Ionic Breeze by Sharper Image opinion

I would like your opinion on this product as to how satisfied you are with it in your home. I have allergies and want to get some kind of an air cleaner for my house. Every time I have ordered some thing from an infomercial I have gotten screwed and have said never again would I order some thing off of TV. I have a Triton electro static air cleaner in my furnace, but it is a worthless piece of junk and it cost me a ton of bucks. Thanks for your help.

Reply to
Ace
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We have 3 in our house. I found them at an estate sale for $100 for all three. They certainly do remove lots of junk from the air. I clean the blades about every 7 days. It takes about 20 minutes to clean all three.

Some notes about them:

o-Because of the physics involved, they will change the 'taste' of the air around them. Some people cannot stand the 'tinny' feeling of the air.

o-They are silent until they need to be cleaned, at which point they start clicking. This is highly annoying if it happens to be in the middle of the night.

o-They are very expensive new.

Reply to
themeanies

Read a long time ago that an ionic air device outputs negative charged ions that stimulate the cells' cilia in the air passages to beat faster. That may give a feeling of "freshness." Its effect is similar to the smell of ozone.

More active cilia movements may in fact help clear inhaled debris faster from the air passages. Its not a "health" claim the manufacturers will make on account of lawsuits.

The explanation sounds about correct. But it also means that the ionic cleaner does not clean the air. There is no filter to collect the dust is there? An ionic air cleaner definitely does not remove allergens and that is your real question.

Reply to
PaPaPeng

What is wrong with the Triton, You have it powered and clean it right? If it did not work your AC coil would be clogged. Ionic breeze rated worthless at Consumer Reports. It omits ozone @

50ppb which is the EPA 8 hr limit for exposure. Although the Ozone dissipates you are adding an irritant . I bought one and returned it after talking to a doctor. Ozone is a lung irritant. There are many published medical studies on how Ozone affects health especialy in asthmatics. Ozone ozidises. What you smell with the Ionic Breeze is Ozone.

Also your Triton omits Ozone probably at least 50ppb. Think about this, The EPA regs for 8 hr exposure are 50 ppb, for good reason.

Reply to
m Ransley

In short it does exactly what the add say.

  • It is quiet * It does not cost much to run * It removes junk from the air

Now what they don't say

  • It does a very poor job of cleaning the air in a room.

No that is not wrong. It removes gunk, but it does so very slowly and only in the air very close to the device. You might get the air in an average room clean if you ran 30-40 of them, but then you would have the ozone levels up to the point you would end up in a hospital for ozone poisoning.

  • They create ozone
Reply to
Joseph Meehan

Chances are excellent that you can do far better by permanently removing all carpets from the home, thorough vacumming on a regular basis and laundering all blankets and bedding.

BB

Reply to
BinaryBillTheSailor

Yep. As an asthmatic I found this to be true. Keep it simple, but I do have a Honeywell air filter that I use mostly when I am vacuuming. Irritation at night is almost always cause by dust mites in bedding or.........

Frank

Reply to
F.H.

Don't forget to maintain proper humidity. In the winter it can get dangerously low, and cause respiritory problems, even for someone without pre-existing issues.

BB

Reply to
BinaryBillTheSailor

Just recently I saw a report of a study that found that using plug in air fresheners in the same area as an ozone source could produce toxic chemicals. They didn't mention any brands, but I immediately thought of your brand.

Bill Gill

Reply to
Bill

An article today in MSNBC- Reuters links cold weather - pollution to heart failures and Ozone a contributor. So a Sharper image Ozone producing machine cant be that good for you.

Reply to
m Ransley

screwed >and have said never again would I order

Well, I have seen these shown on TV and you said that you would not order anything off of the TV.

I made my point... Remove NoSpam to reply, Thanks

Reply to
Kahlua53

October 2003 In-depth tests: Sharper Image Ionic Breeze, Honeywell Environizer MAKING A MARKET Ads like this one have helped make Sharper Image the leading brand. It makes a number of claims (?cleans 24-7? and ?saves money,? for example). However, as our report explains, those statements are irrelevant because the main claim--?It works!? --didn?t measure up in our tests. Sharper Image ads claim that the Ionic Breeze has been ?proven effective? and that ?tests at leading university research centers show that the Ionic Breeze is effective at trapping airborne allergens, contaminants and irritants.? Ads also cite its quiet operation, implying that other cleaners are less effective because people can?t abide the noise and will shut them off.

