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FrozenGate by Avery

Ozone Generator Finished

Benm said:
If it is high enough to kill a nasty smell, it probably is high enough to kill you.
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Kill you? Nah. Definitely strong enough to damage some of your respiratory tissues though.

Teej said:
Even 50 ppb is enough to cause most people problems, and some people start having issues down around a 1/10 of that.
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That is interesting to know. The data I found via google said 10ppb was the average lower limit for detection, so if both are correct that means some people have adverse reactions at half the concentration where most people are just beginning to be able to smell it? Man, I'd hate to be them.

You're right about the concentration ratios for reactions though. That's why you never ozonate while you habitate.
 





I didn't mean kill you right away, but it can induce conditions like COPD or even cancer in the future, which can be quite deadly eventually.

As for health problems caused by ozone it's important to look at the difference between acute and chronic exposure. For acute problems you would expect someone to be able to smell it before any serious medical condition develops. With chronic exposure you could see damage developing over years or decades from small concentrations that people don't really notice, or do notice but don't find unpleasant (such as the smell when you laserprint a few pages).

Accumulative effects become a problem here: if you print a few pages once a week there probably is little risk, but if you are working in a room with a shitload of laser printers and copiers all day long there probably is.

In a way it's comparable to the risk of smoking cigarettes: If you smoke one a week or even one a day for a couple of years that isn't likely to shorten your lifespan by much, if at all. Smoke 2 packs a day for 40 years and it becomes quite likely to kill you.

Experimenting with ozone generators is probably fine as long as you stop when it becomes irritating to your lungs. The thing to avoid is having one running long term in an environment you live in. Things like ozone generators for cars could be problematc there since they often switch on when driving the car. It would be better if those did the exact opposite: produce ozone while the car is parked and stop as soon as you turn the car on.
 
I'm actually from The Wirral, across the water from Liverpool, but nobody knows where that is, so I say Liverpool :) .
And it was JD that knight that saw me off.

@Ben. Yeah I only had it activated during the testing phase, and even then it was short bursts as I was aware of the danger. Sig has adjusted an Arduino sketch for me to activate it shortly after I leave for work in the morning.

Here's a question, could an Ozone generator trip a smoke detector, given the amounts of Ozone being produced?

Ped
 
ped said:
I'm actually from The Wirral, across the water from Liverpool, but nobody knows where that is, so I say Liverpool :) .
And it was JD that knight that saw me off.

@Ben. Yeah I only had it activated during the testing phase, and even then it was short bursts as I was aware of the danger. Sig has adjusted an Arduino sketch for me to activate it shortly after I leave for work in the morning.

Here's a question, could an Ozone generator trip a smoke detector, given the amounts of Ozone being produced?

Ped
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It depends upon the type of detector.

O3's ionization potential is ~ 12.4 eV or so, so if the detector uses a PID for example, it would need to be able to ionize chemicals above that range. As its oxygen that breaks off when ionized, this may or may not trip at the involved concentrations...

On the other hand, if the concentration of ionized particles is reduced by the ozone, the detector might not "see" enough to trigger it.

If its a photoelectric detector for example, the ozone should not create enough opacity to trigger it.
 
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Most of the common detectors use an Americium plated pellet to ionize an air channel between to electrodes. When smoke particulates enter the channel they obstruct the alpha particles from the Am241 and lower the ionization level of the air channel, causing less current to flow through the channel which is detected by the electrodes, signaling the alarm.

Having an already ionized gas flow through the channel actually raises the threshold for detection (makes it harder for smoke to trigger the alarm) as the quiescent current raises in step with air channel ionization.

You'd need extreme levels of ozone to make a noticeable difference though, I wouldn't worry about it.

However, if you have a very rare type of detector, which is a "mixed gas detector" similar to the SnO2 sensors, the competing reaction of the ozone on the air contaminates means the threshold for detection raises significantly at even moderate ozone levels. This is similar to what I observed with my MQ-3 (VOC) sensor. Even so, the amount of smoke put out by a real fire would trump this effect. Having ozonated air means that a small amount of smoke from a kitchen is less likely to set off this kind of alarm. Kind of like cutting off your hand to stop an itchy finger though, lol.
 
