Originally published at: This ozone sprayer cleans, disinfects, and sanitizes without toxic chemicals | Boing Boing
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Or there is the O3Waterworks version on Amazon for $179.
Weirdly for a BB shop post the product concept is actually plausible.
Dunno if it’s worth it, but it’s been strange to find out that bleach, which I thought was some sort of super disinfectant, is actually hard and slow to sanitize with, is corrosive, and it makes toxic gas if it comes into contact with even the residue of other cleaners, such as vinegar or citric acid. It has a 5-10 needed “dwell” time, whereas aqueous ozone sanitizers have a much shorter 30 second dwell time. But you’d better hope the unit is working, otherwise you may be unknowingly “sanitizing” with nothing but a $200 water sprayer 
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Ozone is a toxic chemical.
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That’s what I came here to write!
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Toxic to breathe when it is a gas in the air, which makes me cringe when I see ionizers and other kinds of “air purifiers” that create ozone. But this purports to dissolve the ozone in water. I have no idea whether it evaporates out in a way that is toxic or not, or what kind of relative risk there is compared, say, to using bleach, which is also toxic and leaves a residue that has to be rinsed.
This company sells industrial systems has a run down, which I assume is biased in their favor. But they do note some of the risks.
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Ozone dissolved in water is extremely oxidizing, even moreso than bleach. That’s why it’s such a good disinfectant.
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Good to know.
Speaking of bleach, I keep getting FB ads for PERFORMACIDE, a brand of powdered citric acid and sodium chlorite to mix with water make a chlorine dioxide disinfectant. It’s weird being sold sodium chlorite for one of it’s intended uses rather than as a fake miracle cure.
The company claims it has 1/3 the corosiveness of bleach.
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Then it’s 1/3rd as effective as bleach lol
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Could be. They claim it’s 2.6 times as “effective” but they don’t define the term, nor the concentration of sodium hypochlorite they are comparing it to. I should also check the dwell times, but I can’t find one on the performacide site, which seems like a huge omission.
Chlorine dioxide does have the advantage of evaporating and leaving no residue (which I hope doesn’t come with a corresponding respiratory health hazard). But there is also the hazard of breathing in the citric acid and sodium chlorite when mixing the solution, or getting in it your eyes. I think I’d feel safer with a product that didn’t need a full face respirator to prepare…
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If I’m not requiring actual cleaning power, but just need to disinfect, I tend to use benzalkonium chloride based stuff, like lysol or those sanitizing wipes.
Benzalkonium chloride is broadly effective and persists on surfaces from a few days to a few weeks while remaining effective, even after it dries out.
For that kind of bang I find it acceptably non toxic. It doesn’t seem to irritate skin. I wouldn’t drink the stuff, but it appears that likely wouldn’t kill you.
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I have an ozone generator in my water treatment system. It helps metals in the water form oxides that precipitate out (as solids) so they can be caught by a simple filter.
I assure you ozone is both a chemical and toxic, even if you can make it on demand doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
My system is a large (10-20 inches?) UV lamp that has air pumped through it by a simple aquarium style pump (it makes that bzzt sound all day and all night). Out the end just a tiny little puff of ozone mixed with air is forced into my water tank. While I believe it would be possible to scale this down, my system doesn’t really produce a lot of ozone fast. Instead it relies on producing ozone very slowly but constantly and faster than it can be used up. I have no idea what the power requirements are, but that UV lamp gets pretty warm. (also, don’t look at it with the cover off)
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It’s normally used in water treatment plants instead of chlorine, because the chlorine smell isn’t normally liked by people.
Where I live the water comes from three different sources, two of them are using ozone, but one uses chlorine, and by the way is harder than the other ones. Sometimes I open the tap and I’m greeted by a swimming pool smell, sometime is not.
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This sounds like a product designed to destroy performance. Or 90s Macintosh desktops.
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Around here (DC region) and maybe for you too, the swimming pool smell is a summer phenomenon. It’s not caused by the chlorine directly, but by the interaction of chlorine with nitrogen compounds. We don’t get the smell as badly during the winter because the Potomac doesn’t have as much fertilizer runoff during the winter.
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I’ve seen a video of a guy who uses ordinary hydrogen peroxide as a household sanitizer, touted as cheap and relatively safe for people but effective against micro-organisms.
there’s gotta be a catch, right guize?
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Peroxide really is a good sanitizer/sterilizer.
It works by breaking down into water and oxygen when exposed to light. Raw oxygen is very reactive and highly oxidizing. So it’s a great microbiocide.
The catch with peroxide is, it’s not stable, goes bad fairly quickly, and you may need to use a lot.
It leaves no residue, since all that’s left when it breaks down is oxygen and water. That’s good or bad depending on use case.
Additionally the low-test concentration you can easily get from the pharmacy isn’t super effective against spores and cysts.
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I’ve been noticing it in Oxfordshire for the last few months. I don’t know why it smells like that in winter, maybe it’s yet another unexpected side effect of Brexit.
enough water will kill you
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