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Uv light wands
Hi everyone.
I’ve been researching ways to keep contamination down during production, would using a uv lamp such as this one be a good idea?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0018A330K?pc_redir=1398850583&robot_redir=1 -
6 Replies
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yes, but…it’s not healthy to expose humans, and particularly human eyes, to this light.
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Wearing protective clothing and eye wear should counter that problem?
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I don’t think a sanitizing wand will be effective. UV light is not penetrating, doesn’t work well on porous structures, any scratch on a surface that can harbor microorganisms will be inaccessible to UV light, and the germicide effect is a function of power of the lamp and duration of the application. So it will be hard to judge the effectiveness unless you can measure the dose and you know the susceptibility of the microorganisms to UV light.
The most dangerous aspect is that can give a false sense of security.
The health care industry uses UV systems to sanitize rooms when people are not present. Still I don’t how effective is in areas that are not “illuminated” by the UV. -
Thank you so much for the reply ruben!
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Fundamentally, UV-C technology is great for knocking down levels of
problematic germs in the environment when people aren’t present in the room. Labs have used UV to decontaminate containment hoods for decades and several companies now use large
UV systems on wheels to decontaminate hospital rooms.A high-output germicidal UV light might be helpful in your case, but a small one probably wouldn’t help much. Effectiveness is a function of the number of photons at the proper
wavelength that are delivered to the target organisms, so in this case
size matters
Note that the same thing the UV does to the DNA of microbes to kill them (destroy/mutate the DNA by causing thymine and cytosine bases to dimerize or pair together) happens the same way to human DNA in skin and eye cells, so PPE would be crucial!
From the standpoint of practicality I’d skip it and perfect your ordinary facility hygiene practices instead. Good question, though. Thanks for asking.
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Thank you for breaking it down for me @the_microbiologist and I’m glad to know that I didn’t ask a silly question. Lol. Thank you for taking the time to answer
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