Huge personal victory here! We often have relatives as multiple day houseguests. I’m very sensitive to perfumes after an industrial exposure to toluene diisocyanate, but my requests to them not to use perfumes here fall on deaf ears and the family dynamic makes it difficult to fix this. When they leave, the guest room (which is next to my office) reeks. I have to close it up with carbon filters for over a week before I can handle it being opened again.
But yesterday I had a great idea! I have mercury vapor lamps that are optimized to emit 185 nm radiation, which creates ozone, in addition to the usual 254 nm radiation. I put one in the middle of the room, left it on, and closed the door. I could smell ozone near the room even with the doors closed. After about 3 hours I went in and turned the lamp off, and sniffed. The ozone was very strong and I left the room closed up. A few hours later the ozone was much less strong. And there’s no perfume odor!!! I’m beside myself with the warm glow of success!!!
I’m curious whether it was the radiation or the ozone that did the work. I’m inclined to think the ozone did it, because the radiation would be mostly line of sight, and the darker corners of the room would still hold perfume, but of course there’d be some bouncing and diffusion of the radiation so I’m not sure about that.
Goddammit, it wasn’t enough for the perfume makers to pollute the world, they also went and used the terms “ultraviolet” and “ozone” for trade names for their poisons. Searching either term with “perfume” just turns up their foul ads.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I’m glad you appear to have found a high-tech solution to a real stinker of a problem.
JFC, I cannot imagine a family dynamic in which it wasn’t possible to express to these skunk-like house guests how difficult they’re making your life. I know real life can be a lot more complicated and nuanced than one imagines from reading anecdotes, but the fantasy I have running though my head is the following. The doorbell rings, I open the door, observe the highly perfumed house guests in the offing, with the odors already wafting into the house, and I inform these house guests that they can either go get themselves de-skunked and return, or they can go and not return, but they are not going to enter my house reeking (with all due respect, I would add) like a French bordello.
I have an ozone generator and it does work great at all sorts of odors. It also seems to work great at things in the air that make me sneeze. I think the UV also creates ozone doesn’t it?
I had a co-worker who preferred “stinks like a Turkish whorehouse.” About another co-worker who over-used perfume in the office (but she didn’t say it to her face – she was cranky but not mean).
Let me guess – in-laws? Weak-kneed spouse who won’t stand up for you? I hope I’m wrong. And of course it’s never that simple. But I guess that’s why I don’t see (or miss seeing) any of the few relatives I have left any more.
“People who buy ozone generators may not be aware that ozone can harm the cells in the lungs and respiratory airways. Exposure to ozone irritates and inflames the lining of the respiratory system. This causes symptoms including coughing, chest tightness, shortness of breath, and impaired breathing. Ozone can worsen asthma symptoms, and may contribute to the development of asthma. Elevated exposures to ozone can cause permanent lung damage, and repeated exposure can even increase the risk of dying among persons already in poor health. Persons especially vulnerable to health problems from breathing ozone include children and those who already suffer from asthma or other respiratory diseases, including the elderly. There are many experimental studies on animals, including dogs, cats, hamsters and guinea pigs, that show respiratory effects from exposure to ozone.”
Better ventilation and use of an effective filtration device are a much better bet for those triggered by certain odors.
The first time my relatives brought their dog to visit, they very carefully asked permission, I thought to bring that specific dog that specific time. After that, everybody in that family just assumed that all dogs were coming with them, any time they came to visit. Most of the visiting time wound up being taken up with carefully keeping dogs apart who couldn’t be trusted together, keeping the dog not safe with cats away from the cats, and listening to unhappy dogs wailing about their unhappiness from their assorted crates, while the cats all hid upstairs under the beds. I like dogs; much of this time I had a dog, who during these visits joined the collection of creatures who had to be carefully accompanied, on leash, whenever out of crates or not shut up in a room, as they were never here long enough for the dogs to settle the relationships to the point at which we were sure they were safe together. I even liked the particular dogs they were bringing; but it was clear to me, if to nobody else, that this wasn’t working well, either for the humans or for the dogs. But when I tried to get people to leave the dogs at home, what I got was that if the dogs weren’t coming, then neither were the people.
I could, of course, have refused to see the people; but I decided against it. I don’t see them all that often; but I didn’t want to not see them at all.
