The UV light in my water filtration system is a 6" long gas vapor bulb of some kind, replacements are $38 US. It's contained in a polished stainless steel tube which allows the water to pass over it. Glad they don't go bad very often, kinda expensive to replace. Nice one Clive.
"Some kind" = Mercury. Those systems where intended for aquariums, where you don't care about poisoning the fish with mercury. But some clever mind decided that it could be used on drinking water for illiterate humans.
Mine has an indicator led that goes red when it goes bad. However my water was so dirty, I still had to take it apart yearly and clean the bulb. One year I did a poor job of reassembly resulting in a slight leak that eventually shorted it.
When I used to work with them the instructions stated they had a finite effective life and they had an hour counter. From memory they had to be replaced annually (and usually hadn't been).
One thing I've learned recently about LEDs, is that you can put a very low current through it (1uA or so) and measure the voltage drop. If it's (for example) 2.1V, calculate the wavelength of a photon with 2.1eV of energy, and that will be the wavelength of light the LED produces.
The best way to see if it's destructive uv is to draw some colours onto some paper, cover half over and expose it to the light over a few hours, see if anything changes, and of course your sniff test, but they've all got their "special" numbers to try and advertise with, I imagine it's fairly accurate, or, as close as you can get for the price
Turmeric is sensitive to UV light and will lose it's yellow colour when subject to sunlight. Which is why it's not been used as a pigment. So that could be something of a test too potentially
I would just point it at something living and check if it no longer lives. Eg. at a leaf (half covered like you suggested with the paper). If the goal of UVC is to sanitize, then the uncovered side of the leaf should get annihilated. At least in theory, not sure if in practice.
@@hubertnnn worth pointing out a leaf has quite a bit more protective hardware than a microbe haha that would be a conclusive positive test, but not a conclusive negative test. Best thing to do is actually use it to treat some pond water and look at the samples under a microscope to see if it actually killed stuff.
Yeah, I remember reading about Nichia, the Korean company, finally figuring it out (I think it was in 1995) and a couple of years later, i was able to order some from Cree. They were so dim lol Someone did a great video about the inventor at Nichia and his perseverance in the face of setbacks, but I can't remember who made it right now. (Edit: its Veritasium, "why it was almost impossible to make a blue led" or something like that)
Judging from the size and power of the UVC emitter, its not really going to sterilize any volume of moving water. In fact not any volume of water at all, unless left for hours and hours and hours. Probably suitable for sterilizing the drinking trough in a hamster cage.
I think the same, I can't imagine a real use of that with this amount of power. This remember me when in COVID time all people want an "air purifier" based in fake UV-C LED lights...
@@MadScientist267 That happened to me also. It is RUclips's auto moderation that deleted our comment, when we rightly are very harsh against anything that simply doesn't work.
There's always the banana burn test, seeing if the little LED can leave the banana skin discoloured from damage as you've demonstrated before with the big CFL-type one... :P
I have a compact fluorescent uvc bulb I got back in covid daze. It's clear, and is intended to sterilize a room. It came with a control base and a remote to turn it on/off and set it for on 30 minutes or on 60 minutes. I put it on the breakfast bar between our kitchen and living room. I know it's legit because if I ever need to go into the kitchen at night, I turn it off manually and get whatever beer I need, and the air has a tad of ozone pungency. I also "tans" any green bananas I also have on the counter. I think this bulb is suppose to not be the strong ozone emitter, but it is pretty light. The mercury vapor UVc bulbs come in two flavors, one that is suppose to release ozone, due to its exceptionally clear glass(ultra low iron I think) and another that they dope the glass with some mineral the selectively filters out the very hard UVc that makes most of the ozone. I think the ozone ones are for sterilizing water and are ment to be immersed like in an ozone generator or filter tube, like for aquariums or water processing.
For years I wanted to put one of these at the bottom of a 55 gallon plastic drum full of water. I figure that with the small amount of heat the LED emits, it will create convection currents in the water so that it will all be near the LED in time. Maybe as a survival source of clean germ-free water.
You could perhaps fit an inline uv water filter from off a reverse osmosis system. I’ve got a 6 stage reverse osmosis unit under my kitchen sink to take all the fluoride and chemical nasties out of our drinking water, and it has a uv filter as the last stage to destroy any biologicals…I’m sure you could potentially adapt it. I would also recommend fitting such a RO filter system anyway because the water government claims is drinkable/potable is most definitely not. That’s not just ‘conspiracy’ because it’s been overwhelmingly scientifically proven that what they’re adding is nothing short of slow acting poison! God bless 🙂👍🏻💕
@@trappedinroom1014 Water itself is a slow acting poison. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies! Oxygen at high concentrations will kill you much faster. If you take just 1.5 mg of vitamin D every day you'll not be able to get rid of calcium and it'll build to toxic levels. In all instances, dose makes the poison. Many things are beneficial rather than harmful under that dose and the amount of fluoride in drinking water has dramatic evidence of being beneficial and no evidence of being harmful. The crap on internet blogs about fluoride is ridiculous and tooth decay will actually hurt you via cardiac problems and just physical pain.
I find these UVC videos fascinating, ever since the covid era when I wanted to get some UVC lights to steralise face shields I was 3D printing for different people in my area that needed then to work during lockdown. (I wanted to make sure that I didn't spread anything and make things worse) In the end I used the trustworthy UVC mercury discharge bulb, having been scammed a couple times with fake LED type (which your videos at the time helped me get my money back and have the ebay listings taken down). I've always wondered if you could use known to be good UVC leds as a photodiode to detect UVC from other diodes, or maybe that would be just a false trigger nightmare!
