Originally published at: eBay's latest offering: electric shock air purifiers that double as fire starters | Boing Boing
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First and foremost: huzzah for Big Clive investigations! so educational! so understated! (and with such a wonderful accent!)
Second and uh… also-most: you really do not want to generate ozone in your living spaces. It doesn’t “purify” the air, and it can really #@$up your lungs. So the (only) good news about these little scam devices in specific is they don’t work.
gratutious wikipedia quote:
Ozone generators sold as air cleaners intentionally produce the gas ozone. These are often marketed to control indoor air pollution, and use misleading terms to describe ozone. Some examples are describing it as “energized oxygen” or “pure air”, suggesting that ozone is a healthy or “better” kind of oxygen. However, according to the EPA: "ozone is not effective at removing many odor-causing chemicals" and "does not effectively remove viruses, bacteria, mold, or other biological pollutants". Furthermore, another report states that “results of some controlled studies show that concentrations of ozone considerably higher than these [human safety] standards are possible even when a user follows the manufacturer’s operating instructions”
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Good post - ozone is about as toxic as hydrogen cyanide and has been linked to cardiac, respiratory and neurological damage. Not just that, but it reacts with a range of organic chemicals to produce lots of serious nasties that have their own effects on human health.
Oh and it attacks a wide range of plastics, rubbers and other synthetic materials - changing their colour and making them brittle.
You really don’t want to be around ozone - no matter how lovely it smells.
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- I stopped SELLING on eBay because my sales were reliably reported as having arrived broken. There is no recourse - it’s refund time.
- I stopped BUYING on eBay because generally speaking, better deals are to be had.
What’s left?
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BigClive is a treasure. Scottish, LGBT, carbonates things that shouldn’t be carbonated, takes apart dangerous electronics and explains why they’re dangerous (and demonstrates it in a saner version of Electroboom), what’s not to like?
I’m kind of amazed at some of these devices. They’re not just like cheap knockoffs that don’t pass electrical device regulations. They literally don’t do anything, can’t do anything, or worse like this one, seem to be actively dangerous on purpose. The mains power is just routed directly outside to the electrodes! What’s the meaning of that? If you’re not grounded and you bump one it shocks you so you think the device is actually functioning? (if you are grounded and bump it then you REALLY get shocked.)
He makes the good point in some of these videos that actually designing or buying/rebranding an OEM thing that already does what you want is kind of trivially cheap (hence ERGLEFLRB products on Amazon) so why spend your own energy making something that’s actively dangerous and doesn’t perform any other function?
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What? Also yeah, you’d think an air purifier would at least put the contamination a particular place out of the way. I mean, ‘in the house fire’ is a place, but…it does satisfy the ‘nothing left to take away’ design rule with excess. What can their corresponding service line be like? Botulin proliferation?
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ERGLEFLERB. You know, ERGLEFLERB LED Light String Watch Robot Vacuum Cleaner [2023 New Model]
Have you not ever used Amazon? 
Some kind of money laundering or tax avoidance or such?
The aim isn’t filtration, it’s to obliterate things at the molecular level.
Sort of like the electronic gadget equivalent of waving around a lit match, except in the air everywhere
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Have you not ever used Amazon?
Yeah, but I think it sensed I didn’t -want- things that put a lien on my house and sent migrants from Louisiana as live-in ERGLEFLRB maintenance.
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