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vbelenky

19 karma · joined January 14, 2026

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vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Sure, I'm game! I can loop you into our comms with LLA and you can do the same, and they can send us both the results as they come in. OSLUV says they're happy to pay for it too so no worries about the expense

I really do think the ushio bulb will last 13.5k+ hours though, and that's a long time to wait--how about we publish the LLA results at 1000 hours, and every subsequent 1000 hour interval after that? At minimum, it should give us a sense for how the lamps are performing, even though we might not get the L70 lifetime for a while. Then, as soon as LLA has confirmed receipt of both our samples we can both retract our lifetime claims, at least until the first 1000 hour interval

Just let me know a good email for you and we can get the ball rolling on this, you can get me at vivian@aerolamp.net

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Here is a paper showing that the USHIO care222 module achieves an L70 of at least 10,000 hours: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/lsj/50/7/50_394/_pdf

Here is a poster with more data in the same series, showing that the L70 is about 13,500 hours: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0694/8637/9189/files/24061...

I have never seen any other data for any other commercially available krypton-chloride excimer lamp besides this paper and this poster. All that is "widely documented" is manufacturers claims. The non-USHIO KrCl excimer lamps I have personally tested had L70s closer to 1000 hours, nowhere near 3000-5000 hours. Of course since I am involved in Aerolamp I am not a credible third party, but I am not asking anyone to believe me, I am simply explaining why I decline to believe this 3000-5000 hour claim that is presently without any substantiation whatsoever, not even a paper or conference poster.

Of course, a cheap 1000-hour bulb that is easy to replace and available from multiple manufacturers is great! For many people this approach makes sense. But it is not a 3000-5000 hour bulb and consumers need to know that in order to replace their bulbs in a timely fashion.

You will probably say that the paper and poster and is not credible third party data. This is why Aerolamp has submitted multiple samples to LightLab Allentown for lifetime testing. Perhaps you would be willing to do the same, given how frequently you emphasize the importance of third-party data?

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
This is incorrect, unless by "old school" UVC lights you mean 172nm xenon lamps. Those produce quite a lot of ozone. 254nm UVC lamps (also quite old school) do not produce ozone.

Ozone is produced at wavelengths below 242nm, but at very low levels. Significant ozone production only ramps up at wavelengths below 200nm (note the log scale in the figure https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/php.13391) Whether or not the light is produced by an LED is immaterial--what matters is the output spectra.

There are no UVC LEDs that I would consider "safe" for either eyes or skin, except insofar as they are safe because they output very little light, or no UVC at all. SilannaUV makes a 235nm LED, but much of its spectrum is outside the relatively safe "far-UV" band.

Krypton-chloride lamps produce near-monochromatic 222nm, and generally are sold filtered to remove even traces of non-far-UV wavelengths. These are relatively safe because at 222nm, protein absorption in the outer layers of human tissues is so high that the photobiological risk is likely low, especially in skin. I still don't recommend staring directly at those lamps for extended periods of time, especially close up, but this is the only kind of lamp that I might consider 'safe'.

Essentially, if it doesn't produce ozone, it is likely a significant photobiological hazard--unless it's just producing very low levels of light, or not producing UVC at all. Many "UVC" lights you can buy online aren't really UVC at all.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
The tear layer only contributes a little bit--far-UV eye safety is mostly down to the fact that the 222nm only penetrates to outer epithelium (so cells that will be dead in a few days anyway), and the fact that your eyes get very little effective dose if you aren't staring directly into the lamp. You've got eyelids, eyelashes, eyebrows, hair, etc, so the effective dose to your eyes is actually much lower than the dose assumed by most safety standards (ANSI/IES 27.1-22, UL8802), which are fairly conservative. Check out this paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/php.13671
vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Yeah, what responsibly deployed far-UV is definitely not is an instant kill beam that immediately inactivates exhaled pathogens. I estimate it takes 100 mW of far-UV about 5 minutes to inactivate 90% of the flu/covid in a 250 sqft room (10 minutes to get to 99%), assuming the air is well-mixed. Far-UV should be thought of as a super-powerful quiet air filter more than anything else--it prevents infectious aerosols from building up in a space, which can matter a lot. You don't necessarily immediately get infected just because someone infected coughed near you--you might only get infected if you spend a long time near them, sharing their air. Continuously cleaning the air prevents these kinds of infections, and can make the infections that do still happen less severe.

