doesn’t UVC cause skin cancer?
Not only skin cancer but major eye issues. I would be surprised if this actually put out UV-C.
I’m very skeptical. How long must the surface be exposed to the UV light, to be sterilized? And how easy is it to accomplish with that tiny lamp? I bet it’s not realistically effective.
Every UV sterilizer says in very clear bold print to never expose yourself directly to it. Particularly your eyes.
It is designed to kill things, obviously it will hurt you. You wouldn’t want to get bleach in your eyes, either.
Short exposures of a few seconds to your skin won’t hurt you, but it also won’t sterilize anything. UV sterilization generally takes about 30 minutes with a real medical grade light. Exposure of a second or two with a tiny little light like this? I absolutely guarantee it to do nothing.
I’ve worked in healthcare for 15 years and used these systems. You can take my word for it.
Well this claims to be 253nm so if it’s not complete bunk then it IS the right UV-C wavelength to sterilize. However as it said above, you can’t just wave this over something and boom bing it’s sterilized. You need some continued exposure to accomplish it.
One of the 3d printing projects making PPE for health care workers has a table of different sterilization methods that were certified to clean the visors they were making. The UV-C method was 15 minutes. So I guess you could set this up over something you’re concerned about for a quarter hour and get your surely clean 4 square inches.
And wouldn’t you know, made in China
Will this work on a CAR Steering Wheel? Asking for a friend!
This really is in poor taste. Profiting from the panic of people by selling a device that shows it can sterilize kids toys, money, etc in a tiny ass device is complete nonsense. You have to expose items to a long time of UVC light.
OK, back to physics. You not only need the correct wavelength (this is it) but sufficient intensity. And remember that unless you are talking a collimated beam, light generally dissipates as the square of the distance in a vacuum (air disapates it a bit quicker) so each time you double the distance you have less than 1/4 the energy per square inch you started with. The medical uv equipment I’ve worked with is in a housing to set the distance from source to patient. It is only a 15 Watt semi-flourescent tube ( 8" tube, fairly standard at one time) and the recommended exposure is 30 seconds to 2 minutes MAX with the housing nearly in contact with skin. At 12 inches you would be almost 8 times as far and the energy woul be about 1/64th. So if a UV sterilization line needs 15 minutes, it is probably because the source is a good distance away from the items, probably to make it safe for the under trained operator to keep sticking his hands and face in the booth.
And as to the “medical worker expert” - you got parts of it nearly right. Take it from me and my fellow physicists, WE KNOW. It’s kind of what we do. Come on out to Argonne labs we’ll prove it.
And as to UV-C causing skin cancer, yes and UV-A and UV-B will also, but that is usually from long term low to mid level exposure. Short term high level exposure the danger is it WILL BURN YOU just like a microwave.
But what if I want to sanitize my phone?
I’m going to guess this requires some sketchy Chinese app to be installed to work.
Shame on you Woot for selling this garbage.
UV-C can’t penetrate the outer skin layers.
Also, well-known makers of water bottle sterilizers also use UV-C sterilization. Crazy Cap, etc. you can search them on Amazon. They also use UV-C leds.
I’m going to buy three and test these out and ask my scientists to conduct some studies using the flu virus. (I read that Coronavirus is more easily killed compared to flu bc of its outer structure)
I’m assuming since it says Iphone that it connects to a lightning port and not micro-USB.
I guess there is a converter somewhere…
