I got one UVC tube like this for myself a while ago to erase old EPROM chips. I used a empty toolbox and taped it with aluminium tape on the inside to cover the light. You really don't want to be exposed to the UVC. But it does work perfectly to erase those old EPROMs from 1970s.
I had several that I needed to erase a while back. In that case I purchased a UVC flashlight from Bangood. I'd sit it on the chip, power it on and leave it for a couple minutes. Erased, then could reprogram it. Mine were for an older car ECU that was prior to OBD.
Buy a cheap UVC toothbrush sterilizer. They are portable and already have a perfect size housing to drop the chip into and close while it runs. Got mine for 20 USD.
@@humidbeing I adapted mine from a phone sterilizer that was on sale in Lidl a fter covid. Two LEDs in a neat package. It has a timer that is too short but just powering the LEDs directly works fine.
Modern UV lamps use small beads of mercury amalgam instead of liquid mercury. This ensures that the vapour pressure is maintained, but that the spread of the mercury is controlled in the case of tube breakage.
@@kyoudaiken The technology has improved a bit (laughs up sleeve). They still take time to stabilise, but that may not matter in all applications. Even liquid mercury tubes took time to settle.
My first purchase with AliExpress was some ccfl tubes for a tv backlight. They were delivered in heavily wrapped PVC pipe. All survived. I was impressed.
let me put you mind at rest. much like lasers, and radiation, UVC is incapable of being recorded by BC's camera and emitted by your monitor. BC mentions the light in case the viewer is sat in a dark room and has eyes are accustomed to the dark.
If you look at these on AX be aware that the less expensive, green-label ones are UVB and the purple-label ones are UVC. There's also a yellow-label UVI model that measures Sun Index. Also note that this product appears to come in 220V version only and there are fewer options for 110V. Understandable as there's a much bigger population using 220/230V and not much interest in UVC in the U.S., which is probably a good thing as we're too dumb to use things like this responsibly.
Yeah, UVB is the shortest wavelength of UV that comes down to ground level. UVC is used in professional horticulture though for its benefits varying based on the plants it's used for (not only germicide effect).
Viz character Professor Piehead tests his new invention, quartz safety contact lenses (pat. pending) and with blood streaming from his eyes comments to his long suffering assistant, "Another partial success."
Pandemic still going on in China？ Where did you get that information from? No it is not, I have lived here for 20+ years, so I can say that with conviction. These UV tubes have been popular in China for over 2 decades. All kindergarten and schools have them fitted and they are used to sterilize the classrooms at night (usually have PIR sensors to ensure that they switch off if anyone enters the class room). Another product that has been popular for as long as I have been here is domestic UV serializing cupboards. They are in the kitchen and look just like ovens but are used for storing plates, cups and other tableware. When I moved into my first home here, I was initially quite excited as it looked like there was a decent sized oven fitted into the kitchen, but my dreams of Sunday lunch roasts soon evaporated when I realized what this thing actually was...
hope each class has an uvc meter to check it is off (or a person checking each class) or a manual switch which could be forgotten to switch on at the end of the day. do the restrooms also have these ?
UVC doesn't pass through regular glass, it actually gets blocked. UVC will pass through Quartz though. The amorphous vs crystalline nature affects the emission of UVC.
Even really thin piece of glass will block it, polycarbonate and PET block it too. Tested with some phosphorescent screen and various transparent objects, many (such as regular glass light bulb) would make a shadow, which was surprising.
Old mercury vapor street lights used the borosilicate glass envelope to block UVC and why they heated up so much. The actual arc tube was made of quartz, so if the outer envelope broke, which is more common than you would think, you'd have an open-air UVC lamp... yikes.
I might be slightly paranodumb here but I would have tested the glasses pointing the other way around, the sensor positioned as your eyes behind the glasses, just in case the blocking is not working both ways because of lenses effect or something.
You said that it was intact, and I noticed the mercury beads... It looked like a piece of filament, and the right filament looked like it was missing a bit in the middle XD Very nice meter! Thanks for the demo!
@@SteveHodge I zoomed in too ;) Probably just because of the light and maybe youtube compression. Besides, it worked. Wouldn't work with a broken filament I think.
That UVC meter, while not expensive, is still not a tool one would buy, if not working regularly with UVC sources. Very well packed UVC lamp - reminds me of the package of old 2.5 mm CCFL tubes, that were shipped in tight bundles, with several extra units, to account for the losses in transit (got as many as half a dozen broken, on a single, well padded, shipment). They also broke just by looking intensely at them :-)
I have a few UVC tubes inspired by your videos. Working on a circuit to turn them on for a short time after the door closes in the fridge. One of my longest subscribed channels.. Thanks 4 the info & the LOLs ☘
I bought a very similar model (a bit nicer construction) on amazon for around $25 during the pandemic. I could tell it worked due to the obvious ozone smell. Took good precautions when using it and still have it. Only used it outside to sanitize stuff during the COVID hysteria. Mercury is still rolling around and doesn't appear to have broken or leaked. Good to see I wasn't gouged much for the lamp.