If they’d been likely to show up every few days, that would have been a different matter. I can put up with a fair amount for a few days a year.
Well, family life has us doing all kinds of unreasonable things. These guests are very important to my spouse. She pines for them when they aren’t around. I don’t understand, but it’s a very powerful dynamic.
Well, it depends. Using them when living creatures are around them is a really bad idea. However, there’s no real risk in using them short term in a closed unoccupied room. In fact, if I use what I learned in this experience, I could run an extension cord under the door, and do a three hour exposure plus a 24 or 48 hour wait, all without exposure to the room. Perhaps a towel or masking tape along the bottoms of the door would even eliminate the ozone scent I detected outside the room, though I’m not sure it would be worth doing.
This point leads to a lot of confusion in the retail marketplace. From memory, mercury vapor lamps with sufficiently transparent envelopes (made of silica I think) pretty much always emit lots of radiation at 254 nm, which is approximately the most effective wavelength at directly killing bacteria but also lots of skin burning ability. This radiation breaks ozone down. It’s in the range of UVC. However, lamps made with envelopes having even better short wavelength transparency also emit 185 nm ultraviolet (I think maybe they have to make other design choices, perhaps bulb pressure or voltage or something). This radiation is fairly strongly absorbed by air, and it creates ozone. Because it doesn’t go very far through air, it’s considered VUV, vacuum ultraviolet. Broadly speaking, making things transparent to short wavelengths is a bit difficult, so the choices of engineering materials get more and more limited. I think somewhere around 120 to 150 nm the only things transparent are a handful of gasses such as argon, and then nothing beyond, until you get well into X-rays, and the mechanisms of transparency are different and going shorter starts making more things transparent.
I sincerely hope that you didn’t expose people to the 254 nm light from those mercury lamps – it can cause skin melanomas and cataracts.
The envelopes for these lamps are made of fused silica, which is basically amorphous quartz. To get to 185 nm you need low-oxygen fused silica, which is more expensive (and fused silica is more expensive than glass). There are a few things transparent at lower wavelengths, like calcium fluoride or lithium fluoride (the most transparent solid material), but they’re not good for making lamp envelopes.
254 nm isn’t very good for making ozone, by the way – you want 160 to 240 nm light for that. You don’t need 185 nm.
One possibility you might consider is an excimer lamp. They’re promoting the use of Kryptonb Chloride (KrCl) excimer lamps now as skin- and eye-safe germicidal ultraviolet, even though the 222 nm light will also create ozone (and you need additional filtering to remove residual melanoma-inducing UV rays). I know a Harvard doctor who set up several of these lamps in a club in Boston, and claims it’s the safest germ-free gathering space around (he sings at the club. Really). This, despite the fact that it’s generating ozone. I don’t know why people don’t also promote Krypton Bromide excimer lamps ( KrBr – 207 nm), which ought also to be germicidal and eye-safe. But all the experimental work has been done on KrCl.
I don’t know how either of these would work on removing perfume from the air, but I suspect the energetic UV photons would start breaking down complex odor molecules.
They told you that their dogs are more important than you are.
You do you, but that would have been the last time I’d have wanted to interact with them had I been put in that position.
There is an epidemic in our society of people thinking pets outrank people. I for one have no use for other people’s fealty to their 4-legged overlords.
Meh. When I’ve told them that I’m not coming because I had to take care of a sick cat, they’ve taken that entirely in stride. In my family, that’s a perfectly good reason.
I think these wavelengths of UV would likely fade or damage these surfaces. I know light can damage things, and I think it’s always the more energetic (shorter wavelength) photons that do the most damage. One possible exception would be that the 185 nm radiation may have a hard time getting to those surfaces because the air is absorbing it.
I bet the ozone generated by the 185 also tends to fade and damage things.
A little quick hunting shows, if I read the reference properly, that absorption by air in the neighborhood of 185 nm is very peaky, the graph showing crowded absorption lines in this region. The attenuation length seems to vary from 0.1 m to 5 m. An attenuation length is the distance the radiation travels as its strength is diminished by the factor e (or 2.71828…). Unfortunately this wide variation leaves me not knowing whether room dimensions make most surfaces safe or leaves them vulnerable.
