TLDR DiscountFilters.com lies about the quality of their filters, refuses to honor their warranty, has fake reviews posted on their web site, doesn’t let customers post real reviews, ignores customer service tickets, ignores TrustPilot reviews, ignores Better Business Bureau complaints. On top of all that, at least some of the filters they sell can be purchased elsewhere cheaper.
An OEM-quality replacement filter that isn’t
I have been ordering furnace filters from DiscountFilters.com for a while now. They’ve been… fine, I guess? The workmanship on the filters isn’t perfect—they kind of seem like “factory seconds”—but they work, and they’re much less expensive than OEM filters.
However, I recently branched out and ordered a replacement from them for our Levoit Core 300 air purifier, and it did not go well.
They claim their replacement is comparable in quality and performance to Levoit’s OEM filter, but it’s absolutely not. I could tell this immediately when I took it out of the box, because I could see that the holes in the “fabric pre-filter” mesh of the replacement filter were about twice as big as the holes in the OEM filter. The outcome of this should be obvious: lots of particles that are blocked by Levoit’s pre-filter slip through the replacement’s, gunking up the HEPA filter and causing the filter to require replacement much more quickly.
And indeed, that is what happened in real-world conditions: the discount replacement filter lasted less than half as long as the OEM filter before the air purifier told me that it needed to be replaced.
The discount replacement filter is only a few dollars less than the OEM filter, so it is definitely not worth buying the discount filter if it’s going to last for less than half as long.
“Customer” reviews of questionable provenance
Their web site has reviews posted on it for their products in general, and specifically for this filter. All the reviews for this filter are five-star reviews. However, when I went to the web site today to post my own less glowing review, there was no way for me to do it! That’s a bit… weird, don’t you think?
How I responded
I emailed DiscountFilters.com’s customer service and asked them three things:
- Please refund my money.
- Either fix your filter to make it truly comparable in performance to the OEM filter, or stop claiming on your web site that it is, because that’s false advertising.
- Why can’t I add a review to their web site, and doesn’t this suggest that I can’t trust any of the reviews or product ratings there?
I received a response indicating that a customer service ticket was opened in response to my email.
After waiting more than a week with no response, I figured out how to post a review of the company on TrustPilot.com, so I did that, complaining as outlined above.
After waiting another ten days with no response to either the customer service ticket or the review, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. Note that the BBB gives DiscountFilters.com a C+ raining. It’s hard to get a rating that low from the BBB; it usually means a company has multiple complaints that they ignored or responded poorly to. DiscountFilters.com never responded to the BBB complaint.
What this means to you
If you’re buying low-tech filters from them, you may find the quality’s a little iffy, but they’ll probably do the job for you. However, you may wish to avoid buying complicated filters from them, such as the three-stage Levoit filter described above. For these, the iffy quality is going to have a real impact on performance, so unless they’re much cheaper, it’s probably not worth it.
Furthermore, you should shop around, because despite the “discount” in their name, their filters may not be the cheapest. For example, for the 20x25x5 MERV 13 filters I use in my furnace, it turns out I can get them from Target cheaper than from DiscountFilters.com!