Nowadays most decent AliExpress suppliers pack their products really well, and I cannot remember when we last received damaged items (even with the well-earned reputation of Australia Post!) . On the subject of the 'Rona ongoing problem, one of the few benefits has been the appearance of very reasonably - priced, adequate resolution IR thermal imagers, which are always useful for hunting down overheating components.
This is very interesting, particularly the exclusive measurement of UVC and complete absence of UVA interference, however I must disagree that the reason for the exclusion of UVA is due to the window in front of the detector. It's just a fused silica window. There are no materials which are transparent at UVC wavelengths, but opaque at UVA. I know they don't exist because I have specifically looked long and hard for them as someone in the fluorescent mineral enthusiast community! It also wouldn't be coatings on the window because the only kind that would be able to achieve this wavelength specificity would be very complicated and expensive multi-layer vacuum deposited dielectric Bragg reflectors, and we ain't gettin' that on a cheap Ali product I don't think. It's also very cool to see the calculations for irradiance on my identical lamp that I got during the height of covid were pretty much bang on and this bulb will sterilize virtually all human pathogens with a mere 5 second exposure at a few cm away. UVC is a very powerful tool! I believe I may pick up one of these meters now!
Maybe multiple photodetectors for the different bands (No-UV-C and With-UV-C) then take the difference between the two? (Basically UVC-cut UVB-pass low-pass filter over one of two sensors) Or maybe some lens arrangement with a prism (or diffaction grating thingy) to split the desired spectra up to always fall upon a certain location, like a sort of static spectrophotometer?
0:30 My favorite part is how it does that "calibration" (for the lack of a better term), including showing the "1" at the left that is very characteristic of those cheap multimeters on power on. It makes me wonder if the inside is simply a "repurposed" multimeter IC of some kind?
Hi big Clive and happy new year! Love the content as always. I always think of Aussie50 when you do vids like this. Miss his stuff in my feed… hope you’re keeping well
And for the second reason I tend to call it Polystygraine, LOL (Graine being the French for Seed or Grain or in this case the little polystyrene beads that fly everywhere).
Thanks for performing that quick little test with your glasses. Very informative! Now I won't have to wear "safety squints" when I have a UVC lamp running on the bench, because I usually have glasses on when I'm there anyway (for bifocal vision and [mechanical] safety). Looking forward to more!
Wish I could have found something like that during the pandemic. I ended up with a couple of the CFL style bulbs that IIRC were 20 and 25W that made me nervous to use. The amount of ozone the one produced was insane.
I used to calibrate UV meters, used to get some mad machines sent in Best one was a box that had a white light sensor pointing at a flourescent strip - it would guess how much UV light there was based on how much white light came off the strip
Imagine pulling out your bottom eyelid, filling it up with sand, and then slapping it back against the eyeball, in the style of ren and stimpy. The worst part is you don't even know until the next morning, when you are rendered nearly completely blind and need to feel your way across the house to make it to the restroom. Hard to imagine a day starting out worse.
Yeah I went surfing all day as a kid once and basically got sunburnt eyeballs. Same thing as welders flash or this kinda light. Felt like I had sand in my eyes all night. Not good.
@TheZombieSaints It's from the sun reflecting off the water, making the UV exposure twice as bad. It's also an issue in the arctic, which is why sunglasses are a requirement. Imagine waking up on your arctic exhibition effectively blind...
I used to work at a printers and had to make printing plates and to burn the image onto the plate required UV light. The curtain around the machine was crap and loads of UV light escaped. And that's how I used to get that feeling every day and made me want to sandpaper my eyes until I decided to wear sunglasses whilst the machine was on and it ended.
Nice find Clive! Would this be good enough to test tube degradation you think? My always-on germ tubes rarely burn-out, , so i've always had to trust the old "UVC will drop to zero after a year so change it every 6 months " directive - annoyingly without ever knowing the true degradation picture ..
I'm sure I had a similar uv tube light which was wrapped in cardboard inside, which failed, shorting the light, I had to get a new power supply for a slightly stronger tube which it happily ran the tube at, though got fairly warm in use, lived longer than the original
really liked this video! but then again i love anythinng u can use to test things! When u have questions it gives answers! and always be safe for the exploration and experiments! : o )
That Antai tester seems a neat device. Unfortunately, they don't seem to make a EU continental version. I wonder if it would compromise safety even further if one changed the mains plug for a reversible one (no telling which pin is live) and used an adaptor for the output?
