Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk Review

It seems like there's a near constant stream of evidence coming out saying that sitting all day is really harmful to your long term health. For those of us that sit all day at work, and do a fair amount of sitting at home, this is bad news!

We recently got standing desks at work which was nice, but they were kind of crummy and just sit on top of our existing desks (http://www.varidesk.com/standing-desk-pro-plus-36). They're also lacking in surface area and a little unstable it seems. I did however appreciate the ability to transition between standing and sitting pretty easily throughout the day. After giving it a try at work, I decided I wanted to replace my own desk at home with a standing model. I did a bunch of research and settled on the Jarvis Bamboo standing desk from ErgoDepot. I got the 60" rectangular model and so far am loving it!

 

Pictured above is the desk in its "sitting" position. As you can see, it has space for both of my 24" monitors, my tower and my mousepad with room to spare! I often put my laptop on the left side of the desk and plug it into the primary monitor. My biggest gripe at the moment is cable management, but that's more on me than on the desk. They sell a "cable management" package which I got and it has all manner of trays, tie downs, and straps that you can use to tame the mess. Its just a little tricky when some of the cables have to be able to transition from sitting to standing seamlessly.

One of the other things research is showing is that standing all day isn't a panacea either - it comes with its own share of problems. The key is to change from standing to sitting throughout the day, and to take breaks to walk around. You basically don't want to spend all your time doing any one sedentary thing. As such, I wanted to make sure it was easy to transition from standing and sitting and back again so that I would actually do it. All the reviews I found of this desk consistently mentioned it was worth the extra money to get the digital controls with the memory presets, so I went ahead and did that as well:

The controls allow you to adjust the height of the desk down to within a tenth of an inch of accuracy and store up to four different preset heights. Once you've got it set up, it only takes a single button press to move your desk from one position to the next - and it always returns to exactly the position you want. This is one of my biggest gripes about my non-motorized one at work. When I move it, its hard to ever get back exactly where I want it and I end up spending a couple of minutes each time trying to get it exactly right. This leads to less frequent transitions between sitting and standing. With the digital controls on the other hand, there's basically zero friction. Hit a button and the desk goes exactly where you want.

Pictured above is the desk in the "standing" position. The height I have it configured actually allows the chair to sit neatly underneath which is a nice bonus! One thing that consistently comes up in reviews of standing desks is that they can be wobbly at standing heights, fortunately, that is not the case here. The Jarvis Bamboos feels rock solid even at its maximum setting (which is even higher than I have it set here). You can really see what I'm talking about with cable management in this photo. Its kind of gross, so that will be my next big project.

Anyways, I've really enjoyed having a standing desk at home so far and, while they can be a bit pricey, I feel like its a wise long-term investment in my health.