What is an Air Purifier?
If you do a search for air purifier on Amazon, you’ll come up with brands like Levoit and BlueAir that appear at the top of the results.
There are a few other big brand names but they all have the same thing in common.
They all use a combination of a HEPA filter, a carbon filter, and a pre-filter to clean the air.
So when you mention air purifier, what you’re talking about is a air filtering machine.
This is what the industry has said that is the best way to clean air. Who am I to argue?
But if you go down into the results of Amazon a few pages, you start to find air purifiers that use other types of technologies besides the standard HEPA and Carbon.
The Sharp Plasmacluster is one of the first ones you come across that does anything to stray from the straight and narrow.
Plasma cluster is an ionizer that releases both positive and negative ions simultaneously.
Ionizer?
A little further into the search results and you find other companies like Guardian Technologies and Air Oasis that are also doing something different.
Ultraviolet light with photo catalyst and Bipolar are terms that you see associated with these air purifiers that are at the core; Ionizers.
Interesting.
What is an Ionizer?
A simple ionizer is a machine that emits negative ions into the airstream.
The ions because of polarity, combine with the contaminants in the air.
After which they become too heavy to float and fall to the surface.
That’s the simple version.
Other versions of ionizers combine ultraviolet light and titanium to create super ions that actually kill the contaminants in the air before causing them to be too heavy to float.
Bipolar ionizers like the plasma cluster technology, release negative and positive ions at the same time.
As soon as the ions are emitted from the machine, they begin snapping together, trapping and oxidizing all the contaminants in the air in the process.
Wow..
As you can see, Modern ionizers are pretty sophisticated.