Hi Clive. Whats the reading min max @ the meter? We do some work sometimes on commercial and industrial UV-C systems. Typical from 300-5000W in a ventilation box or in kitchen ventilation.
Clive, do you notice a difference scent of the ozone when it's made by that lamp (and other UVc sources) and by other types of Ozone generators such as the high voltage plate type? Growing up, my P's medical practice had a very large UVc light and the ozone smelled like it does with the high voltage plate O3 generators. The AliExpress Ozone lights (quartz tube w/ Hg) have a different scent. I thought it was the plastic or the electronics in the Ali specials but it's not. It's the actual ozone; and it has a very different olfactory "note" than the high voltage ozone generators and the old lamp from the medical office.
Some of the UVC tubes block the 184nm wavelength so they don't generate ozone, but instead you can smell the organic destruction in the air. Like burnt hair.
Am I correct in assuming a welding arc flash contains a degree of UVC? Or is it something else? I ask because I have suffered from extremely sore eyes after nearby welding activities were not properly shielded.
New sub and loving the wealth of info 🙂. Just finished your Dubai Light vid and it made me think of a vid I’d absolutely love to see you break down and show what part is failing and and so on. So here in South Carolina, we have thousands upon thousands of these LED street lamps that go from their normal cool white temp color when new and operating correctly, to a SUPER annoying black light purple color after only 2-3 months use. This started happening in 2019-2020 and were supposed to be replaced, sadly very few have been.
I think the purple looks really nice. It's not a failure mode of the ones in my city, they went for a warm white and the only failures I see are completely out with a very few that have gone into a flash mode.
The older units with real capacitors actually connected had terrible power factor. Often worse than the small number of continuous inductive loads in modern homes.
How about calibrating or compairing the AlliExpress uv meter against the borrowed Naomi Wu spectrometer. Or you might be able to get standard uv sources to check you meters. Thanks for the video
I bought one of those UV-C lights recently, too. I'm not as forgiving as you are about the exposed live electrical contacts... At the very least, they should ship them with the cap covering one or the other, which the end user is required to remove if they want to feed power from the opposite side. What they really should do is make one of the two a C7 (female) connector which would have been safe, rather than both being C8 (male). That would have allowed daisy-chaining the lights, without any risk of electrocution, but instead they save a couple cents, and a few people get killed.
The detector is the whole magic. Ultraviolet (UVC) detectors use wide-bandgap semiconductors with bandgaps of around 4.7-4.9 eV. These semiconductors are less sensitive to visible light, so they don't need additional filters.🤪
what do you search for to find those tubes? I've tried in the past and not been able to figure out the correctly munged english terms to get them to show up. I wanted one to make a UV EPROM eraser - I think I ended up getting one of the folded CFL style tubes you showed before, and then I ended up just getting a real EPROM eraser for a decent price anywa
Try keywords like UVC and germicidal. After you've browsed a few of the listings AliExpress may pop them into the "bundle deals" menu at the top of the home page.
Yeah, I miss the old days of ordering stuff from Choina when postage was subsidised. You could order a rock for 50c, pay 50c in postage, and they'd wrap the rock in a bedsheet's worth of bubblewrap, then properly mummify it with about a quarter-roll of clear packing tape, then stuff it into a thin poly envelope and send it halfway around the globe for 1buk total.
Its great that I can protect my eyes from my uv laser with just plain old glasses. The great give away was it etches glass so showing that it gets blocked.
It would be interesting to see a demonstration of stuff that can block UVC... and what can't. Like, show if basic glass lets it through or if water can block it. I guess it's more of a question of what doesn't block UVC.
*_OMG! OMG! OMG!_* You exposed yourself to several seconds of UV-C *AND* ozone!! Oh well, It has been a pleasure letting you massage random spurts of warm, juicy knowledge into my thinking brain over the years. Rest in peace dear mister Big Clive sir, it was fun while it lasted!
UV is supposed to make green potato looper caterpillars glow. I just bought two different types of UV lights to show them up at night. So I could save my garden form the little critters. The caterpillars didn't glow at all. a yellow filter on a white LED sort of worked.. a bit.. My lights are in the 300 to 400 nanometer range.. Any ideas? I mean for visual isolation.
Are the glasses anti-UV coated? Glass or plastic? Richard Feynman decided to look directly at the Trinity Test (lol) through a car window, claiming the window would block out the ultra-violet. I've always wondered how true that would be, and if it would block out both long and short wavelengths.
Ordinary glass blocks UVC (the harmful kind of UV) no special coating needed roughly anything under 310nm is blocked by ordinary glass, that's why the tube on these is made up of quartz which allows UVC to pass through.
