Ikea: home of cheap furniture, cheap home decor…and as of now, cheap air purifiers. How cheap? Less than the cost of a Poang armchair.
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At $55, Ikea’s new Fornuftig air purifier is one of the cheapest on the market. It’s even cheaper than our best budget air purifier, the Partu BS-03 Air Purifier. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad; the units are outfitted with a HEPA 12 filter, which blocks 99.95 percent of particles 2.5 microns or larger, as well as a carbon filter, which sucks up toxic chemicals and foul odors. Even the replacement filters are a bargain, at $10 for a carbon filter and $5 for a HEPA filter.
The new Fornuftig line of air purifiers are built for small-home living. The compact devices — it’s just 12 inches by 18 inches with a 4.0-inch depth — are unsurprisingly good-looking, very much in line with Scandinavian minimalist design. Rather than looking like a medical device, the Fornuftig looks more like a speaker, and borrows the same fabric design as the Symfonsik line of speakers Ikea made with Sonos. Available in black and white, it’s unobtrusive — both design-wise and literally. You can even hang the Fornuftig from the wall, since it’s so light.
But what matters with an air purifier is its effectiveness. To gauge this, look to its clean-air delivery (CADR) rating, which measures the volume of clean air produced per minute. The Fornuftig clocks in at 130 cubic meters per hour. That’s not a particularly high rating, so don’t expect this to thoroughly clean your whole home — it’s better suited to small rooms.