Here is what we found.

Last year, we said that the Ionic Breeze ?proved unimpressive? and that our tests ?found almost no measurable reduction in airborne particles.?

The company complained, maintaining that our tests, based on the industry standard for measuring clean-air delivery rate (CADR), were inadequate. Sharper Image said that the Ionic Breeze technology is ?vastly different? from that of other air cleaners and would fare better in a longer test.

We re-examined our test procedures and had them reviewed by an independent expert, Morton Lippmann, professor of environmental medicine at New York University. He confirmed the validity of our methodology. We continue to stand behind our report.

This year, we ran our regular tests for the Ratings of whole-house and room air cleaners. We then ran additional long-term tests to find out whether the Sharper Image technology is, as the company says, ?so unique? that we have to ?look beyond the limiting CADR test protocol? to evaluate it fairly. We included the similar Honeywell Environizer in the extended testing.

This year?s additional testing has not changed our judgment.

We hired both Prof. Lippmann and S. Katharine Hammond, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, to evaluate the results of several studies that Sharper Image sent us to demonstrate the Ionic Breeze?s effectiveness. According to our two experts, some of those studies were irrelevant to the question of whether the Ionic Breeze was an effective air cleaner. For example, one Virginia study used the Ionic Breeze only as a particle sampler, not an air cleaner. Other studies used questionable methodology or showed merely that the Sharper Image had little air-cleaning capability.

THIS YEAR'S ADDED TESTS AND RESULTS

Long-term air cleaning. We tested the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze and the Honeywell Environizer against two high-scoring air cleaners, the Friedrich electrostatic precipitator and the Whirlpool HEPA filter.

We gauged how well each air cleaner could handle the periodic introduction of small amounts of pollutant into a sealed test chamber over a 6-hour period. One set of tests used smoke, another fine dust. A second set of tests gauged how well each cleaner worked for the next

17 hours, after the last injection of pollutant. For both sets of tests, we ran the Ionic Breeze and the Environizer on high to maximize performance; the others were on low, their quietest setting.

The better an air cleaner does in lab tests like these, the better it will perform in a household setting. But as Prof. Lippmann explained, if there is ?very little dust removal over 100 minutes,? then running an air cleaner for 24 hours ?is not going to make it an effective air cleaner when infiltration of air containing particles into a room continues.?

The results. The Ionic Breeze and the Environizer didn?t come close to the performance of the others. As the graph below shows, the Friedrich and Whirlpool have very high rates of air-cleaning. The Ionic Breeze and Environizer had very slow rates of cleaning, which did not improve over time; those two products never achieved the same low pollutant level that the Friedrich and Whirlpool attained.

Noise study. We asked 40 people in 20 households to run the Friedrich and Whirlpool in their bedrooms continuously on low speed for a week.

The results. Thirty-five of those using the Friedrich said they didn?t notice the noise, hardly noticed it, or noticed but didn?t find it bothersome. With the Whirlpool, 29 people didn?t notice the noise at all, hardly noticed it, or noticed but didn?t find it bothersome. Two said the Whirlpool?s noise was so annoying that they wanted to turn the machine off. No one said that about the Friedrich.

Given those findings, you could expect most of the air cleaners we tested to be quiet enough on low speed for most households. Based on our lab measurements and judgments, both fell within the range we call very good for noise on low speed.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The Ionic Breeze and the Environizer are quiet but ineffective. A comparable product, the Hoover SilentAir 4000, performed poorly in our standard test; we chose not to put it through any extended trials. Considering how slowly these three products worked, our advice is to avoid all three. There are much better choices.

Air-cleaning speed

The bars show the speed of reducing respirable smoke pollutants in our test chamber from 2,500 to 1,500 particles per cubic centimeter. The longer the bar, the better. The Friedrich and the Whirlpool (on low) were more than 25 times faster than the others (on high).

Reply to
cyberdock

And a new report today at MSNBC - Reuters links Ozone to heart ailments. Ionisers , Sharper Image produce Ozone at 50 ppb the legal 8 hr limit by the EPA....

Ozone is not healthy in any dose, tests prove this

Reply to
m Ransley

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