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Home appliances

IKEA FÖRNUFTIG

8owners with an opinion
71%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for noise and value; criticized for performance and ease of use.

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What people wrote

Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
I've been using the air purifier as a white noise machine for 5 years and I couldn't be happier. Currently sitting in a room with PM2.5 at 1 µg/m³ I bought the Ikea (FÖRNUFTIG) because I was worried that lesser known brands on Amazon might go out of business, making it hard to find replacement filters later
Doesn’t like itOwned 0.17 years
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...
Doesn’t like it
I do not understand why IKEA makes it so hard to attach a FÖRNUFTIG purifier to a wall or under a table. I bought one to attach it under my son's room table, which fit perfectly, but putting four screw holes into the FÖRNUFTIG was a pain in the ass. It would make those things so much more versatile if scrwholew were already perpared.
Likes it
1. I'd love to live somewhere where "sunset" or "sunrise" is an actionable thing :D Over here the sun might rise a bit before noon and it might never actually set. 3. I don't arm our security system, but it does set the home to "away" mode, turning off all lights and the coffee maker and other "dangerous" appliances. 4. I'm stealing this one =) For air purifiers, you can get Ikea's FÖRNUFTIG purifiers that are 100% stupid devices that just start when the power comes on. I'm running them all the time on low power, but I'm considering automating them on the highest power so that they run when we're not at home or not in the room (the loudest mode is kinda loud, the slowest is practically dead silent).
Neutral
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.
Likes it
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.
Likes it
One of my cats, who's since passed away, was asthmatic. Air purifiers throughout the house and a motion activated box fan plus furnace filter near the litterboxes resulted in an immediate and noticeable improvement in his quality of life. I've noticed a similar improvement in my own health. I've since ended up with a variety of air cleaners: * IKEA FÖRNUFTIG[0] is a small and relatively quiet unit. It can be wall-mounted, so it can take up virtually no space. The unit is reasonably priced. Filters are cheap. * IKEA STARKVIND[1] is a much larger unit (also available in end table form[2] to save space), but also relatively quiet on the lower speeds. It's an interesting unit - integrates into Home Assistant (the unit speaks Zigbee), and has a PM2.5 air quality sensor. This unit is a lot more expensive than the FÖRNUFTIG, but the filters are reasonably priced. * The box fan plus single furnace filter is incredibly noisy, but really good at dealing with cat litter dust. There is a huge range of price/quality when it comes to filters[, I just use the cheaper ones since I'm focusing on large dust particles. * I have a couple of units that use Bionaire aer1 filters[3]. The units I have are quiet and reasonably sized, though they get louder as the filter fills up. The filters are expensive, and one of the units takes two of them which doesn't help matters. There is a variety of filters available. There's a huge spectrum of tradeoffs between noise, size of the unit, filtrati…
Likes it
> Do they make a difference? Perhaps a placebo? A must have? It really depends on where you're coming from. I have one of those air purifiers from Ikea (Förnuftig). It's cheap but not the cheapest. On any high dust/polen concentration level day, a minute or so with the device turned on at full blast is enough to make any problem go away in that particular room.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
I understand the point. The point doesn't matter. 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?