UVC falls behind ozone as sanitizing machine for schools

Nevada’s Clark County School District has adopted UVC irradiation to protect its 320,000 students. Each of the 370 campuses will receive a stand-alone UVC tower. The single unit will be manually wheeled from room to room, taking a brief stop in each one to disinfect the surface with ultraviolet type C (UVC) light. This is an important step forward and we soon hope to see this revolutionary use of biosecurity in all student classrooms and transportation.

The power of UVC to sanitize surfaces is well-proven and sound science, but UVC means depending on where you sit in the classroom affects how safe each student is. And that's going to be a problem when parents find out.

How UVC disinfection works

When applied properly, UVC radiation is incredibly effective at neutralizing many kinds of biohazards, including bacteria and viruses. The higher the dose, the greater the level of disinfection, so to go from 99% to 99.999% elimination you need to destroy one thousand times more microorganisms. The way to achieve this is to throw way more light energy with more bulbs, or higher power bulbs, or leave them on for longer and hope that every surface gets sanitized to the level you wanted.

The disinfecting power of UVC, drops exponentially with distance. Placed in the middle of a room, a kid's desk just ten feet way gets one thousandth of the power of a desk one foot away. This means that all surfaces near the tower will receive a lot more disinfecting energy than those further away. Parents of the kids who sit towards the back of the room will discover their children are not as protected. You could call it unintended health and safety inequity.

Remote walls, and surfaces that are at an angle to the light like tables and chairs, will receive little to no light energy. Hidden surfaces like under chairs and tables are in the shadows and receive no light, and therefore no disinfection.

UVC Cleaning: In Search of the Perfect Process

To disinfect a 50-room school, with an average of 15 minutes per room, would take over 12 hours. If you need to save time, you could have some units reside permanently in some rooms, so they are run in parallel. Another approach is to have the UVC tower drive itself, using AI, from room to room, following a pre-defined path. This works well if all the doors are left open, all pathways are clear, and in a nod to R2D2’s challenges, no stairs.

Misting Technologies

Two options that deliver more equitable disinfection are chemical foggers and electrostatic sprayers These atomize harsh chemicals into the air and some cling to surfaces. Those that don't remain in the air and are small enough to be breathed deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. These are the lungs of either the adult performing the disinfection or worse, the kids returning in the morning.

EPIC iO AURA™

Alternatively, you could have permanently installed units centrally controlled and run automatically on a schedule. It would use no chemicals and the only sign it was there is fresh oxygen. This is the revolutionary EPIC iO AURA™ approach, which safely disinfects every square inch of a room equally, every night consistently and with no human intervention. And in the morning, the kids return to a clean and fresh smelling room.

EPIC iO AURA™ is safe, consistent, equitable, completely automated, uses no chemicals and leaves no residue.

Kids’ health and safety at school is paramount, and now we can add biosecurity to the list of threats we can protect them against. Contact us at EPIC iO to learn how we help keep our kids safe.

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