You're totally right that circulating the air is important though! Definitely don't use far-UV in totally still air. But you don't necessarily need a LOT of air movement to achieve "good" mixing. Often just an air-change or so of ventilation is enough--just think about what would happen if you started smoking indoors. The smoke would be ~everywhere pretty fast.

The oxygen absorption at 222nm is not significant however--it's enough to produce a bit of ozone (less than you'd get from just opening a window), but not enough to actually absorb a significant amount of radiation. 222nm lamps are generally less powerful than 254nm lamps anyway, but because 254nm is much less safe, those systems have to be deployed in ways that often reduce their efficacy--in special louvred fixtures that kill most of their output or in portable units/ducts that constrain their effectiveness.

222nm seems to be more effective per-photon at inactivating viruses than 254nm too: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c08675

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Shrug. Nothing is 'harmless', including far-uv. Going outside in the sunshine isn't harmless. The stove in your kitchen isn't harmless. Can you prove your stove isn't going to explode some day and kill you? No, but you don't expect it to, in part because it complies with consensus product safety standards--germicidal UV products have their own standard, UL8802.

Far-uv is relatively new tech so it's reasonable to be wary, but I'm persuaded on the merits of evidence. Viruses definitely aren't harmless, and I'd rather not be catching random bugs on the regular if I can avoid it, or worry about my grandma catching flu in the hospital. Everyone has to make reasonable tradeoffs about risks and benefits.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
I'm not sure what you mean by clinical unit--the ushio care222 is the longest lasting KrCl emitter I'm aware of, but as all bulbs age, they tend to degrade just by losing output, not by spectral shifting.

Basically everyone in far-UVC is a teeny tiny group selling lamps on basic websites, even those who source care222 emitters from USHIO. It's not a big industry!

We don't source our KrCl bulbs from Shenzen, but not for this reason. Yes, that's true about LEDs, but the physics of LEDs and excimer bulbs are different. Excimer spectra don't smoothly shift the way LED spectra do. Excimer spectra have characteristic peaks based on the energy levels of the possible gas molecule species present in the filler gas. The main change over time is the gradual reduction of the 259nm Cl2* peak, which is the main peak of concern--so it fails gracefully. Another possibility is the degradation of the dichroic filter coating under thermal stress--but I've only ever observed this in diffused units, none where the filtered glass is open to the air, and that will happen even on an Ushio bulb.

Nukit is our competitor but I doubt very much that any concerning spectral shift will take place over the course of the lifetime of their lamp.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Nah--use 254nm for that. It's a standard thing, if it's contained in a duct it doesn't need to be fancypants human-safe 222nm.

Ducting it kills most of the effectiveness though--now you have to move air through your ducts in order to treat it, so you only get as much treatment as you move air--usually not very fast or else it would be loud and annoying. You can move it faster, but then you need more UV since the faster-moving air won't be exposed for as long. Honestly, upgrade to a MERV-13 filter before thinking about residential in-duct UV

In-room UV is a different story--since it exposes all room air, pathogens start getting inactivated as soon as they're exhaled. The whole room becomes a disinfection reactor.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Here's a paper: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/lsj/50/7/50_394/_pdf

This is a study of the Ushio Care222 unit, but its underlying physics is the same as any other KrCl excimer lamp, so its pretty implausible for other KrCl lamps to exhibit spectral drift when this one doesn't.

The spectrum does change a bit over time--it actually gets less dangerous. But it's a very slight difference.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Two studies that I'm aware of, but yeah, data is thin on the ground:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/7/4141 https://www.boeing.cn/cti/downloads/Boeing-Compatibility-of-...

Summarized here, along with other materials considerations: https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/u/2025/06/Blueprint-for-Far...

