251–260 of 723 posts
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,…
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 e…
I've always enjoyed Marques Brownlee (MKBHD)[0]. He's made a pretty lucrative career of great reviews, without selling his soul. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee
Looking for an indoor air quality monitor to buy, any recommendations?
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, $1…
For kitchen devices, ATK or SeriousEats. 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 en…
> 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, fo…
I find that if I read a whole lot of stuff, I start to get the gist.
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> 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.
Um. Okay. I was just responding to your comment about: "The air purifier industry is more about aesthetics than it is function" I didn't mention anything about dangerous levels of smoke, forest fires, low income families... I take your overall point but I think you need to keep the context of which it was said and not add a different one.
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.
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> 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 ad…
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 th…
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.
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>HEPA is not right for a purifier that sits in a room Why not? I don't know anything about HEPA, or quality, air flow, etc.
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 captur…
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.
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 e…
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.
For kitchen devices, ATK or SeriousEats. 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 en…
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.
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The article explains it well: 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 beca…
The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird. The moment I read that I checked out on the rest of the authors opinions.
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)