I would say you'd need to look into how they work, and what spectrum they produce, if there's lower frequency content it could be tripped by lower frequencies to some extent. Likely better to use a purpose built photo detector (of basically any type so long as the capsule doesn't block uvc) with a filter to block lower energy photons.
I had thought about this also... A regular visible color LED is usually pretty sensitive to it's own color, and puts out a very measurable voltage when illuminated. It would be great if a UVC LED would work the same. It would be very hard to calibrate it to use it for any actual output power measurements, but it would still give a general idea if it responds to UVC light.... I have a couple bare UVC emitters, I'll have to have a play about with them.
@@xxportalxx.The epoxy encapsulation WOULD be the issue... That is why every UVC emitter has a special "glass" window on it, because any plastic would block emission.
Norman Cook is notoriously a heavy sampling artist, so I was pretty sure he wasn't the OG and I dug into that. Wildchild sampled and cut this line from One for the Trouble by A.D.O.R then Renegade Master was remixed by Fatboy slim who entirely removed its House instrumental. "One for Trouble, two for the time" is already a playword with the early hiphop line "one for the treble, two for the time" from Spoonie which apparently is already a play from the "One for the money, two for the show" opening of from Carl Perkins and popularized by Elvis.
That cover is probably quartz, but there's a misconception about regular glass. 2mm thick borosilicate and soda lime glass actually transmits about 90% at 375nm, 50% at 300nm, cutting off at about 260nm. That's sufficient for most UV photochemistry.
Congrats on 1 MILLION SUBS! Any chance you could upload an entire raw process that you go through for making one of your videos; taking pictures, printing them, looking up parts, labeling the pictures, following the traces, etc.?
UVC is the new LED frontier that we went through with the original Blue LED in the last century. Whoever figues out how to make a UVC high output chip is going to make a lot of money. As it turns out Higher energy photons get harder to make as the wavelength goes down.
I found a bunch of uvc bulbs about 4 inches long at goodwill for $2 each, I bought them all. The bulbs were 15 watts I think, and they would turn plastics brown and crispy in seconds. I tested the bulbs on living plants and a 10 second exposure killed everything, but it took time to see the effects. I used safety squints, pants and a long sleeve shirt for protection.
@@colinbm2010 I can't find those bulbs anywhere. The bulbs were for an air ionizer, they were 7 watts, but it was two thin U shaped bulbs rated at 3.5 watts each. The bulbs were in a blue plastic reflector.
My understanding is that high quality UVC LEDs look mostly white with a blueish-violet tint, and crappy ones look especially purple. That one looks very purple and cheap.
My cat drink any manky water collecting in things left in the garden without noticeable problems. I rarely see them drink from the bowl indoors that I change the water in daily.
I've noticed an interesting uptick on quality and price from some of the Chinese products lately. I've also seen some that go the opposite way, that they only work enough to "technically" work but aren't really practical for any real use. Kinda like the rest of the world right now, really.
Recently, I purchased a security light from B&Q Stupidly I was ‘taken in by the words ‘smart’ I fitted the light However getting the ring to talk to my WiFi involved Changing my router settings 😬 Basically it wanted me to turn off the security! £36 I took it back ! Went to my ‘brown overall’ local diy shop and got one for £19 with lovey big adjustment knobs 👍🏻👍🏻 Works perfectly 😜 I was gonna send you the B&Q smart rubbish but they refunded me without question. Keep it up big Clive Your utterly fantastic and we love you ❤❤
Check the Vd and current for the LED itself, then check digikey for cheap LED below 300nM which looks the same. PS the bottom of the LED itself is all copper pads, so as long as solder is wide, it's well heatsinked, even if it's not flat against the PCB.
I have a small sterilizer that uses the same style of UVC LEDs. I believe the two dies are 390 nm (visible) and 250 nm or 270 nm (UV) respectively. The small slab of silicon on the side is a zener for ESD protection. The data sheets are out there somewhere. Edit: And the UVC output is pretty feeble if I recall from the spectrums in the datasheet.
I've considered using one of these for ages to submerge inside liquid Tissue Culture media that I use in Petri dishes but they're so expensive, and I've just resorted to buying some of the cheaper 8 W high voltage UVC fluorescent bulbs instead, the long tube style ones that "don't emit ozone" ahha , $7 each, soldering extra long cables to the AC inputs on each end and waterproofing the ends in UV setting resin glue of all things, then submerging the entire Quartz Bulb in my 8L tub of media to maintain sterility while i pour agar plates hahah.
You can do a practical test, put petri dishes in shoe boxes (or something similar) and hang the lamp in one of them. If after a while you notice a clear difference, then it's working.
Those dual chips are usually listed as "270-285nm". I'd assume they're 285, as it seems the shorter the wavelength, the higher the price, almost exponentially. They're about 1-3mW of optical power.
Thanks for finding this Clive. Half of my brain tells me I need one but the other half says "what for" 😂 Could you run it without the glass cover to see if the effect on the UVC test paper is greater? Could be that the glass is not as transmissive as the manufacturer would hope!
Is the brief exposure enough? The whole assembly is just a little vessel the water passes right through. Can't last more than a second at volumes of 7 gallons (close to 30 liters) a minute. Water bottles are similar sized and run a uv much longer (probably battery instead of mains tho). I'm gonna start sounding dumb soon if I continue. I thought it took a while.
