Frequently asked questions

You shouldn’t trust us — you should check us, and that’s the point. Every number on this site is linked to the manufacturer’s own document or a published standard, dated with the day we read it. You can open the source and verify it in about ten seconds. A site that says “we tested forty chairs and liked this one” is asking for trust you have no way to check. We’d rather give you something checkable than something impressive. The full argument is on our methodology page.

Because the manufacturer doesn’t publish that number, and we won’t invent it. The dashes are some of the most informative things on the site: three of the six chairs in our chair roundup publish no seat height — the single most important dimension on a task chair. Two of the four bars in our light bar roundup have no usable CRI figure, one because the maker’s own page claims two different values simultaneously. You would not learn any of that from a site that filled the gaps in.

Because we haven’t touched them. A 9.2/10 from someone who has never used a product is an invented judgement dressed up as a measurement. Every product here carries a Spec Line instead: three published numbers, the third always a longevity figure. It’s the honest version of the same device — the manufacturer’s own numbers, cited, arranged so you can compare at a glance and check our work.

At your seated elbow height, with your feet flat and elbows around 90°. For the median adult that works out around 26.6″ for men and 24.4″ for women — both belowthe 29″ a standard desk gives you. But use your own measurement rather than either of those: the desk height calculator does the arithmetic and shows its working.

No. OSHA prescribes no desk height at all. Its Computer Workstations eTool gives posture principles and exactly one number — leg clearanceof 20–28 inches under the desktop, which is the room for your knees, not the height of the surface. It’s also advisory guidance rather than a regulation. Anyone citing “OSHA says 29 inches” has invented it.

No, and this surprised us too. ANSI/BIFMA X5.1’s own scope says, word for word, that the standard “does not address lounge seating, flammability, surface material durability, cushioning materials, product emissions, or ergonomic considerations.” It’s a safety, durability and structural standard — drop tests, load cycles, swivel tests. Useful, but it tells you nothing about whether a chair fits you. Worth adding: not one of the six chairs we looked at actually publishes a clean X5.1 certification claim anyway.

We’re not qualified to answer that, so here’s what the evidence says instead. Cochrane’s 2018 review of 34 studies found low-qualityevidence that sit-stand desks reduce sitting time at work (by around 100 minutes a day, short-term), and called the health benefits “unproven”. It also notes standing “hardly increases energy expenditure, so one should not expect a sit-stand desk to help in losing weight.” No harms were found either. The honest summary: sitting less and moving more is supported at low-to-moderate quality; the health claims the category markets are not. More on that page.

It’s real, but it’s not what people say it is. 20-8-2 comes from a Cornell University ergonomics web page by Prof. Alan Hedge, which itself calls it “a ball park goal” and says the numbers “aren’t hard and fast”. It is widely claimed to have been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine — we read that paper’s full text, and it contains no 20-8-2 and no sit:stand ratio at all. What it actually recommends is accumulating 2 to 4 hours a day of standing and light activity, on evidence its own authors grade B and C. The part everyone skips is Cornell’s other line: “Simply standing is insufficient. Movement is important.”

Fit first — can this product physically work for you? A desk that won’t come down to your elbow height is wrong for you at any price. Then longevity: what does the maker commit to in writing, and how specific is it? Then documentation: when two products are close, the one that told you what you were buying ranks above the one that didn’t. You’re welcome to disagree with that weighting — it’s written down so you can.

Affiliate commission from Amazon when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you. That’s the whole model, and it’s on the disclosure page. No brand pays to appear, none gets a preview or a veto, and commission rate isn’t an input to ranking.

It would if we let it, so judge it by what we actually did. We left the biggest name in the standing-desk category off our roundup because they block access to their own spec sheets and we’d have had to guess. Every product carries a “don’t buy it if” line. We tell readers a converter for a third of the price may be the smarter buy, and we report Cochrane calling the health benefits unproven on a page with a buy button on it. Those all cost us money.

Prices come from Amazon’s API and are stamped with the date we fetched them (Jul 17, 2026, currently). If our data goes over 48 hours old, the number disappearsand the button falls back to “Check price on Amazon”. It never quietly shows you a stale number. Same for products with no current buyable offer.

There aren’t any, because this site is new and has no customers. A wall of five-star quotes would be entirely fabricated, so there isn’t one. If you want the subjective half — how a chair feels at hour four, whether a desk wobbles — owner reviews on the retailer’s page will serve you better than we can. We say so on every roundup.

The person who writes this. He’s worked from a home office for years and reads spec sheets for fun. He is notan ergonomist, physiotherapist, engineer or clinician, holds no certification in any of it, and this site will never suggest otherwise. There’s no editorial team and no expert panel behind him. More on the about page.

No, and we won’t pretend to. We describe mechanisms and geometry — a lumbar rest adjusts through a published range; a seat at the right height lets your feet rest flat. We never claim a product prevents, treats or cures anything. If you’re in pain, that’s a question for a clinician, not a website with an Amazon link.

Please tell us — the contact formtakes about a minute, and a link to the manufacturer’s page is the fastest route to a fix. We’ll check it against the source, correct it, and log the correction visibly on the page rather than editing it quietly. A correction you can see is worth more than a page that has never admitted one.

Because every page here belongs to a category, and a dated feed ages badly against a “still good in three years” thesis. The guides live under Setup & Ergonomics and the product content lives under the category it belongs to. Nothing on this site is designed to expire.

No. We cover desks, chairs, monitor arms, lighting and cable management — the things that decide whether eight hours at a desk is comfortable and whether the gear survives three years. Printers and storage are real categories with real search demand; they’re just not what this site is about, and we’d rather be good at five things than thin at ten.