Other than a piece of the Sun, if something makes light, Clive has it and the tool to test it. Nice look at the tester Clive👍, expensive especially if from China..And another UVC lamp. I have two dental brush cleaners with UVC bulbs in them, they are the normal U shape inside a polished chrome interior chamber that hold the tooth brushes. Instructions expressly say to close the unit before turning on and not look at the light, must be the real deal.
I got one UVC tube like this for myself a while ago to erase old EPROM chips. I used a empty toolbox and taped it with aluminium tape on the inside to cover the light. You really don't want to be exposed to the UVC. But it does work perfectly to erase those old EPROMs from 1970s.
I had several that I needed to erase a while back. In that case I purchased a UVC flashlight from Bangood. I'd sit it on the chip, power it on and leave it for a couple minutes. Erased, then could reprogram it. Mine were for an older car ECU that was prior to OBD.
Can confirm. I needed to erase some too and a dollar tree covid wand did the trick in minutes.
Buy a cheap UVC toothbrush sterilizer. They are portable and already have a perfect size housing to drop the chip into and close while it runs. Got mine for 20 USD.
@@iamdarkyoshi "Dollar Tree COVID wand? " I'll have to check that out!
@@humidbeing I adapted mine from a phone sterilizer that was on sale in Lidl a fter covid. Two LEDs in a neat package. It has a timer that is too short but just powering the LEDs directly works fine.
Modern UV lamps use small beads of mercury amalgam instead of liquid mercury. This ensures that the vapour pressure is maintained, but that the spread of the mercury is controlled in the case of tube breakage.
if it in form amalgam did it keep it that form when the bead in vapor state when lamp in operation?.
@@wahyutriwibowo1803 The mercury partially vaporises for operation, and then recombines when the tube cools down again.
If the tube breaks when the tube in running, it wouldn't make much difference. If a cold tube break, the Hg would be sequestered.
I remember MEGAMAN CFLs that would take 15 minutes to even five out usable brightness, these used Amalgam.
@@kyoudaiken The technology has improved a bit (laughs up sleeve).
They still take time to stabilise, but that may not matter in all applications.
Even liquid mercury tubes took time to settle.
My first purchase with AliExpress was some ccfl tubes for a tv backlight. They were delivered in heavily wrapped PVC pipe. All survived. I was impressed.
"Watch your eyes, the light is coming back. Please never mind the germicidal lamp"
I had the same thought!
4:13
let me put you mind at rest. much like lasers, and radiation, UVC is incapable of being recorded by BC's camera and emitted by your monitor. BC mentions the light in case the viewer is sat in a dark room and has eyes are accustomed to the dark.
Those tubes are used in pond filters too, fits inside a quartz tube and the water flows around it.
I always chuckle every time Clive says chube
Shh... If you mention it he'll stop saying it. RIP millamps and greaze.
chyoob
This is standard British pronunciation of "tu" as "choo". Tune = choon, not "toon" etc.
Although I don't know if grease = greaze is a Scottish thing.
Pronounced as Greece, the country.
If you look at these on AX be aware that the less expensive, green-label ones are UVB and the purple-label ones are UVC. There's also a yellow-label UVI model that measures Sun Index.
Also note that this product appears to come in 220V version only and there are fewer options for 110V. Understandable as there's a much bigger population using 220/230V and not much interest in UVC in the U.S., which is probably a good thing as we're too dumb to use things like this responsibly.
Eh, the place I'd consider using it is inside HVAC duct, and there's readily available 240V right there. I know it's there because I wired it myself.
the tubes are also used for sterilizing drinking water. And the generated ozone can be bubbled into the water for even more sterilization.
The only problem with something being "Idiot Proof" is. Someone will eventually invent a better idiot.
Cool! Now I'm feeling disinfected, haha.
Could you smell the Ozone as well ? 😉🖖
It'd be interesting to know the reading from direct sunlight.
Not going to happen on the Isle of Man
It should be zero. UVC does not make it through the Earth's atmosphere.
Yeah, UVB is the shortest wavelength of UV that comes down to ground level. UVC is used in professional horticulture though for its benefits varying based on the plants it's used for (not only germicide effect).
Maybe in Antarctica thru the ozone hole .
or 200km above the earth's surface 🙃
Any value recorded by this meter needs to be μW/cm² @ 38cm. The distance is the industry standard for comparing flux.
Just watching this video made my eyes itch :)
Yep. Been quite a while since I had welding flash - but it's something that you don't forget easily!
It is nice to KNOW the UV-blocking glasses work.
Honestly, considering how rare uvc transparent materials are, it would be more surprising if they didn't work
Viz character Professor Piehead tests his new invention, quartz safety contact lenses (pat. pending) and with blood streaming from his eyes comments to his long suffering assistant, "Another partial success."
I think eyeglasses block xray and heat vision as well. Explains why Clark Kent always removes his glasses before saving the world.
Most or all prescription lenses are plastic nowadays. Does this apply to them?
