21.5" x 27.5" Media Air Filter

I ordered 5 - 20"x25"x4" filters to get a price discount and figured there'd be better packaging for a quantity purchase. QUICK, they delivered in a few days, packaged in a cardboard box. The box was big, 20"x20"x25", so it took the shipper a little more effort to move it around, hence no damage to box or products. Seems damage was an issue for some who ordered one at a time. EASY, the filters are a perfect size replacement of the original filter, BETTER, these have a MERV 11 rating whereas the original one had a MERV 8 rating, hopefully the slightly better efficiency won't put too much more strain on the system. The HARD part was getting the large box into the attic. It was wider than my stairway, so I had to remove the filters and flatten the box to get it up there. Then I re-configured the box and reloaded the extra filters to keep them dust-free. All done, I have a 2 1/2 year supply of filters, located near the unit they will go into, and they aren't taking up any of my other storage space. Oh, and I put the supplyhouse.com packing slip back in the top of the box for when I need to re-order and don't remember where I bought them. ALL GOOD!

I ordered 2. The shipping box they arrived in was in perfect condition, but both filters were crushed, one so much so that it is unusable and is being exchanged. This tells me that someone at Supply House intentionally shipped a bad filter, hoping that someone would just accept a defective product at full price. Before purchase, I read several reviews indicating basically the exact same problem, but I ordered anyway, assuming that Supply House would have addressed the issue by now, based on reading and responding to previous bad reviews. Not so in this case. Hopefully they will get the message soon. I will say that the price is a little lower than elsewhere on the Internet, but I thought I was getting a usable product for that price. No indication in the descriptions that the price was discounted due to product damage. One other gripe, about the product itself: at some point, and I don't know when, but Honeywell changed the design of these things and they now have 12 Vertical pleats, vs. an old filter that was installed in my system when I bought my house that had 18 horizontal pleats. So the surface area of the media is 33% less, which to me says that it will last about 33% less time before it needs to be replaced. Existing filter and new are same exact make (Honeywell) and model (FC100A1037), printed on product itself, so if it's a fake, they are REALLY faking it. I THINK that this is just the new design, likely to cut some corners to keep costs down or profits up, and not two different products on the market. Pictures at other online retailers all look like the new ones I received, and reviewers at those other retailers also complained about the reduced # of pleats. The old filter that I was replacing was in the system when i bought my house and it was BADLY clogged, and the previous owners used the house as a 2nd home, so it was often unoccupied, so it may have been in there for many years, so that style may have been discontinued a long time ago.