits just don't seem to move much air. I like big, quiet fans that move lot's of air.
I've got a Blue Air 211+ and am pretty happy with it. I have extraordinarily bad seasonal allergies.
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.
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.
While we are recommending filters, I absolutely love my Mila. Their best filter is about $100 and about once a year. I put the sock on there and clean that regularly and I suspect that makes the filter last a lot longer.
if there is a way to make more money by being dishonest, twisting definitions, or cutting corners they will. over and over again. we see this repeatedly.
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.
they refer to the IKEA purifier as using a “PM2.5 filter”
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.
