As a user it's important to know that you have an authentic, original (and new) HEPA filter. So while it's a cool hack, I really hope that this doesn't result in a flood of low quality counterfeit filters on the market.
Sure, quality varies, but they should all function well enough for domestic function of capturing dust and pollen.
I say this as someone who has terrible allergy, I know when they work and when they don’t, no lab equipment necessary.
The the main thing that matters in air purifier is size, for delivering volume of cleaned air.
The problem is we keep putting them into strange shapes like cylinders and every purifier has an incompatible cartridge. And also we made a filter and a fan into a strange luxury product that costs hundreds of dollars.
I will be switching to IKEA purifiers because they are flat, simple, and filters are cheap.
I remember when manufacturers competed to make their products desirable, and appliances came with schematics.
Absolutely. cf. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/ind... as just one example of dozens, if not hundreds.
I have to say though, mine doesn't obey the DRM. It warns you if there is no sticker, but it works fine.
It's unavoidable that if customers have behavior X, such as tending to go for the cheapest thing, sellers in the market will develop clever strategies to game that behavior. Retailers go so far as to research how the colors, shapes, and surface textures of packaging affect buying behavior, so of course they are also going to intensively study customer price sensitivity behavior too.
I've learned that with a lot of things such as appliances, tools, and some electronics it's actually cheaper to buy the higher-end model. It's cheaper to buy one good one than two or three pieces of junk that break easily.
They just don't realize the tradeoff they're making until it's too late.
Why aren't people doing the most basic of research before buying things?
You can get an old school safety razor for under $20 and it will last forever. They are what double sided razor blades (the kind you normally see used in movies to split cocaine) were designed to fit into. Good razor blades can be found at a rate of about $0.05-$0.10 per, and last about 4-5 shaves - for me at least - before they start going dull and pulling. They also get me as clean of a shave as any other razor
Still not sure why people pay 10x more on cartridge systems, but maybe I'm just weird
Ultimately, electric razors are my favorite. You have to do a fair amount of work to get a close shave, but you also don't have to later up and you shove it in a charging base to clean it every day. I'm not sure it saves much money (when you replace the foils as recommended), but it is convenient and does a good enough job for me.
I'd argue that this technique is borderline fraud. It plays against the common assumptions of what the product is without advertising it.
"sleek" "modern" "futuristic" "design"
I'm that close to do the same for my child's nightlight: just shunt power around whatever is opening the circuit and drive it with a Shelly plug.
(Okay the grand idea would be to ultimately put an ESP32 between the control unit and the three buttons, so that I can both operate it manually yet have full control of the thing; not the least because if you cut power it resets its state to a static white light. Never done that so that'd be nice way to acquire the skill without much risk to that super cheap device)
Automations allow me to run the purifier at Medium/High speed for certain times a day, even when I am not around. Other than that, they are always on Auto - so they produce minimal noise.
However, certain times a day for period of 15-30 mins or so, they run at Medium/High so they can do certain number of air changes in a room of x SQFT.
Having a 'computer' also allows them to detect when a room suddenly becomes less 'sanitized' and ramp up the 'automatic' to an appropriate level.
I've wanted to try building one myself, but unfortunately even the minimal woodworking required is a bit of a challenge for me.
I was building a DIY filter and took apart a purifier and was disappointed at it not having DC for me to connect my esp to for a sensor to check the purity.
No smarts, means no DRM.
There is a mechanical filter that will be cleanable, but the HEPA filter works by having an injected electrostatic charge which will leak away over time, and the activated carbon will deactivate over time.
It would be interesting to know if there are statistics on how quickly those processes occur, and whether they are affected by volume of air or just elapsed time
Nope, HEPA filters are not dependent on electrostatic effects and do not magically start leaking. When they are too loaded with dust, air has a harder time getting through, which is the main factor that causes them to need replacement.
What's the point of having a warning of the life of the filter if OP ignores it? Why did it say it couldn't filter? If his house is dusty, and he cleaned it there's probably dust that isn't visible, he hacked the drm but he also looked for the "best air filter" and found this instead of a fan with some filters on it with no verification.
You don't just clean a filter and say I KNOW there is 12 months more.
So you'll buy a replacement filter to make the warning go away, a filter you can't (easily) buy from anyone besides the original manufacturer since they DRMed it? Obviously HEPA filters do expire eventually, but there's a perverse incentive here for the warning to undershoot the actual useful life of the filter.
Hypothetically, yes, there's a perverse incentive, but is that what is actually happening?
