When renting products makes sense?

Along with home appliance buying, renting also on rising. Perhaps this is the most convenient option in a fast paced lifestyle. In this article, we will explore the possible situations where renting of home appliances is really helpful.

Cost of appliance is very high 

This is particularly true with Air conditioners. In peak summer you want to relax for some time and getting cool air with Air conditioner costs you around Rs. 40,000. That too at max you use it only for a couple of months. Then why to shed hefty amount on AC buying. If your finances are tight, then renting is the best option. Apart from that, it makes sense for other appliances like refrigerators and microwave oven and oil based room heaters.

Shifting homes and moving cities

Say you are relocated to a city and you know at max you will stay there only for 6 months to a year maximum. Then buying all the home appliances like refrigerators, microwave oven, washing machine, AC, television is the cumbersome task. Selecting the right product, installing it well, and when you move back either you have to sell it once again or carry along with you. These things make life painful when you are juggling in the work. You can outsource all your worries by renting the appliance.  Additionally, if you are living in a rented house and planning to buy a new house and move there then renting home appliances also makes sense.

Want to try different things?

Say you want to try Oil filled room heater?  How warm it will be if you use Oil filled room heater. How much it will save your electricity bills. Buying Rs. 15,000 appliance just to know this is a real waste of money. What if you know Oil filled room heater does not suit you? Either you need to resell it or keep it in your attic. Renting will definitely solve such types of problems. Same is the case with costly new dresses, new X-box game.

When unexpected guests arrive? 

Say your uncle visited you for a week in Delhi? And you need an extra bed. You could buy a new one, but once your uncle leaves it is a waste. Not only that, it will occupy a significant amount of space. In such cases, renting bed and mattresses is a very good choice.

You don't need to buy a Porsche car to ride once

Say you are attending the wedding and you want to look awesome. You may not afford to buy a designer wear but you can rent it for a day. Planning for a birdwatching trip once in a year - you don't need to buy a DSLR camera, you can rent it as well. Same is the case with mountain trekking accessory.

Where can you rent online?

There are many startups ventured into this territory. Out of which we have found for renting products online few startups are doing really well with a large inventory and prompt service.

What is wrong with Mi Air Purifier 2?

Due to rising pollution in India people are daily becoming aware of the pollution and looking for ways to get clean air. Delhi is worse hit city and with rising Air Quality Index (AQI).  This is the reason for high demand for Air Purifiers. It is expected that Air Purifiers industry is going to be high growth industry.  

At right time Xiaomi launched Mi Air Purifier 2 in India officially and the price is Rs. 9,999. This MI Air Purifier 2 got much hype because of its IOT enabled smart APP and the product is hailed as Smart Air Purifier. In fact the brand has succeeded to generate enough hype around it and they are offering the product at reasonable rate.

Mi Air Purifier 2 is very speedy in removal

In fact the Mi Air Purifier 2 has its product page with detailed spec overview. Nevertheless to say the page is beautiful. The specs also looks promising.  Mi Air Purifier 2 is compact and have 310 CADR rating.  Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) is a figure of merit that is the cubic feet per minute (CFM) of air that has had all the particles of a given size distribution removed.

Mi Air Purifier 2 is very smart indeed

You can use your phone as a remote to power on,  power off, and switch modes. The Mi Home app  also lets you monitor home air quality from your phone at any time. Create schedules to power on, power off, switch to Night mode, and more. The devise is intelligent enough to know the filters needs replacement and can alert you the same on the App as well.  The App display the air quality as well.

The purifier page says it is very quite but decibel level information is completely missing so really we cannot say about it.  Mi Air Purifier 2 consume 4.8 Watts making it very energy efficient air purifier.

Then what is wrong with  Mi Air Purifier 2

Well it looks awesome and smart but will it really clean the Air? What is the heart of Air Purifier - the answer is its Air Filter. It has the ability to clean or purify the Air.  Better the filter then better the air quality. Then what is the best standard for filter? The name is HEPA or True HEPA. HEPA filters are considered as efficient in cleaning and consider industry standard and best for Asthma patients. Mi Air Purifier 2  do not have HEPA filter which is industry standard.  It has high-density EPA filter but not HEPA filter. Generally true filter is expensive and HEPA air purifiers price starts from Rs. 15,000.

What exactly is HEPA?

High-efficiency particulate arrestance (HEPA),  also sometimes called high-efficiency particulate arresting or high-efficiency particulate air, is a type of air filter. Filters meeting the HEPA standard have many applications, including use in medical facilities, automobiles, aircraft and homes. The filter must satisfy certain standards of efficiency such as those set by the United States Department of Energy (DOE). To qualify as HEPA by US government standards, an air filter must remove (from the air that passes through) 99.97% of particles that have a size of 0.3 µm.

Products that claim to be "HEPA-type", "HEPA-like", "HEPA-style" or "99% HEPA" do not satisfy these requirements and may not have been tested in independent laboratories. Some of these sub-par quality filters may come reasonably close to HEPA filtration, while others will fall significantly short, making them truly inferior.  Read more at Wikipedia

As mentioned above 99.97% of particles that have a size of 0.3 micron  should be removed to be HEPA. Xiomi Mi Air Purifier argues that it can remove 0.4 micron particles but what percentage? It will be complete inefficient air purification if it is able to remove only 95% of pollutants. Even the purifier filter page does not have any information about this.

