Ozone Air Purifier
Thinking about getting an ozone air purifier? You should probably think again. There is a significant health risk from using products that rely on ozone, a harmful gas that does not really do much for cleaning out air pollutants and in any significant concentration is dangerous to humans. It's really just not worth taking that risk when there are other, better air purifier products on the market.
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Ozone Air Purifier
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has considered the risks and the misinformation concerning ozone air purifier products to be significant enough to warrant issuing a paper debunking some of the claims surrounding them. Among their findings:
Ozone is not effective at cleaning out air pollutants, and in fact is only good at getting rid of odors by masking them with its own smell (which many people find just as offensive as the original odor they were trying to get rid of).
Even if you are operating an ozone air purifier using the manufacturer's recommendations, you can still exceed safe limits of ozone in your house by several times. Factors involved include the number of purifiers used (if you go beyond one, you will increase the amount of ozone in your house significantly), whether indoor doors are closed, and whether you are using an air purifier that has a bigger square footage capacity than the area you are purifying.
It's hard to control exposure to ozone because there are so many factors affecting it - the concentration will be higher near the ozone air purifier, so people who are nearby may be in an unsafe level of ozone whereas people who are across the room may be fine. The different settings are also not proportionate to the amount of ozone produced - low, medium, and high are not necessarily low, medium, and high levels of ozone - they vary widely among different products. There are some now with sensors designed to shut it off if ozone levels are unsafe, but that has not yet been evaluated by the EPA.
The EPA hasn't issued a blanket recommendation not to use an ozone air purifier, but it recommends using traditional air purification methods instead. These could include getting rid of the source problem as the easiest (for example, quitting smoking), next as getting better ventilation (open windows, fans near the source if you can), and finally other air purifier products. This guide does not recommend ozone air purification - the EPA seems very wary of using them, and I personally wouldn't risk my own health when there are other technologies readily available. There could well be specific ozone air purifier brands that are safe, but it's very hard for a consumer or a person who isn't an engineer to figure out which ones are OK and which ones are not. It's beyond me personally, and I would stick with things like a HEPA filter, a UV filter, or other methods that can't really do you any harm.
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