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
The spectra are slightly different, but Nukit is also filtered, I would expect it to be just as safe--just lower output
vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Kinda like advertising "Asbestos-Free Cereal" isn't it? If someone was marketing a product to me and they were super insistent about how super duper safe it was I would probably start getting suspicious
vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Nichia is pretty top of mind for me as a solid supplier of 265-280 nm LEDs https://led-ld.nichia.co.jp/en/product/uv_top.html. Decently high output, decent lifetime (especially the longer wavelengths). There's also CrystalIS https://www.cisuvc.com/klaran-for-disinfection/ But there's tons

This review paper is from 2019, but it includes a good summary of basically everyone who's relevant to the field https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-019-0359-9 The author used to keep an updated figure on his website but sadly it seems to be down, or have moved

SilannaUV has 230nm, 235nm and 250nm wavelengths, as far as I know the only supplier that does so https://silannauv.com/

I would be pretty careful with all of these wavelengths though. None of them are truly monochromatic far-UV. Use eye/skin protection when messing with them.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
I don't really think 222nm UVC LEDs are going to be super relevant anytime soon https://www.convergentresearch.org/resources/convergent/soli...

SHG chips might get there but they're very early days right now. And solid state capital economics are pretty unforgiving--I think we'd have to be seeing millions of lamp sales annually for SHG to really compete with KrCl lamps

Honestly, the KrCl lamps currently available are already pretty cheap even at the very small scale they're being sold. If demand picked up I think they could easily fall from $500/lamp to $100/lamp without any serious innovation.

It would be awesome if SHG could beat that and I think it has tons of advantages, but white LEDs got as cheap and efficient as fast as they did because literally everybody needs lightbulbs and they used to consume a lot of energy--general lighting is a huge industry with tons of demand. UVC simply is not.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Pretty sure that's a UVB flashlight. There's absolutely no way that anyone is selling 255nm UVC that outputs much of anything for more than a few hours for $45.

A good 280nm chip is ~$100 (https://www.ledsupply.com/leds/uv-c-280nm-nichia-ncsu334a-le...), and it gets exponentially harder to produce shorter wavelengths the further down the spectrum you go. 270nm and 265nm chips are getting there, but 255nm is mostly a research area right now.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
The uviquity 220 nm SHG chips are super cool--they're perfectly monochromatic (though maybe with some blue light leakage) and I hear from their tech lead that they expect to get up to 10% WPE. I think that approach is definitely going to be relevant much sooner than far-UVC LEDs, but they're still early days, it's going to be a long road. Krypton-chloride excimer lamps are more or less the only game in town for commercial far-UV, at least for now.

Full report here if you want more solid state far UV info: https://www.convergentresearch.org/resources/convergent/soli...

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
If it's mounted at the recommended 8.5 feet, it's ~impossible/extremely unlikely for the people in the room to get a dose that exceeds the 222nm threshold limit values set by ACGIH (see here https://uvmedico.com/research-and-publications/acgih-2021-th...). You can be standing around in the lamp's hotspot literally all day and still be fine. Check out this sim tool: https://illuminate.osluv.org/?preview_lamp=Aerolamp%20DevKit

But if you're itchy about direct exposure you can also just leave it horizontally on a high shelf or something and it'll still work pretty well. I see lots of people doing that just because they don't feel like buying mounting equipment. It'll just be more dependent on vertical air currents circulating in the room to work well so be super sure that you have a ceiling fan/HVAC/air filter running while using it. Doesn't need much air movement, just a bit, as long as the room air isn't totally still/stuffy.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
1. UVA/UVB is more efficient in terms of $/watt than 222nm KrCl*, but they're FAR less efficient in terms of germicidal dose than UVC (both 254nm and 222nm). You have to output a LOT of UVA/UVB to kill pathogens at anywhere near the same rate as UVC. I would consider UVA to basically be only "technically" germicidal--it's just not in the same league at all.

2. They're technically considered a cancer risk because UVC is considered "actinic" and so has been grandfathered into that definition, but it actually seems like commonly used UVC wavelengths generally don't penetrate deeply enough into skin to plausibly cause cancer--and you have to keep in mind the difference between 222nm and 254nm. There's definitely no evidence that 222nm is a cancer risk,** but I'm even suspicious of some of the older 254nm studies that report tumors in hairless mice exposed to 254nm. 254nm UVC is produced by low-pressure mercury lamps, and they're *almost* monochromatic, but not quite--they also produce low levels of UVB, which is a serious skin cancer risk even at very low levels (see figure 6 in https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10643389.2022.2...). My lab is currently trying to reproduce that result with a filtered/true-monochromatic 254nm lamp and we are just not seeing any tumors in those mice. Those poor bastards are being exposed to such high doses of 254nm that their skin looks super gross, cracked and bleeding, WAY higher doses than anything you'd encounter in a real-world installation--and they're still just not developing tumors. It looks like 254nm is "actinic" in that it's quite unpleasant to experience an overexposure, but it probably doesn't cause cancer, and 222nm seems to not be particularly actinic at all. I get overexposures all the time and basically never notice.