We hope that in the next version Mi Air Purifier 3 they will incorporate HEPA filter even it is little pricey but fixing the essential heart of the air purifier.  You can try using out smart air purifier selection tool and can easily select best air purifier for your home.

Shocking facts of buying guides in India

We at Zelect (www.zelect.in) build interactive buying guides. The use case is like while selecting the products you don't need to read buying guides, you can use our tool and we will let you know the best features and  suitable products to you as well. Well in our mission of making the feature selection automatic, i.e. eliminating the need to read the buying guides we have came across few interesting facts.

First before even we build our smart selection tool we do literally one week research on buying guides. We read lots of buying guide, with that knowledge we write our algorithm and map our feature recommendations to products. Initially we have build the products just by reading the buying guides and we failed miserably. Here is our analysis.

Shocking fact - 1: Buying guides are USA orientated and NOT India orientated.
Yes, most of the bloggers and sites just copied/re-wrote  the same USA buying guides. Of course they did good SEO optimization on 'India' keyword. So that their page is top on the results. But unfortunately the guides are not 100% meant for Indian audiences.

Example: For room heating the guides talk about central heating systems which are not available in India. Many Chimney guides mention about types of Chimneys and suggest Mesh filters which are  suitable for western cooking only.

Shocking fact - 2: Buying guides are out dated and becoming irrelevant with time

Many buying guides of Microwave ovens talk about the microwave ovens that can be fixed in the wall. But these models are not available in India at all.  Then what is the point of mentioning about them in one page when at the end those products are not available in Indian market?

It happens with many products. The so called 'look for features' are not available in the Indian market at all or outdated and removed from Indian market. It is pointless to explain about CRT or LCD, even Plasma TVs and selection between these technologies when all of these technologies are out dated and LEDs are only available and ruling the market.

Shocking fact - 3: Buying guides are unnecessarily lengthy and with full of jargon
Yes, In the anticipation of getting top in the Google search results the buying guides are very lengthy. The buying decision points  can be explained in one page dragged to five pages. To increase the length of  guides, authors  usually introduce jargon and make further complicated.


Shocking fact - 4: Few buying guides are totally wrong
Yes, with out doing the total research the authors simple promote the wrong things.  Examples include many Air Purifier buying guide suggest to take Ozone Air Filters, which are very harmful to health and in fact banned in few countries. Many water purifier buying guides simple mention to take RO water purifier if the water is from bore well or hard, which is completely wrong.


We are on a mission to build automated buying guides and write contemporary, India relevant, short and well researched buying guides.

Gold mine secrets for home appliances marketers!!!

We have seen 33,000 visitors in the last 30 days. We have analysed our user demographics and we got few surprising results to share. Here we are presenting Zelect info graphics.  Just to let you know Zelect is dedicated home appliances selection portal. You can try our smart selection tools at http://www.zelect.in

38% of home appliances selection users are women

It is clear proof that women are critical decision makers in the home appliances selection. In old days they used to give requirements in the home. But now they are searching, reading, using the selection tool to know the right appliance for the home.  So dear marketers target the women on media, and daily soup operas.

Mid age is the gold mine age group for Home appliances

Age group of 25 - 34 search more about home appliances. Around 40% of users are of mid age. So in case you want to market through media or other ways target the mid age group.  In fact it looks natural as young generation won't be interested in buying the appliances till they get married and settle. So market, target mid age group, stay away from marketing on the news channels for teens.

Delhi and Bengaluru rocks in online home appliances research

Delhi constitutes 14% of total visitors and Bengaluru stood in second place by 13% of visitors. It looks like Delhi and Bengaluru people look for online research before purchasing home appliances compared to other city folks.

Mobile, Android platform are at top positions

48% percentage of traffic comes from mobile devises which is almost equal to desktop.  Out of that mobile traffic 83% of traffic comes from Android phone and 12% percentage from IOS.

Along with home appliances sale, the home appliances repair and home services startups are also booming.  Sometimes your appliance manufacturer may not provide service in your area or may take a long time to visit your place then it is a big problem getting the appliance repaired. More importantly for the price point, they offer to repair may not be economical to you. Thanks to the new generation home services startups bringing high-quality repair personals to your doorstep. Not only that, these companies can take care of wide varieties of services like packers and movers, house cleaning, pest control, laundry, beauty services  and  other.  For example servicesutra for home services is one of the very good startups.

Zelect forum launched ...

Zelect selection tools will help you to select the product easily. But at some point you may  have very specific questions that may not be addressed, or need to know the review of the product? As of now there is no exclusive place to discuss the same. Quora and Yahoo answers do the job till some point, but having dedicated portal will help a lot. 

We have initially launched one small "Ask a Question" form to take the questions from visitors. We got very  good response. So we have finally decided to launch our own Question & Answer community site..... here we go http://forum.zelect.in

In Zelect forum you can ask any question related to buying guides, product selection, reviews, comparison related questions.  We hope it will help the community.