Ozone would be unlikely to trip a smoke detector of either kind.

For the optical type it would have to absorb significant amounts of visible light. While at high concentrations ozone gas could be a bit blue (from theory, never seen it irl), in survivable concentrations it's absolutely invisible.

Since it's made up of oxygen it isn't likely to block alpha particles much more than air does either, so i don't see why it would trip americium based detectors either.

Perhaps it could cause alarms on things like carbon monoxide, methane or hydrocarbon detectors. It could also have the opposite effect (stopping alarms going off when they should) because it reacts with what you are trying to detect (i can imagine how that'd work on hydrocarbon detectors).

At the parts per billion level i doubt it would have any real world effects though. Once you start counting conentration in parts per million it's probably time to get out of there because of the ozone itself, regardless if something is on fire (yet) or not.
 
Benm said:
Since it's made up of oxygen it isn't likely to block alpha particles much more than air does either, so i don't see why it would trip americium based detectors either.
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You misread what I wrote. The ozone doesn't obstruct the alphas, I was describing the operation of the Am241 detectors. Smoke obstructs the alphas causing a lower level of channel ionization. If the channel ionized more than normal because of the presence of O3 and singlet O, it takes more smoke than normal to trigger the alarm.
 
This is what i meant by 'opposite effect': ozone could react with whatever the detector was intended to see, causing the alarm not to be as sensitive as it should be.

I don't expect big differences in 'smoke detectors' that essentially rely on soot blocking the passage of light or alpha particles since the ozone would not react with soot that quickly. It could, however, react with some organic molecules like hydrocarbons clearing them from the air before the detector trips.

For domestic applications i think there is little to worry about - ozone concentrations are not likely to be that high in an environment you want to live in. Fire/smoke detectors for domestic use are of the optical type nowadays, and those trip on amounts of smoke that would also be quite visible. The main added value of such detectors is that they sound an alarm when there is smoke, even when you are sleeping and would not be able to see it because of that.
 
I admit to not reading through this entire thread. Now that that's out of the way is an air ionizer anything like what is being talked about here? I have one in one of my vehicles (built in not added that I can turn on/off in the programming). My understanding is it is used to get air particles to not stay floating around in the air. There's also an in cabin air filter but that's in all my vehicles (recently changed all of them).

Edit: after reading all the posts and also reading what an ionizer is for I'm still a bit confused as it said that an ionizer can produce excess ozone. All I know is I never see any dust in the air or smell any odors in it either although I keep my vehicles very clean anyways. I've had it switched on since the day I bought it. I'll have to look at the manual about it but theres no built in time limit. There is another thing I can select that does some kind of additional air cleaning for 2 minutes. Going to have to look at that also as IME not sure what that does. It might just make the air ciculate inside the car through the air filter on recirculation mode.
 
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@Pman ionizers are intended to charge particulate matter in the air so they coalesce together and stick to surfaces, removing the particulates from the air. Ionizers have a byproduct of small amounts of Ozone and Nitrogen Oxides because the high electric field gradient at the emitter(s) also ionize the air mollecules.

It's a poorly studied field (haha pun not intended), and there is a huge amount of pseudoscience surrounding the subject, but there are two polarities of ionizers (negative and positive), and it is postulated that positive ones can cause additional harm to living organisms. The inverse is also postulated but that has been studied a bit more and there hasn't been any conclusive evidence to my knowledge. It was mostly ruled that negative ions are neither harm nor help (aside from the particulate removal, anyway). Regardless, since Negative has been found to not harm, it's best to err on the side of caution and not use positive ionizers.

While ionizers work on a macro scale to "clean" the air, UV and ozone works on a micro scale to attack and chemically alter contaminants in the air. The key end user difference being that Ozone and UV are dangerous to be around, while as negatively charged ions themselves appear not to have any health effects. An ionizer won't remove much if any aromatic organic compounds from the air (they're typically nonpolar) but UV and Ozone will.
 
Yeah, I remember that smell very well. That "singlet" O, or atomic oxygen is a free radical. It is very reactive. But, my thought was who would want such a device? I guess I don't miss the smell as much as others do. LOL.
 
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Well I do know that it is a negative ionizer.
Thanks for the answer and +REP (yes it worked too)
 
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