There’s a handmade cheap spectrometer called „little garden”, it helps determining wavelength with quite an impressive range. Done by a Chinese tech bear 😅
As far as i've been able to test, its range tops out at 345nm. I do not know if this is where the camera sensor also tops out, or whether it's the diffraction grating coating (literally just a piece of DVD) starts blocking UV light past that wavelength. If that's the case, you could try finding a diffraction grating that is able to pass shorter wavelengths
The chip is a variant of the "standard" PT4115, wich is used everywhere It can deliver 1.2A and has 100mV sense voltage The PT4211 has 0.8-1 Ohms of on resistance while the PT4115 has only 0.4 - 0.6 ohms they come in the same package so there is not much need to care about the smaller version I think As you said, these things come in all different flavors
Mouser has the Mikroe-4144 UVC sensing board for about 50€ plus taxes. That uses a narrow band UVC detector. Should be good to build a simple detector from. It has analog and i2c outputs.
It looks like the main wires are holding the LED away from the back plate but they are soldered on the front so you could desolder them, stick the LED down and then resolder the wires on
I couldn't believe when you said that spectrometers were that expensive, so I did a little digging. Seems like there are a few options, especially from thunder optics, but they only seem to go down to just under 400nm. Not nearly low enough for what you're looking at. I'm really surprised there aren't better cheap options available for this.
Search here for the Little Garden Spectrometer. It's a marvel at under a hundred bucks. A Chinese man recently started making them on his own. The resolution is exceptional and with a diy razor entrance slit they can resolve the sodium doublet.
@@Muonium1 Sadly this seems to have the exact same issues as all the others with measuring UVB/UVC. It's amazing that these are coming out, but they don't solve the problem Clive was having.
@radiantthought it's using a transmissive polycarbonate grating, a piece of DVD, so nothing below about 400nm can get through. For below 400nm you HAVE to get a Czerny-Turner parabolic reflective grating based device, there's no other choice. No cheap option for such reflective gratings yet.
You might benefit from a system akin to what Brainiac uses for tesitng wavelengths- as his might be cheaper than the one you were loaned for a time. Keyword- might be as I dunno how much his costs, though it does have the ability to measure across the majority of the light spectrum in both visible and invisible lights. :D
3:19: I know you have to use isopropyl alcohol to clean fingerprints off the quartz glass on, say, an incandescent stage light bulb. But for a piece of glass that doesn't get that hot, is it strictly necessary?
So, I don't suppose this is powerful enough for our 2 x 10,000 litre rainwater tanks, then 😀. I could see a use in some of the very low flow smaller aquarium bio-filters though, possibly as a pair, since mounting would be easy, and they use pretty much no power!
Mr Clive, have you ever done a teardown on a hotel chocolat velvetiser? Fixed mine this weekend, and I thought the wiring in the base was beautiful, even dealing with the sealed unit 👍
Very interesting. Thanks Big Clive. Did it energize the UVC test strip any better at 24 volts? Pretty neat little item. I would think it would be useful, depending on efficiency, for sterilizing water in the "field" as it were? Not sure.
Would be interesting to see if the test card would light up more without the glass. With the product being so cheap I wonder if that "glass" is really quartz, if it's normal glass it will block most of the UVC. When it bounced off the table it sounded more like plastic than glass or quartz. Not that it matters much, the power is so low it would only be good for sterilizing about a teaspoon of water, maybe a tablespoon...
I miss the old TO3 packages, I've known them since my valve days. Not surprising actually since they were designed to plug into B9G valve sockets during the changeover period (mechanically, not electrically, obviously). Try it for yourself, or get the dimensions for both and compare.
Have you ever tried USING one of those Screen Color calibrator devices, some of which are spectroscopes and a few ive seen manage to see somewhat into the UV spectrum.
The small power and ground planes in the circuit board design under the LEDs have an offset under the UV-A one, I wonder what the reason behind that is? 🤔 Thanks for the video!
hey clive can you please do a teardown on one of those little USB filament led lights? the ones on alixpress that have two little filaments in them contained in glass and a capacitive touch button on top. just wondering.
Pretty sure actual UVC LEDs of any useful power output and wavelength don't live more than a few hundred hours as the UVC light is damaging. If it lasts it's UVA/UVB.
Dangit, we should be able to cheaply measure UVC dose in 2024! The markup on these niche applications is understandable, but frustrating. I was looking at EEG probes, and its just some friggin pogo pins and an op-amp, marketed for DIY use, and they were ~$200 each!
Hi, nice video. Have you tested it without the glass cover to see if it lits the UVC phosphor with more intensity? May be the glass attenuates some of it.
Interesting .... Cheaper in the long run if it works, however just last week I dumped some sodium hypochlorite in my tank. Way easier to implement and you get a day of childhood memories of an overly chlorinated school swimming pool!
I did some checks. If the UV is not strong enough then the bacteria just get resistant. The UV must be strong enough to un alive the bacteria completely then it's good
How much UVC do you get with the indicator card if you remove the glass (or is it plastic) cover? The cover may be filtering most of it out.. Also, how much UVC is required to sterilize water? There must be a minimum amount of UV energy that a microorganism has to absorb to be killed and the water itself would also attenuate the light, so with a dim light source, the sterilization may only happen within a few mm of the emitter, so what happens to all the other microbes in the rest of the tank, especially if the water is flowing and not just sitting in the tank?
The cover glass on these water steriliser lamps are quartz glass I dosent filter out the uv. That's why you should not use a non uv blocked halogen lamp in work light with missing cover glass . Often the uv tank is narrow so the light from the uv lamp may sterilise all the water around it ,when it has passed trough the tank. the glass has to be cleaned ( often there is a underwater wiper blade that does this ) if there is stuff on it ,so the uv does not get blocked, by the coating collected on the outside. The effect off the light source is the factor that determines how fast the water may flow/ neessery exposure time and how big the tank may be. The effect on these uv lamps are pretty high and need water as a heat sink to avoid overheating.