@@alanpatterson2384 Polycarbonate does also block, or at least strongly attenuate, UV-C
Pandemic still going on in China？ Where did you get that information from? No it is not, I have lived here for 20+ years, so I can say that with conviction.
These UV tubes have been popular in China for over 2 decades. All kindergarten and schools have them fitted and they are used to sterilize the classrooms at night (usually have PIR sensors to ensure that they switch off if anyone enters the class room). Another product that has been popular for as long as I have been here is domestic UV serializing cupboards. They are in the kitchen and look just like ovens but are used for storing plates, cups and other tableware. When I moved into my first home here, I was initially quite excited as it looked like there was a decent sized oven fitted into the kitchen, but my dreams of Sunday lunch roasts soon evaporated when I realized what this thing actually was...
hope each class has an uvc meter to check it is off (or a person checking each class) or a manual switch which could be forgotten to switch on at the end of the day.
do the restrooms also have these ?
How would you know? Your government tells you nothing and you're supposed to be shut off from the outside world.
Re-upload?
UVC doesn't pass through regular glass, it actually gets blocked. UVC will pass through Quartz though. The amorphous vs crystalline nature affects the emission of UVC.
Even really thin piece of glass will block it, polycarbonate and PET block it too. Tested with some phosphorescent screen and various transparent objects, many (such as regular glass light bulb) would make a shadow, which was surprising.
Old mercury vapor street lights used the borosilicate glass envelope to block UVC and why they heated up so much. The actual arc tube was made of quartz, so if the outer envelope broke, which is more common than you would think, you'd have an open-air UVC lamp... yikes.
@ I do, a 250W one 😸 (and yikes indeed, it's evil)
I might be slightly paranodumb here but I would have tested the glasses pointing the other way around, the sensor positioned as your eyes behind the glasses, just in case the blocking is not working both ways because of lenses effect or something.
You said that it was intact, and I noticed the mercury beads... It looked like a piece of filament, and the right filament looked like it was missing a bit in the middle XD
Very nice meter! Thanks for the demo!
Trick of the light, I think. I zoomed in a screenshot and the right filament is definitely intact.
@@SteveHodge I zoomed in too ;) Probably just because of the light and maybe youtube compression. Besides, it worked. Wouldn't work with a broken filament I think.
Even these cheap el.ballast need both filaments intact to light up the tube._
That UVC meter, while not expensive, is still not a tool one would buy, if not working regularly with UVC sources.
Very well packed UVC lamp - reminds me of the package of old 2.5 mm CCFL tubes, that were shipped in tight bundles, with several extra units, to account for the losses in transit (got as many as half a dozen broken, on a single, well padded, shipment). They also broke just by looking intensely at them :-)
I have a few UVC tubes inspired by your videos.
Working on a circuit to turn them on for a short time after the door closes in the fridge.
One of my longest subscribed channels.. Thanks 4 the info & the LOLs ☘
What is your UA-cam chsnnel please
I bought a very similar model (a bit nicer construction) on amazon for around $25 during the pandemic. I could tell it worked due to the obvious ozone smell. Took good precautions when using it and still have it. Only used it outside to sanitize stuff during the COVID hysteria. Mercury is still rolling around and doesn't appear to have broken or leaked. Good to see I wasn't gouged much for the lamp.
Nowadays most decent AliExpress suppliers pack their products really well, and I cannot remember when we last received damaged items (even with the well-earned reputation of Australia Post!) . On the subject of the 'Rona ongoing problem, one of the few benefits has been the appearance of very reasonably - priced, adequate resolution IR thermal imagers, which are always useful for hunting down overheating components.
And most non-decent AliExpress suppliers don't. Only yesterday I received an A4 gel sheet in a very flimsy thin plastic bag. Totally crumpled.
As always an excellent product review. Your the best.
This is very interesting, particularly the exclusive measurement of UVC and complete absence of UVA interference, however I must disagree that the reason for the exclusion of UVA is due to the window in front of the detector. It's just a fused silica window. There are no materials which are transparent at UVC wavelengths, but opaque at UVA. I know they don't exist because I have specifically looked long and hard for them as someone in the fluorescent mineral enthusiast community! It also wouldn't be coatings on the window because the only kind that would be able to achieve this wavelength specificity would be very complicated and expensive multi-layer vacuum deposited dielectric Bragg reflectors, and we ain't gettin' that on a cheap Ali product I don't think. It's also very cool to see the calculations for irradiance on my identical lamp that I got during the height of covid were pretty much bang on and this bulb will sterilize virtually all human pathogens with a mere 5 second exposure at a few cm away. UVC is a very powerful tool! I believe I may pick up one of these meters now!