It's also definitely not true that KrCl lamps don't produce continuous illumination. That's exactly what they do!

However, it is true that a typical 222nm installation won't kill covid in 60 seconds. It only reduces it by about 40% in that time period--it'll take about 5 minutes to get to 90% reduction, and 10 minutes to get to 99% reduction. But that is WAY faster than basically any other tech that won't be blowing your hair back, including in-duct UV.

In-duct UV works well for some stuff but not really for person-to-person airborne disease transmission. If it's in the ducts, it's hard to maintain and verify, if the lamps get dusty they stop working (and ducts are super dusty), and anything that goes in the duct only works while your HVAC system is running--and your HVAC system just doesn't run very fast, or else it would be loud as hell. If you're going to put something in your ducts, it should be a MERV-13 filter. Way cheaper, way more maintainable. Then if you want extra air cleaning but don't want to use UV, get portable air filters. I vouch for the reviews at https://housefresh.com/

*although 254nm low pressure mercury lamps are also quite power efficient--about 40% WPE **to be fair, it hasn't been around long enough for long term studies to be done, so if that's your bar for evidence, you'll have to wait--but I think there's other forms of reasonable evidence that can give us information about what's likely a cancer risk and what isn't. The fact that 222nm seems to be >99% absorbed in dead skin cells, and the remaining <1% in non-dividing cells, is pretty strong evidence to me that it's unlikely to cause cancer. Certainly compared to UVB-containing sunlight!*

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
The filter is a hafnium oxide interference filter! There are some absorption-based filters being studied in academic settings (as they'd be potentially cheaper to manufacture) but none are used commercially as far as I know

Honestly there aren't that many commercially available unfiltered KrCl lamps out there. I'm only aware of one and it's stupid expensive. Every other lamp you can actually buy is filtered, although some filters are a bit worse than others (though still pretty safe). Any lamp module that uses the Ushio Care222 emitter is certainly very well filtered because Ushio integrates the filter into the module.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
>This lamp would kill those friendly microbes.

Not really. Those microbes live deep in your pores where the UV wouldn't reach. Even if the UV totally scoured the surface of your skin, it would only be a temporary disruption, which we're generally ok with. After all lots of things disrupt the skin microbiome--showering, hand sanitizer (which DOES penetrate into the pores).

But I think UV skin microbiome disruption is likely to be pretty mild compared to things like eg hand sanitizer. Generally anything that lives on a surface (compared to liquid, and especially air) requires a much higher UV dose to inactivate, because even seemingly-smooth surfaces actually have lots of microscopic nooks and crannies for pathogens to hide in. And skin isn't smooth at all--it's got tons of visible wrinkles and surface complications and complicated geometry. Bacteria are also less sensitive to far-UV than viruses. So lamps that are dose calibrated to kill airborne viruses aren't going to have much of an effect on bacteria that live on a complex surface.

There's actually some data on this although sadly it never ended up published--my lab collected microbiome data for this 66 week hairless mouse skin exposure study https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9691791/ and found basically no difference in microbiome between the exposed and unexposed mice. It didn't end up in the paper because nobody in the lab had enough bioinformatics expertise to do a nice publishable analysis and just had to take the bioinformatics centers' word on it that there weren't significant differences. Weak/hearsay-ish evidence but not nothing!

In-duct UV is a thing but it's really not ideal for preventing person-to-person disease transmission, for a number of reasons.

vbelenky··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
You can filter viruses with mechanical air filters, but based on the available data, far-UVC can do this much faster than even a high-CADR air filter. The best filter I'm aware of can deliver 200 CFM of clean air quietly or 400 CFM loudly, one high-quality far-UV lamp can deliver the equivalent of ~1000 CFM--silently. That seems like the main advantage to me--plus not taking up the floor space that a large, quiet air filter would require. Basically it's the more dakka solution. But it's recommended to use far-UV with at least one source of mechanical air mixing like an air filter anyway just to make sure its maximally effective