This might be a dumb idea... Could you get a little sidewalk water and look at it under a microscope and verify wigglies. Split the sample into a control and experimental sample. Expose the experimental sample to the device under test for a period, then use the microscope to see if the DUT killed the bugs?
If you have a ~known~ good UVC LED, and a decent scope, you can pretty much make a poor-man's detector by using it as a photodiode. It will not be a good detector, but it will work.
Interesting it didn't cause your skin to burn. I bought a "120W high power UV flashlight" from Aliexpress ("Alonefire Flagship Store") and although it's only supposed to be UV-A it's so bright you can feel the heat on your hand if you stick it in front of the beam, and smelling your hand afterwards gives a really bad burnt smell. Not sure what the true wattage actually is but I never realised strong UV-A light could cause burns too.
Could work nicely in the bottom of a stainless steel pet water fountain that recirculates the same water with a pump. They can get scummy over time even with frequent washing. The filters that come with the pet fountains are garbage since the water is allowed to flow around the filter.
Well I feel much cleaner now, thanks Clive. Why not just put the visible led in series with the UV led.? Make your own UV a, b, c, and IR, detector/realtime imager. Us an old phone or digital camera, 8 to 12 megapixel is plenty. Remove the lens, remove the AA grill and any internal filters. Refit the lenz and rub off any coatings. Use a Circular Polarization filter on the lens. Some old-school pre digital filters enhance all UV or IR. Some devices may need some alteration to the firmware. I use a 2004 8mp Cannon, uses AA batteries.✅ UVa shows yellow~ish, b blue~green, c red~ish-blue. IR low band, blue~ish white. IR high band, green~ish white. Use the flip-out display (NOT THE EYEBALL VIEW FINDER). Its not dangerous.! Just good safety habit training.
i'm a big fan of that squiggly burn mark from the plastic-welder video
Haha, yeah that always makes me chuckle when I see that mark in a video. Takes me back to some of the past "events" that it has seen 😂
Someone should make a website where you can click on the burn mark of your choice and go to the video. :)
His name is Snakey.
Those are the marks of battle my friend :P
love that to
The UV light in my water filtration system is a 6" long gas vapor bulb of some kind, replacements are $38 US. It's contained in a polished stainless steel tube which allows the water to pass over it. Glad they don't go bad very often, kinda expensive to replace. Nice one Clive.
"Some kind" = Mercury. Those systems where intended for aquariums, where you don't care about poisoning the fish with mercury. But some clever mind decided that it could be used on drinking water for illiterate humans.
Mine has an indicator led that goes red when it goes bad. However my water was so dirty, I still had to take it apart yearly and clean the bulb. One year I did a poor job of reassembly resulting in a slight leak that eventually shorted it.
@goingjag Yeah, mine has the indicator light as well. 👍
When I used to work with them the instructions stated they had a finite effective life and they had an hour counter. From memory they had to be replaced annually (and usually hadn't been).
sounds like a pretty standard 6w/8w bulb with a big price hike
One thing I've learned recently about LEDs, is that you can put a very low current through it (1uA or so) and measure the voltage drop. If it's (for example) 2.1V, calculate the wavelength of a photon with 2.1eV of energy, and that will be the wavelength of light the LED produces.
The best way to see if it's destructive uv is to draw some colours onto some paper, cover half over and expose it to the light over a few hours, see if anything changes, and of course your sniff test, but they've all got their "special" numbers to try and advertise with, I imagine it's fairly accurate, or, as close as you can get for the price
Turmeric is sensitive to UV light and will lose it's yellow colour when subject to sunlight. Which is why it's not been used as a pigment. So that could be something of a test too potentially
I would just point it at something living and check if it no longer lives.
Eg. at a leaf (half covered like you suggested with the paper).
If the goal of UVC is to sanitize, then the uncovered side of the leaf should get annihilated.
At least in theory, not sure if in practice.
@@hubertnnn worth pointing out a leaf has quite a bit more protective hardware than a microbe haha that would be a conclusive positive test, but not a conclusive negative test. Best thing to do is actually use it to treat some pond water and look at the samples under a microscope to see if it actually killed stuff.
It interests me that it took decades to perfect a blue LED, and now they've got all the way to the far ultra-violet.
I think the gallium nitride research opened up a new wavelength avenue.
They got a Nobel prize for the blue LED.
Yeah, I remember reading about Nichia, the Korean company, finally figuring it out (I think it was in 1995) and a couple of years later, i was able to order some from Cree. They were so dim lol Someone did a great video about the inventor at Nichia and his perseverance in the face of setbacks, but I can't remember who made it right now. (Edit: its Veritasium, "why it was almost impossible to make a blue led" or something like that)
@@johnclavis It was not Nichia. It was Shūji Nakamura who invented it. Nichia just was their employer and the company that stole his research.
Barely making UVC doesn't really qualify as useful. I don't understand all the excitement about UVC. LEDs can't do it efficiently. Plain and simple.
You should try the uv tester strip without the glass cap to see if tge UVC works better. Maybe they cheaped out on the glass
Back once again with the renegade master!
The Ill Behavior.
Judging from the size and power of the UVC emitter, its not really going to sterilize any volume of moving water.
In fact not any volume of water at all, unless left for hours and hours and hours.
Probably suitable for sterilizing the drinking trough in a hamster cage.
Would the UV-C blind your hamster though?
(Picturing an adorable little hamster with black eyeshades and Itty bitty white cane)
It ain't gonna do squat. To anything. Comments get deleted for explaining (and properly ridiculing) the concept.
I wonder if you could use it to kill algea in an aquarium, or in hydroponic container.
I think the same, I can't imagine a real use of that with this amount of power. This remember me when in COVID time all people want an "air purifier" based in fake UV-C LED lights...