Maybe multiple photodetectors for the different bands (No-UV-C and With-UV-C) then take the difference between the two? (Basically UVC-cut UVB-pass low-pass filter over one of two sensors)
Or maybe some lens arrangement with a prism (or diffaction grating thingy) to split the desired spectra up to always fall upon a certain location, like a sort of static spectrophotometer?
I was safe during this video. I put in my safety glasses to block the UVCs and possible 5G rays! I could smell the Ozone too! 😅🤣😂🤣😅
I use an old microwave oven fashioned into a helmet! 🤣
@@AdamSWL Shoulder pads and easy open front door are mandatory. The new inverter type are lighter and more comfortable.
@TerryLawrence001
Most definitely!
UV/RF protection all in one and more sturdy than a tin foil hat! 😂
0:30 My favorite part is how it does that "calibration" (for the lack of a better term), including showing the "1" at the left that is very characteristic of those cheap multimeters on power on.
It makes me wonder if the inside is simply a "repurposed" multimeter IC of some kind?
I'd guess it is a standard meter chip.
2:29 "It's not idiot-proof, but that's OK, we're not idiots."
✌😎 I LOVE THAT LINE
Speak for yourself!
They are always working on better idiots.
"Not idiot proof" my new favorite phrase ❤
Hi big Clive and happy new year! Love the content as always. I always think of Aussie50 when you do vids like this. Miss his stuff in my feed… hope you’re keeping well
Polystyrene…protects anything during shipping with the added bonus of keeping everywhere looking like Christmas 👍
And for the second reason I tend to call it Polystygraine, LOL
(Graine being the French for Seed or Grain or in this case the little polystyrene beads that fly everywhere).
I once worked in an expanded polystyrene factory, the damn stuff got everywhere and the static electricity was terrible!
Hey Clive.. do you know anything about checking the calibration of that wee UVC meter.?
I'd guess the calibration may be based on a standard mercury tube at a known distance.
@ Oooh .. Yes. That sounds spot on. Will save some pennies and buy a new toy if I can calibrate it myself. Thanks, C. See you in the next video. ☘
"Is this live?"
Proceeds to touch metal...
Lucky that my phone does not have a full spectrum screen. Thanks Clive.
Thanks for performing that quick little test with your glasses. Very informative! Now I won't have to wear "safety squints" when I have a UVC lamp running on the bench, because I usually have glasses on when I'm there anyway (for bifocal vision and [mechanical] safety). Looking forward to more!
Just keep in mind that it can sneak in the sides of lenses, and long skin exposure can cause irritation too.
Wish I could have found something like that during the pandemic. I ended up with a couple of the CFL style bulbs that IIRC were 20 and 25W that made me nervous to use. The amount of ozone the one produced was insane.
That UVC fixture is a universal fixture they make for all cheap lighting devices.
quite an exciting light source
How long will it be before you can no longer resist the temptation to take this new tool apart?
It will happen. But I'm expecting a very basic circuit. A meter chip and maybe an op-amp.
What, no schematic? No reverse engineering? I’m at a loss for words.
Oh nice, excellent addition to your toolkit.
I used to calibrate UV meters, used to get some mad machines sent in
Best one was a box that had a white light sensor pointing at a flourescent strip - it would guess how much UV light there was based on how much white light came off the strip
Very interesting companion to a lux meter in a "greenhouse"... nice bulb too...
I've had that uvc experience. Like doing a face plant on the beach and keeping your eyes open. 🤣🤣🤣
Imagine pulling out your bottom eyelid, filling it up with sand, and then slapping it back against the eyeball, in the style of ren and stimpy. The worst part is you don't even know until the next morning, when you are rendered nearly completely blind and need to feel your way across the house to make it to the restroom. Hard to imagine a day starting out worse.
Yeah I went surfing all day as a kid once and basically got sunburnt eyeballs. Same thing as welders flash or this kinda light. Felt like I had sand in my eyes all night. Not good.
When the Sandman puts up his sandblaster and scratching your eyes.
@TheZombieSaints It's from the sun reflecting off the water, making the UV exposure twice as bad. It's also an issue in the arctic, which is why sunglasses are a requirement.
Imagine waking up on your arctic exhibition effectively blind...
I used to work at a printers and had to make printing plates and to burn the image onto the plate required UV light. The curtain around the machine was crap and loads of UV light escaped. And that's how I used to get that feeling every day and made me want to sandpaper my eyes until I decided to wear sunglasses whilst the machine was on and it ended.
"We're not idiots."
Speak for yourself. I have dedicated my life to rampant acts of idiocy.
My thoughts exactly. Electroboom could use me as a warning for others! 🙂
Yeah right ! I'm not gonna let him put me down either.
"We're not idiots" is a bold assertion. Maybe _you're_ not, but at least some of the rest of us...
If you watch technical videos that generally means you do not fall into the idiot category.
