Andrew O'Hara
Ikea's first smart home air purifier, called Starkvind, not only blends into your home but also works with Apple's HomeKit platform.
One of the two models of Ikea's Starkvind is shaped like a simple end table that would naturally find itself in your living room. Hidden within are all the smarts and filters necessary to clean your home. The cable is also routed down the leg to help it stay hidden.
For those that don't love the look of the end table, a self-standing version is also available.
"For IKEA, the smart home is not about gadgets. It's about making life and home better through combining our solid home furnishing knowledge with digital solutions and technology," said Henrik Telander, Product Owner at IKEA of Sweden. "That's why we explore the possibility of integrating the function of purifying air and technology to provide good experience for customers at home."
The new Starkvind air purifier is rated to clean rooms up to 20 square meters. It works on its own but when paired with an Ikea Tradfri gateway, it can be scheduled and automated.
There are five different speed settings as well as an auto mode that will ramp up and down as necessary. It features a three-filter system to first collect hair and dust before making its way to the tight filter to remove up to 99.5 percent of small airborne pollutants, including dust, pollen, and PM2.5 particles. Another filter is designed to capture various gaseous pollutants such as VOCs and formaldehyde.
When connected to the Tradfri gateway, it enables smart connectivity to Apple's HomeKit platform. This allows hands-free control with Siri as well as the ability to automate it based on other triggers, such as independent air quality monitors.
The design of the Starkvind falls in line with Ikea's other smart home products that blend into their surroundings. We recently saw the release of the new Symfonisk Picture Frame Speaker that blends an AirPlay 2-connected speaker into a piece of wall art.
Ikea says the Starkvind smart air purifier will be released in October 2021.The self-standing version will run $129 while the end table will cost you $189.
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6 Comments
hmmm.....
air purifiers for me are in the pseudoscience category of useless and 1960s door-to-door salesman sort of junk
i have allergies and hayfever, but i dont for a moment believe this would actually help
HEPA filters work. They are in use anywhere that the air needs to be clean and hypo-allergenic - hospitals, etc.
First, I have to say what a great idea putting the filter in a piece of usable furniture verse adding another object in our already crowded homes.
I have to agree filters like this are not as affective as people would like to believe. Yes HEPA fitters do what they claim, but they work best when you can seal the space and create enough positive pressure to force air out of the space to keep impurities out.
For people with allergies the best solution is remove all carpeting and have hardwoods and tile floors and minimize the amount of textile upholstered furniture. Then clean the hardwoods all the time.
90% of my house is hardwood or tile floors, we generally dusty mop them weekly and we still get dust floating about. Recently we got a robot vacuum and it runs the floors 3 times a week and dust showing up on flat surfaces each week has gone way down. We have forced air VHAC so we have air moving about most of the time and it has high efficient HEPA filter on it. Just cleaning the floors does way more since your movement across the floor stirs it all up.