@@MadScientist267 That happened to me also. It is RUclips's auto moderation that deleted our comment, when we rightly are very harsh against anything that simply doesn't work.
For sanitising water you can't beat whisky.
Whiskey is brown. I like unmuddled transparency. Vodka for me 😂
There's always the banana burn test, seeing if the little LED can leave the banana skin discoloured from damage as you've demonstrated before with the big CFL-type one... :P
I have a compact fluorescent uvc bulb I got back in covid daze. It's clear, and is intended to sterilize a room. It came with a control base and a remote to turn it on/off and set it for on 30 minutes or on 60 minutes. I put it on the breakfast bar between our kitchen and living room. I know it's legit because if I ever need to go into the kitchen at night, I turn it off manually and get whatever beer I need, and the air has a tad of ozone pungency. I also "tans" any green bananas I also have on the counter. I think this bulb is suppose to not be the strong ozone emitter, but it is pretty light. The mercury vapor UVc bulbs come in two flavors, one that is suppose to release ozone, due to its exceptionally clear glass(ultra low iron I think) and another that they dope the glass with some mineral the selectively filters out the very hard UVc that makes most of the ozone. I think the ozone ones are for sterilizing water and are ment to be immersed like in an ozone generator or filter tube, like for aquariums or water processing.
For years I wanted to put one of these at the bottom of a 55 gallon plastic drum full of water.
I figure that with the small amount of heat the LED emits, it will create convection currents in the water so that it will all be near the LED in time.
Maybe as a survival source of clean germ-free water.
Funny, looks like they’ve used just the bottom part of a TO-3 housing. Very smart.
I was thinking more like the housing of a thermal limit switch.
TO-3 for sure :)
'Power to the people right on " Guy from Liverpool
Finally a solid state ozonator for my garden squirrel jacuzzi
These look good for making my kitties water fountain a bit better for a longer time...this unit could go in the pump area which is closed off.
Very cool. I’ve been wanting something like this for my campervan water tank
Amazon, $20. Two for $40 for free shipping and better sterilization.
You could perhaps fit an inline uv water filter from off a reverse osmosis system. I’ve got a 6 stage reverse osmosis unit under my kitchen sink to take all the fluoride and chemical nasties out of our drinking water, and it has a uv filter as the last stage to destroy any biologicals…I’m sure you could potentially adapt it.
I would also recommend fitting such a RO filter system anyway because the water government claims is drinkable/potable is most definitely not. That’s not just ‘conspiracy’ because it’s been overwhelmingly scientifically proven that what they’re adding is nothing short of slow acting poison!
God bless 🙂👍🏻💕
Make sure, the material can handle uvc
@@trappedinroom1014 Water itself is a slow acting poison. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies! Oxygen at high concentrations will kill you much faster. If you take just 1.5 mg of vitamin D every day you'll not be able to get rid of calcium and it'll build to toxic levels. In all instances, dose makes the poison. Many things are beneficial rather than harmful under that dose and the amount of fluoride in drinking water has dramatic evidence of being beneficial and no evidence of being harmful.
The crap on internet blogs about fluoride is ridiculous and tooth decay will actually hurt you via cardiac problems and just physical pain.
I never imagined i could combine my two favourite hobbies, electronics and finger sniffing.
I find these UVC videos fascinating, ever since the covid era when I wanted to get some UVC lights to steralise face shields I was 3D printing for different people in my area that needed then to work during lockdown. (I wanted to make sure that I didn't spread anything and make things worse)
In the end I used the trustworthy UVC mercury discharge bulb, having been scammed a couple times with fake LED type (which your videos at the time helped me get my money back and have the ebay listings taken down).
I've always wondered if you could use known to be good UVC leds as a photodiode to detect UVC from other diodes, or maybe that would be just a false trigger nightmare!
I've pondered whether a UVC LED can be used as a UVC sensor.
I would say you'd need to look into how they work, and what spectrum they produce, if there's lower frequency content it could be tripped by lower frequencies to some extent. Likely better to use a purpose built photo detector (of basically any type so long as the capsule doesn't block uvc) with a filter to block lower energy photons.
I had thought about this also...
A regular visible color LED is usually pretty sensitive to it's own color, and puts out a very measurable voltage when illuminated. It would be great if a UVC LED would work the same.
It would be very hard to calibrate it to use it for any actual output power measurements, but it would still give a general idea if it responds to UVC light....
I have a couple bare UVC emitters, I'll have to have a play about with them.
@@xxportalxx.The epoxy encapsulation WOULD be the issue...
That is why every UVC emitter has a special "glass" window on it, because any plastic would block emission.
Okay. I like the Fatboy Slim line from Renegade Master "D4 damage of power to the people" at about 5:38. Thanks for that.
That's not the first time that line has been in a Big Clive video.
Norman Cook is notoriously a heavy sampling artist, so I was pretty sure he wasn't the OG and I dug into that.
Wildchild sampled and cut this line from One for the Trouble by A.D.O.R then Renegade Master was remixed by Fatboy slim who entirely removed its House instrumental.
"One for Trouble, two for the time" is already a playword with the early hiphop line "one for the treble, two for the time" from Spoonie which apparently is already a play from the "One for the money, two for the show" opening of from Carl Perkins and popularized by Elvis.
@@PainterVierax Nice digging there. That makes a great etymology. I had no idea these complexities were behind it.
Look at that little light why do my eyes feel like there's sand in them lol
I love the oldschool "Renegade master" rap lyrics reference. :D Good sense of humor as always. :) You are in a good mood. :) Cheers!
Haha Back once again with the renegade master honestly just cracked me up
Hmm, at first I thought it was a fancy new LED license plate illumination...