Interesting to see what it reads on a sunny day.
Yes, feeds my addiction to UV tubes.
I recently ordered two beutiful vintage incandescent light bulbs and they arrived in this exact custom styrofoam packaging. Both survived.
Looks like a Ave knife. Great videos. I love them.Keep em up ehh😁
It's a Giaco maker knife.
Nice find Clive!
Would this be good enough to test tube degradation you think?
My always-on germ tubes rarely burn-out, , so i've always had to trust the old "UVC will drop to zero after a year so change it every 6 months " directive - annoyingly without ever knowing the true degradation picture ..
It seems specifically designed for that purpose. They advise testing and logging the output when the tube is new as a reference.
Just got this notification, thanks for the great videos as always clive
I'm sure I had a similar uv tube light which was wrapped in cardboard inside, which failed, shorting the light, I had to get a new power supply for a slightly stronger tube which it happily ran the tube at, though got fairly warm in use, lived longer than the original
really liked this video! but then again i love anythinng u can use to test things! When u have questions it gives answers! and always be safe for the exploration and experiments! : o )
I've been extra busy lately, but I'll catch up soon. Thank you, and keep working.
curious what it would show in direct sunlight! would be a useful comparison for its readings of other sources.
That would require sunshine to test. On a typical overcast day here it showed nothing.
That Antai tester seems a neat device. Unfortunately, they don't seem to make a EU continental version. I wonder if it would compromise safety even further if one changed the mains plug for a reversible one (no telling which pin is live) and used an adaptor for the output?
This one already arrived with live and neutral reversed.
That UVC meter sounds like it has a really nice button click.
Arc welding rays are something you would wish on anyone.
Don't ask me how I know that.
Cheers big guy, brilliant programme as usual 😊.
Would not wish on anyone.
"Do not gaze upon the turquoise forbidden light"
Cool. Take it outside on different weather and season days please!
Hi Clive. Whats the reading min max @ the meter? We do some work sometimes on commercial and industrial UV-C systems. Typical from 300-5000W in a ventilation box or in kitchen ventilation.
It goes from 0 to 1999uW per square centimeter.
Big Guy, looking for the video where you change multimeter's leads for nice thick silicone?
It might be this one:-
ua-cam.com/video/McXkzYsules/v-deo.html
Clive, do you notice a difference scent of the ozone when it's made by that lamp (and other UVc sources) and by other types of Ozone generators such as the high voltage plate type? Growing up, my P's medical practice had a very large UVc light and the ozone smelled like it does with the high voltage plate O3 generators. The AliExpress Ozone lights (quartz tube w/ Hg) have a different scent. I thought it was the plastic or the electronics in the Ali specials but it's not. It's the actual ozone; and it has a very different olfactory "note" than the high voltage ozone generators and the old lamp from the medical office.
Some of the UVC tubes block the 184nm wavelength so they don't generate ozone, but instead you can smell the organic destruction in the air. Like burnt hair.
As always funny and interesting video. I love your videos. Thx for all the knowledge.
Am I correct in assuming a welding arc flash contains a degree of UVC? Or is it something else? I ask because I have suffered from extremely sore eyes after nearby welding activities were not properly shielded.
It does contain all the wavelengths of UV including UVC.
New sub and loving the wealth of info 🙂. Just finished your Dubai Light vid and it made me think of a vid I’d absolutely love to see you break down and show what part is failing and and so on. So here in South Carolina, we have thousands upon thousands of these LED street lamps that go from their normal cool white temp color when new and operating correctly, to a SUPER annoying black light purple color after only 2-3 months use. This started happening in 2019-2020 and were supposed to be replaced, sadly very few have been.
I think the purple looks really nice.
It's not a failure mode of the ones in my city, they went for a warm white and the only failures I see are completely out with a very few that have gone into a flash mode.
That is caused by the phosphor layer detaching from the violet LED chips that are used to stimulate the phosphor.
Can you link to your meter?
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305881106496 UK listing on eBay.
I'd be interested to know if the UVC sensor has any markings. I wonder if it is available separately.
I looked into that and the silicon carbide sensor was quite expensive on its own.
DON'T LOOK AT THE LIGHT ! I can't help it, it's SO0oo.. beautiful....
Have you ever use your PF meter to check power safer boxes?
The older units with real capacitors actually connected had terrible power factor. Often worse than the small number of continuous inductive loads in modern homes.
How about calibrating or compairing the AlliExpress uv meter against the borrowed Naomi Wu spectrometer.
Or you might be able to get standard uv sources to check you meters.
Thanks for the video
I had to send that unit back to Naomi after making the excimer video.
Is UVC the component that results in arc eye?
Yes.