A clogged filter can stress the fan motor which can A) increase power consumption and B)reduce overall product life.
you got it completely backwards, unless you have a very fancy and expensive ECM motor.
Increasing resistance decreases power draw, as the fan needs to do less work. You can test this by hooking up a vaccum cleaner to a killawatt and blocking the intake.
There may be concerns about cooling the motor, but it really doesn't take that much air movement to dissipate heat.
Why would anyone do that? Seems like a waste of a hot water heater that probably has a lot of life left.
People that do this probably throw out food the moment it hits the best before date too.
If you want a speaker you don't buy Sonos and say I turned off the drm, firmware and added a headphone jack.
If you want filtered air for cheap you buy a box fan with HEPA.
If someone does their research, and still buys a proprietary system that sells you expensive filters and has drm, AND chooses to get this device they must have a really good reason or aren't very smart.
We don't know it said that - it could have been saying 'arbitrary number of seconds of use has elapsed/. You could be right, but we don't know.
At least in the older Version 3 that was still the case.
People really need to include the running costs into their calculations. The best deals aren't usually the cheapest machines.
> You don't just clean a filter and say I KNOW there is 12 months more.
You do, I have been using two for about 6 years, and you can easily get at least 3-4× runtime out of authentic filters. I refer to external particulate matter sensors and ignore whatever the purifiers themselves are showing. You can also easily clean the filter with hot water, it removes any smells and has no effect on its purifying performance (again, using a couple of external sensors as reference).
What? What do you call the particles it filters, if not dust?
Of course you can do with a prefilter which filters out larger dust particles so they don't clog your finer filter. But most air purifiers come with that from what I've seen.
Yes, you definitively do.
I am located in a defacto dust free location, but I use an air purifier to keep my pollen allergy under control when spring arives: This shitty DRM is telling me to change filters after X hours, because it ASSUMES it is clogged, even though it has no idea of the reality? No idea if the air is like in New Delhi or like in the north of Sweden?
Hell no! Thank you, but I can decide that on my own.
If you could do that all and still chose to buy the device with drm, locked hours and a proprietary fan with filter there is flawed logic way before you bought the device. Even going forward a box fan and filter is cheaper and better.
My eyes can probably not tell if the filter is over its lifespan, but my pollen allergy definetly can tell if it still works.
Never buy a laser printer or photocopier. They'll tell you the toner needs replacing months before it actually does.
HEPA filter life is a little harder to evaluate using basic human senses.
There's people born every day that don't know anything. Some would rather exploit that rather than facilitate openness and creativity.
Breathing air that was cleaned by someone's intellectual property (without a royalty payment and code to ensure their lungs only process it according to the license) is theft. Unless we DRM it, the incentive to clean the air will be gone and nobody will do it!
A glut of complicated smart devices connected to simple electronics such as motors and lights are easily rerouted to another IC.
I have the same unit, except an older one, which doesn't really cause problems (it just displays the 0% for a few seconds when turning on). But the newer models do have this issue.
I basically replace mine once per year even though Xiaomi considers it to have a service life of about 6 months when running 24/7 as it does here. I run it at a pretty low speed because it's too noisy otherwise but they don't seem to take this into account when calculating the lifespan. When the hayfever season starts, I put in a fresh one to get maximum benefit. But it's nice to be able to reset this.
PS: I didn't "see" the tag on my last filter with my phone, I thought it was a different type with a different frequency. Guess I'm wrong.
It's a bit suspicious that older models only showed the warning at power on and they changed it to be more annoying. It's possible that the change was malicious (an intentional dark pattern).
Looks like it is 3 stages ("primary", "high-efficiency", and "activated carbon"). https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-smart-air-purifier-...
I keep a low-dust apartment, and my 2 Levoit air purifier HEPA filters get changed every 3 months (sooner, if there was an unusual incident). The white of the HEPA material is sometimes visibly gray after 3 months, even though I vacuum the first stage surface every 1-3 weeks.
Obviously they aren't as new, but they still work very well.
Imported Xiaomi filters are annoyingly expensive though
Also, I thought air purifier filters aren't 'cleanable'. Like, you can't just hoover them.
The machine can know if it measures differential pressure across the filter. If the DP across the filter is too high (indicating a clogged filter), the filter needs to be replaced.
A machine could, but is this machine sophisticated enough to do that? Why do we play around with hypotethical scenarious where this warning message on another device might not be shitty DRM?
Edit: prohibited is U+1F6AB So place this over U+1F4A9 That is the logo! Is there a way to specify combinations of characters in unicode?