Now that is a name I haven't heard in a while... Naomi Wu... Miss her channel.
That cover is probably quartz, but there's a misconception about regular glass. 2mm thick borosilicate and soda lime glass actually transmits about 90% at 375nm, 50% at 300nm, cutting off at about 260nm. That's sufficient for most UV photochemistry.
Congrats on 1 MILLION SUBS! Any chance you could upload an entire raw process that you go through for making one of your videos; taking pictures, printing them, looking up parts, labeling the pictures, following the traces, etc.?
Lovely little thing that is, thanks Clive for the great video 😊
Nice product you find , didn't know they make this in this form .
What would we do without you big Clive ❤
Damn sure wouldn't take any advice from lil' Clive
UVC is the new LED frontier that we went through with the original Blue LED in the last century. Whoever figues out how to make a UVC high output chip is going to make a lot of money. As it turns out Higher energy photons get harder to make as the wavelength goes down.
As the wavelength goes down, acschually😊
@@RuneBivrin Depends which way up you hold the graph.🙃 As Wavelength goes down, Energy/Frequency goes up.
Uv is nice, but not nearly as much of a breakthrough as blue
Thank you Clive 👌👏👏
0:55 - I believe "visible ultraviolet" is technically known as... "violet". 😜
And the invisible one becomes more *violeNt* as the wavelength decreases 😁
The cover glass cup doesn't look like quartz which explains the low UVC output
I found a bunch of uvc bulbs about 4 inches long at goodwill for $2 each, I bought them all. The bulbs were 15 watts I think, and they would turn plastics brown and crispy in seconds. I tested the bulbs on living plants and a 10 second exposure killed everything, but it took time to see the effects. I used safety squints, pants and a long sleeve shirt for protection.
Do you have a link with a picture please ?
@@colinbm2010 I can't find those bulbs anywhere. The bulbs were for an air ionizer, they were 7 watts, but it was two thin U shaped bulbs rated at 3.5 watts each. The bulbs were in a blue plastic reflector.
oh yeah, the instant skin cancer lamps. Love those
My understanding is that high quality UVC LEDs look mostly white with a blueish-violet tint, and crappy ones look especially purple. That one looks very purple and cheap.
Immediately I want to install one in the lower hidden tank section of my cat's water fountain.😽
Make sure it is WELL hidden , cats can see Ultra violet 😝.............. DAVE™🛑
The water will be moving too quickly to make a difference.
My cat drink any manky water collecting in things left in the garden without noticeable problems.
I rarely see them drink from the bowl indoors that I change the water in daily.
my dog also much preferred random mud puddles. it's good for the immune system.
That’s exactly what I thought about doing. Darn things get scummy fast.
Great find. Thanks
I've noticed an interesting uptick on quality and price from some of the Chinese products lately. I've also seen some that go the opposite way, that they only work enough to "technically" work but aren't really practical for any real use. Kinda like the rest of the world right now, really.
This would be good to make a small water steriliser for fish tanks.
Recently, I purchased a security light from B&Q
Stupidly I was ‘taken in by the words ‘smart’
I fitted the light
However getting the ring to talk to my WiFi involved
Changing my router settings 😬
Basically it wanted me to turn off the security!
£36
I took it back !
Went to my ‘brown overall’ local diy shop and got one for £19 with lovey big adjustment knobs 👍🏻👍🏻
Works perfectly 😜
I was gonna send you the B&Q smart rubbish but they refunded me without question.
Keep it up big Clive
Your utterly fantastic and we love you ❤❤
Check the Vd and current for the LED itself, then check digikey for cheap LED below 300nM which looks the same.
PS the bottom of the LED itself is all copper pads, so as long as solder is wide, it's well heatsinked, even if it's not flat against the PCB.
I have a small sterilizer that uses the same style of UVC LEDs. I believe the two dies are 390 nm (visible) and 250 nm or 270 nm (UV) respectively. The small slab of silicon on the side is a zener for ESD protection. The data sheets are out there somewhere. Edit: And the UVC output is pretty feeble if I recall from the spectrums in the datasheet.
I've considered using one of these for ages to submerge inside liquid Tissue Culture media that I use in Petri dishes but they're so expensive, and I've just resorted to buying some of the cheaper 8 W high voltage UVC fluorescent bulbs instead, the long tube style ones that "don't emit ozone" ahha , $7 each, soldering extra long cables to the AC inputs on each end and waterproofing the ends in UV setting resin glue of all things, then submerging the entire Quartz Bulb in my 8L tub of media to maintain sterility while i pour agar plates hahah.
The old tubes are much more efficient for UVC, than LEDs. Hopefully UVC LEDs will get more efficient and cheaper.
Looks like they have re-used the good old TO-3 (mini) package for constructing the LEDs.
It does resemble a TO3 package.
Yeah, it does. Kinda clever, actually
You can do a practical test, put petri dishes in shoe boxes (or something similar) and hang the lamp in one of them.
If after a while you notice a clear difference, then it's working.
Those dual chips are usually listed as "270-285nm". I'd assume they're 285, as it seems the shorter the wavelength, the higher the price, almost exponentially. They're about 1-3mW of optical power.
Thanks for finding this Clive. Half of my brain tells me I need one but the other half says "what for" 😂
Could you run it without the glass cover to see if the effect on the UVC test paper is greater? Could be that the glass is not as transmissive as the manufacturer would hope!
I should try that.
I did try that and it didn't help. These are pretty wimpy LEDs overwhelmed by the UVA side.
Had a few of these, i was hoping to illuminate my UV reactive minerals but they are very low output...
I think that when the UVC LED dies, those 60mA will fry the violet LED as well, so the diagnosis of a failure shouldn't be a problem...