I bought one of those UV-C lights recently, too. I'm not as forgiving as you are about the exposed live electrical contacts... At the very least, they should ship them with the cap covering one or the other, which the end user is required to remove if they want to feed power from the opposite side. What they really should do is make one of the two a C7 (female) connector which would have been safe, rather than both being C8 (male). That would have allowed daisy-chaining the lights, without any risk of electrocution, but instead they save a couple cents, and a few people get killed.
No tear down? What makes it chooch?
Nice investment , the power button is very "cliky" :D
Please, can you share the UVC lamp link?
vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005006788305498.html Noting that this listing is for a 220V version.
The detector is the whole magic. Ultraviolet (UVC) detectors use wide-bandgap semiconductors with bandgaps of around 4.7-4.9 eV. These semiconductors are less sensitive to visible light, so they don't need additional filters.🤪
Just had a decorative glass bulb from Aliexpress packed similarly...got compressed in shipping and of course broken.
what do you search for to find those tubes? I've tried in the past and not been able to figure out the correctly munged english terms to get them to show up. I wanted one to make a UV EPROM eraser - I think I ended up getting one of the folded CFL style tubes you showed before, and then I ended up just getting a real EPROM eraser for a decent price anywa
Try keywords like UVC and germicidal. After you've browsed a few of the listings AliExpress may pop them into the "bundle deals" menu at the top of the home page.
I am very interested in your UV content. Please make more.
What are you measuring? mW?
microWatts per square centimeter.
No teardown (with schematic)?
Yeah, I miss the old days of ordering stuff from Choina when postage was subsidised. You could order a rock for 50c, pay 50c in postage, and they'd wrap the rock in a bedsheet's worth of bubblewrap, then properly mummify it with about a quarter-roll of clear packing tape, then stuff it into a thin poly envelope and send it halfway around the globe for 1buk total.
Would true UVC LEDs work as photo voltaic detectors for a DIY detector?
Possibly. I should test that.
For a point of reference; what would that meter read outside in full sun?
I've still to test that. Sunshine is rare at the moment.
why does it say "uW/cm²"? what is uW?
Did they mean microwatts? If so then why is there a "u" and not the greek letter "my" (μ)?
Like, no way they fucked up basic notation, right...?
Happy New Year Clive 🎉
Mig welding used to give me excellent sunburn. Is that a, b or c?
Welding arc emits all of them, uv-a b and c, but it's uvb and uvc that give sunburn, uvc more than uvb
It's all of them.
Question Clive: What glasses are they?
Standard generic reading glasses with plastic lenses.
“It’s not idiot-proof.” Look at it as a Darwin Award test.
Its great that I can protect my eyes from my uv laser with just plain old glasses. The great give away was it etches glass so showing that it gets blocked.
It would be interesting to see a demonstration of stuff that can block UVC... and what can't. Like, show if basic glass lets it through or if water can block it.
I guess it's more of a question of what doesn't block UVC.
Ultra high purity glass, air and water are some of the very few things that pass UVC.
Thank you BC 👌👏👏
Glad I had my astigmatism glasses on watching this video. RIP to people who went without. :D
*_OMG! OMG! OMG!_*
You exposed yourself to several seconds of UV-C *AND* ozone!!
Oh well, It has been a pleasure letting you massage random spurts of warm, juicy knowledge into my thinking brain over the years.
Rest in peace dear mister Big Clive sir, it was fun while it lasted!
UV is supposed to make green potato looper caterpillars glow. I just bought two different types of UV lights to show them up at night. So I could save my garden form the little critters. The caterpillars didn't glow at all. a yellow filter on a white LED sort of worked.. a bit.. My lights are in the 300 to 400 nanometer range.. Any ideas? I mean for visual isolation.
It might be UVA for the caterpillars.
Nice product! good to know ... this us actually quite useful
Are the glasses anti-UV coated? Glass or plastic? Richard Feynman decided to look directly at the Trinity Test (lol) through a car window, claiming the window would block out the ultra-violet. I've always wondered how true that would be, and if it would block out both long and short wavelengths.
Ordinary glass blocks UVC (the harmful kind of UV) no special coating needed roughly anything under 310nm is blocked by ordinary glass, that's why the tube on these is made up of quartz which allows UVC to pass through.
Many plastics and ordinary glass will block UVC.
Other than a piece of the Sun, if something makes light, Clive has it and the tool to test it. Nice look at the tester Clive👍, expensive especially if from China..And another UVC lamp. I have two dental brush cleaners with UVC bulbs in them, they are the normal U shape inside a polished chrome interior chamber that hold the tooth brushes. Instructions expressly say to close the unit before turning on and not look at the light, must be the real deal.
Does UVC age plastic and make it brittle?
I think it's more the accompanying ozone, but I'm just making a wag.
Yes, uv from the sun which is only uva and b does that, so uvc will definitely do it too
It can cause surface bleaching.