It did not vanish

Boneco’s own store lists the H680 as sold out, and it has been dropped from the humidifier range page, which now shows nineteen products without it. Read only that and the machine is dead.

A US specialist had one at $1,099.99 with a working cart and a five year warranty. The consumables are all in production too, because the H700 that replaced it in the range takes the same filter, the same evaporator mat, the same fan blade and the same water base pivot. Boneco’s own parts page says the mat “Fits to BONECO HYBRIDS H700 and H680.”

What happened is a soft withdrawal rather than a discontinuation. Boneco rotates models out of the range collection while the product page stays live and the parts keep shipping.

The manual prints a CADR that no lab issued

Clean air delivery rate is AHAM’s measurement. AHAM runs a certification programme, publishes a directory, and that directory is how you check whether a purifier’s number came from a lab or from a marketing department.

The H680’s technical data table reads “Air purification performance 190 m3/h (112 CFM) (CADR).” AHAM’s term, in AHAM’s units.

I read both editions of the directory, April 2020 and October 2023, looking for Boneco and for Plaston, the Swiss parent that owns the brand. Neither appears in either. Blueair is in there, so are Honeywell, Sharp, Winix, Samsung and Fellowes. Boneco has never been in the programme.

So the number in the manual is a figure Boneco measured and Boneco published. It might well be accurate. Nobody outside the company has checked it.

Three manuals, three room sizes

The US manual says the machine covers rooms “up to 1370 sq ft (127 m2)”. One other revision says 100 square metres. A third says 150.

Throughput moves with it. Two of the revisions say 190 cubic metres an hour and the third says 205. A retailer adds a fourth version of the truth by advertising the noise floor as “Less than 25 dB” when Boneco’s own figure starts at 27.

One more absence worth knowing. The word HEPA does not appear anywhere in the H680’s manual. Boneco calls the part a HYBRID filter and never states a grade, an efficiency percentage or an EN 1822 class, while every retailer sells the machine as a HEPA air purifier.

Ten hours to the bottom of the tank

Boneco advertises 6.34 gallons of moisture a day out of a 2.64 gallon tank. That is 2.4 refills every twenty-four hours, or about ten hours from full to empty at the rate on the box.

The W200 manages nearly thirteen hours on a tank a quarter the size, because it puts out far less. Bigger tank, bigger output, shorter run. There is no humidifier at any price that runs a full day at its headline rate.

What it costs to keep running

The filter is CHF 89.90 and lasts a year. The evaporator mat is CHF 34.90 every two years. The Ionic Silver Stick is CHF 29.90 and Boneco says to change it every season. Then there is descaler, and this is the line people miss: Boneco’s instruction is to decalcify the water base and tank every two to three weeks.

Add it up and a heating season costs about CHF 172. Run it year round and it is closer to CHF 206, plus $15 to $45 of electricity depending on hours. The P500 below costs CHF 110 a year, and every franc of the difference is water hygiene.

Getting the parts in America is the harder problem. One US retailer lists the genuine A681 filter as currently unavailable at $163. The only in-stock option I found was a $119.99 aftermarket copy whose own vendor describes it as not an original part, made to replace discontinued filters. Boneco lists it in stock in Switzerland at CHF 89.90. Both things are true at once.

The silver stick, and what testing says about it

Boneco sells the Ionic Silver Stick on the anti-microbial effect of silver. Consumer Reports tested humidifiers making that class of claim in 2016 and found most of them “harbor bacteria in the reservoir tank and many have the potential to emit that bacteria into the air”, and it named ionic silver technology specifically. No independent test of this particular part exists that I could find.

Boneco’s own troubleshooting table takes the same problem seriously. Unpleasant odour from the air is listed with the cause “Stagnant water in the tank and water tray” and the instruction to empty and thoroughly clean the appliance. Clean it on schedule whatever the stick is doing.

The Boneco P500, which is the sensible half of this

The P500 is a straight air purifier with no water in it, and unlike the H680 it is still in Boneco’s current range at CHF 339.90. A US specialist had it at $191.99 against a $479 list, which is the largest genuine discount anywhere in this cluster.

Boneco rates it for 30 square metres, about 320 square feet, and publishes a particle clean air delivery rate of 285 cubic metres an hour. The US 120 volt version draws 34 watts and is rated at 177 CFM. Running cost is one filter a year at CHF 109.90, with no descaler, no silver stick and no mat.

It carries the same problem as its stablemate. Dealers circulate its clean air figures as “Smoke 144 CFM, Dust 162 CFM, Pollen 202 CFM”, which is AHAM’s exact three-column house format for a brand that is not in AHAM’s directory. One independent reviewer says so plainly: the P500’s rating is not verified by AHAM.

And one retailer describes its filter as a “true HEPA filter (E11)” with “an efficiency rating of 99.97% for particles as tiny as 0.3 microns”. Under EN 1822, E11 is an EPA class rather than a HEPA one. HEPA starts at H13, and E11 is roughly 95 per cent efficient. The 99.97 figure belongs to H13 and has been attached to a filter that is not one.

What is wrong with it

Questions people ask

Both Boneco machines and all three AeraMax units are compared on the air care hub.

Read how I check numbers.