6:09... Is that a little Shottky diode to try and protect against E.S.D. damage, since a UVC led is much more expensive than a regular color LED?? 🤔
Is the brief exposure enough? The whole assembly is just a little vessel the water passes right through. Can't last more than a second at volumes of 7 gallons (close to 30 liters) a minute.
Water bottles are similar sized and run a uv much longer (probably battery instead of mains tho). I'm gonna start sounding dumb soon if I continue. I thought it took a while.
just use a syringe to inject heat paste to fill the space between the components. Bridge the gap as it were.
I have a torch runs of 1 18650 and has 3 of these style listed as uvc torch my work gave them out for free in covidd times
There’s a handmade cheap spectrometer called „little garden”, it helps determining wavelength with quite an impressive range. Done by a Chinese tech bear 😅
I've looked at that, but it doesn't go anywhere near UVC.
As far as i've been able to test, its range tops out at 345nm. I do not know if this is where the camera sensor also tops out, or whether it's the diffraction grating coating (literally just a piece of DVD) starts blocking UV light past that wavelength. If that's the case, you could try finding a diffraction grating that is able to pass shorter wavelengths
@@mfbfreak it's a transmissive polycarbonate DVD grating so almost nothing below 400nm is getting through.
The chip is a variant of the "standard" PT4115, wich is used everywhere
It can deliver 1.2A and has 100mV sense voltage
The PT4211 has 0.8-1 Ohms of on resistance while the PT4115 has only 0.4 - 0.6 ohms they come in the same package so there is not much need to care about the smaller version I think
As you said, these things come in all different flavors
Mouser has the Mikroe-4144 UVC sensing board for about 50€ plus taxes. That uses a narrow band UVC detector. Should be good to build a simple detector from. It has analog and i2c outputs.
I've ordered a simple UVC meter that may use one of those sensors.
@ looking forward to the reverse engineering!
It looks like the main wires are holding the LED away from the back plate but they are soldered on the front so you could desolder them, stick the LED down and then resolder the wires on
I couldn't believe when you said that spectrometers were that expensive, so I did a little digging. Seems like there are a few options, especially from thunder optics, but they only seem to go down to just under 400nm. Not nearly low enough for what you're looking at. I'm really surprised there aren't better cheap options available for this.
Search here for the Little Garden Spectrometer. It's a marvel at under a hundred bucks. A Chinese man recently started making them on his own. The resolution is exceptional and with a diy razor entrance slit they can resolve the sodium doublet.
@@Muonium1 Sadly this seems to have the exact same issues as all the others with measuring UVB/UVC. It's amazing that these are coming out, but they don't solve the problem Clive was having.
The complexity is the behaviour of UVC. It is easily blocked, so standard optical systems can't measure it.
@radiantthought it's using a transmissive polycarbonate grating, a piece of DVD, so nothing below about 400nm can get through. For below 400nm you HAVE to get a Czerny-Turner parabolic reflective grating based device, there's no other choice. No cheap option for such reflective gratings yet.
You might benefit from a system akin to what Brainiac uses for tesitng wavelengths- as his might be cheaper than the one you were loaned for a time. Keyword- might be as I dunno how much his costs, though it does have the ability to measure across the majority of the light spectrum in both visible and invisible lights. :D
3:19: I know you have to use isopropyl alcohol to clean fingerprints off the quartz glass on, say, an incandescent stage light bulb. But for a piece of glass that doesn't get that hot, is it strictly necessary?
With these, the layer of fingerprint oil can attenuate the UVC output.
So, I don't suppose this is powerful enough for our 2 x 10,000 litre rainwater tanks, then 😀. I could see a use in some of the very low flow smaller aquarium bio-filters though, possibly as a pair, since mounting would be easy, and they use pretty much no power!
Power to the people... ooh Clive you're soo HIP :)
You could check if the UVC LED could erase an EPROM.
Mr Clive, have you ever done a teardown on a hotel chocolat velvetiser? Fixed mine this weekend, and I thought the wiring in the base was beautiful, even dealing with the sealed unit 👍
I've not looked at one. I'd guess a heater and magnetically or directly coupled stirrer motor?
Very interesting. Thanks Big Clive. Did it energize the UVC test strip any better at 24 volts?
Pretty neat little item. I would think it would be useful, depending on efficiency, for sterilizing water in the "field" as it were? Not sure.
Oh, I wonder how hot it gets after a certain time. Would the Flir camera be skewed by UVC or worse, would UVC damage the sensor?\
It runs at fixed LED current from about 6V to 24V.
The UVC shouldn;t pass through the thermal camera lens.
Could be handy for modding a water jug in the fridge. Just toss a 9v battery on it, a transistor and a LDR to detect visible light (and turn it off).
Have an RO system with a VIQUA VT1 that's 13W. The UV light and conversion losses heat water at the kitchen sink tap to ~ 35 C.
For a moment there, I thought you were channelling your inner Citizen Smith (5:35)
The chips I'm familiar with usually come with salt and brown sauce.
Would be interesting to see if the test card would light up more without the glass. With the product being so cheap I wonder if that "glass" is really quartz, if it's normal glass it will block most of the UVC. When it bounced off the table it sounded more like plastic than glass or quartz. Not that it matters much, the power is so low it would only be good for sterilizing about a teaspoon of water, maybe a tablespoon...
I miss the old TO3 packages, I've known them since my valve days.
Not surprising actually since they were designed to plug into B9G valve sockets during the changeover period (mechanically, not electrically, obviously).
Try it for yourself, or get the dimensions for both and compare.
Have you ever tried USING one of those Screen Color calibrator devices, some of which are spectroscopes and a few ive seen manage to see somewhat into the UV spectrum.
