Buying guide

Electric or manual, single or dual motor, height ranges and the cable problem nobody plans for.

Height-adjustable desks are the single upgrade people are most pleased with a year later, and the one most often bought in the wrong specification. Here is what actually matters.

Buy electric.

Manual crank desks are cheaper and they work perfectly well. The problem is behavioural: adjusting one takes about forty turns of a handle, so people stop doing it. A manual sit-stand desk reliably ends up used as a fixed desk within a fortnight, which means you have bought an expensive fixed desk. If the budget only reaches a manual desk, a good fixed desk and a separate monitor arm is usually better value.

An electric desk moves in six or seven seconds at the touch of a button, and that is the difference between a desk people use as intended and one they do not.

• Single motor desks drive both legs from one motor through a linkage. They are slower, noisier, and have a lower weight capacity. Fine for a light home-office setup.
• Dual motor desks have a motor in each leg. They are quicker, quieter, lift more, and cope better with a heavy monitor arm, a docking station and a person leaning on the desk. For anything in a shared or commercial office, this is the specification to buy.

If you are putting three monitors and a laptop dock on it, dual motor is not optional.

The two numbers to check are the minimum and maximum height, and which one matters depends on the person.

• Shorter users get caught by the minimum. A desk with a 680mm minimum will be too tall for someone who needs 620mm, and no chair adjustment fixes a desk that will not go low enough. A footrest is the workaround, not the answer.
• Taller users get caught by the maximum. Standing comfortably at a desk needs roughly your elbow height. For anyone over about 1.9m, check the desk reaches 1250mm or more.

Desktop thickness is included in the quoted range on our ranges, but it is worth confirming if the figure is marginal for you.

Four memory presets sounds like a gimmick and is not. The difference between "press and hold the button until it looks about right" and "press 2" is exactly the friction that decides whether the desk gets used twice a day or twice a month.

If two people hot-desk at the same station, memory presets stop being a convenience and become the reason it works at all.

The failure mode of a sit-stand desk is not the mechanism. It is the moment the desk rises and the monitor cable, which was just long enough, is not.

Plan for it:

• a cable tray or basket under the desktop to hold the power brick and slack
• a cable spine or sock carrying the cables down one leg
• an in-desk power module so the desk has one cable to the wall rather than six
• monitor cables and power leads at least 500mm longer than they need to be at sitting height

Doing this at the point of order costs a fraction of doing it later and takes ten minutes at installation instead of an afternoon.

For teams, back-to-back sit-stand desks share a frame and a cable route, which is cheaper per user than two individual desks and much tidier. The thing to watch is that both sides move independently, so one person standing does not lift their colleague's monitor.

If you are laying out a whole floor, send us the dimensions and we will tell you what fits.

The advice that survives contact with reality:

1. Start with twenty minutes standing per hour, not two hours at a stretch. Standing still all day is its own problem.
2. Set the desk at elbow height, forearms roughly level, screen top at eye level. If your shoulders are up by your ears, the desk is too high.
3. Get an anti-fatigue mat if you have hard flooring. It is a small spend that makes the difference between standing being pleasant and being a chore.
4. Change position before you get uncomfortable, not after.

• The desktop size against the space, including the depth once a monitor arm is clamped on
• Whether the frame clears any pedestal or drawer unit at its lowest setting
• Whether the floor is level, because a wobble at sitting height becomes a sway at standing height
• Where the plug socket is

Tell us the room and we will sanity-check the layout with you before anything ships.

Call 0208 103 4875 or email info@officefurniturestoreuk.co.uk. No charge, and no obligation to buy anything.