I was thinking maybe a uv sensor could be used in conjunction to make sure the uv is present as a failsafe ?
Could you measure it by irradiating some water and then sending both irradiated and contaminated water out for testing ?
I could theoretically test it by exposing petri dishes.
The small power and ground planes in the circuit board design under the LEDs have an offset under the UV-A one, I wonder what the reason behind that is? 🤔
Thanks for the video!
Very interesting module. Seems a bit underpowered for sterilizing, though.
hey clive can you please do a teardown on one of those little USB filament led lights? the ones on alixpress that have two little filaments in them contained in glass and a capacitive touch button on top. just wondering.
Pretty sure actual UVC LEDs of any useful power output and wavelength don't live more than a few hundred hours as the UVC light is damaging. If it lasts it's UVA/UVB.
Great Video ! cool product Aliexpress
I wonder if this led will help with the I'll behavior. It may cause D4 damage. Not sure though.
Dangit, we should be able to cheaply measure UVC dose in 2024! The markup on these niche applications is understandable, but frustrating. I was looking at EEG probes, and its just some friggin pogo pins and an op-amp, marketed for DIY use, and they were ~$200 each!
Pity it was out of range of your digital UVC aromatic detector, but considering the cost of the other instrument, I don't blame you.
Hi, nice video. Have you tested it without the glass cover to see if it lits the UVC phosphor with more intensity? May be the glass attenuates some of it.
Speaking of Naomi Wu… is she still active on Social media, and if so, where?
Naomi is keeping a low profile online.
@ i miss her
Interesting .... Cheaper in the long run if it works, however just last week I dumped some sodium hypochlorite in my tank. Way easier to implement and you get a day of childhood memories of an overly chlorinated school swimming pool!
I did some checks. If the UV is not strong enough then the bacteria just get resistant. The UV must be strong enough to un alive the bacteria completely then it's good
How much UVC do you get with the indicator card if you remove the glass (or is it plastic) cover? The cover may be filtering most of it out.. Also, how much UVC is required to sterilize water? There must be a minimum amount of UV energy that a microorganism has to absorb to be killed and the water itself would also attenuate the light, so with a dim light source, the sterilization may only happen within a few mm of the emitter, so what happens to all the other microbes in the rest of the tank, especially if the water is flowing and not just sitting in the tank?
UVC light does not need to kill microbes directly, it is enough to damage their DNA so that when they try to divide into two clones the process fails.
The cover glass on these water steriliser lamps are quartz glass I dosent filter out the uv. That's why you should not use a non uv blocked halogen lamp in work light with missing cover glass .
Often the uv tank is narrow so the light from the uv lamp may sterilise all the water around it ,when it has passed trough the tank.
the glass has to be cleaned ( often there is a underwater wiper blade that does this ) if there is stuff on it ,so the uv does not get blocked, by the coating collected on the outside. The effect off the light source is the factor that determines how fast the water may flow/ neessery exposure time and how big the tank may be. The effect on these uv lamps are pretty high and need water as a heat sink to avoid overheating.
Got to get me one of those for golf ball finding😅
You'd be better with a 365nm flashlight for that.
So basically it sanitizes 50ml tanks?
Thanks for another great video clive 👍
Could something like Arctic Silver be injected into the gap between the LED and the heat sink?
I wonder how the UVC test strip would react with the glass cover removed. Maybe its crappy glass?
Hi bigclive. Thank for this interesting video. A question for you. Do you think this will stop Algie growing in my cats water fountain?
It might help in the internal reservoir.
xiaomi air humidifier has similar looking led in its lower water tank
This might be a dumb idea... Could you get a little sidewalk water and look at it under a microscope and verify wigglies. Split the sample into a control and experimental sample. Expose the experimental sample to the device under test for a period, then use the microscope to see if the DUT killed the bugs?
is usb c output any better without glass cover?
@8:47 "when it reaches the threshold though, 3.3 ohms, it turns the circuit off" I don't follow.. :( can anybody advise?
The voltage across a resistor increases with the current. That is being used to sense the current by detecting a specific voltage.
If you have a ~known~ good UVC LED, and a decent scope, you can pretty much make a poor-man's detector by using it as a photodiode. It will not be a good detector, but it will work.
Interesting it didn't cause your skin to burn. I bought a "120W high power UV flashlight" from Aliexpress ("Alonefire Flagship Store") and although it's only supposed to be UV-A it's so bright you can feel the heat on your hand if you stick it in front of the beam, and smelling your hand afterwards gives a really bad burnt smell. Not sure what the true wattage actually is but I never realised strong UV-A light could cause burns too.
Could work nicely in the bottom of a stainless steel pet water fountain that recirculates the same water with a pump. They can get scummy over time even with frequent washing. The filters that come with the pet fountains are garbage since the water is allowed to flow around the filter.
Well I feel much cleaner now, thanks Clive.
Why not just put the visible led in series with the UV led.?
Make your own UV a, b, c, and IR, detector/realtime imager. Us an old phone or digital camera, 8 to 12 megapixel is plenty.
Remove the lens, remove the AA grill and any internal filters. Refit the lenz and rub off any coatings. Use a Circular Polarization filter on the lens.
Some old-school pre digital filters enhance all UV or IR.
Some devices may need some alteration to the firmware.
I use a 2004 8mp Cannon, uses AA batteries.✅
UVa shows yellow~ish, b blue~green, c red~ish-blue.
IR low band, blue~ish white. IR high band, green~ish white. Use the flip-out display (NOT THE EYEBALL VIEW FINDER).
Its not dangerous.! Just good safety habit training.
The visible one operates at lower current.
Resistor.?