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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
*_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!
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 :-)
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!
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
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 ..
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 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.
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.
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.🤪
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a 24 watt UVC lamp from a pond skimmer and that thing is absolutely scary to operate the instant you turn it on you smell the ozone and burning flesh
ive got a 35w UVC lamp for fluorescent minerals that conveniently has the cooling fan vent right in your face as you run in. Its in a housing so you are safe from the light but oh boy the ozone!
@alexdrockhound9497 my friend bought an air tiger that had a 24 watt tube and fan for fungus control in a crawl space and it was brutal .it was like a good smack in the face of ozone when you entered the area,always smelled like someone Tig welding .It had a tiny window on the stainless and that's how you knew not to open it .Works fantastic at killing bugs too
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
Hi Clive. Whats the reading min max on 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.
I have an annoyingly small letterbox, the tube would probably make it to the UK intact and get broken by the postman trying to force it through my tiny hole.
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.
changed a hospital's UV unit, new bulbs, but had to retrieve my phone I left in the room during testing. Ended up with a strange tan, glad I at least had UV filtering sunglasses on. I do have better ones for my laser engraver.
Nice unit! Any rating on the sensor sensitivity over time? ones I worked with in the past in the day job changed quite a lot over time. (as did the UVC tube emissions). It was kind of a moving target but we were trying to ensure consistent emissions and calibration method for a therapeutic device over time. Cheers!
@@muppetpaster well, probably a known well-specced photodiode operating in photovoltaic (shorted) mode with a transimpedance amplifier, but still, could be interesting!
Just two days ago I got an email from ebay for a product recall of one of these lamps. Apparently it emits unhealthy amounts of UVC. Who would have thought?! Too bad there's very likely no one there who cares, because I would like to tell them that that's exactly the reason why I bought the lamp. (I used the ozone to get rid of smells in basement rooms that got too humid in the summer; I put the lamp into a metal can so almost no UVC gets out, but with vent holes for the ozone; it pretty much worked as expected)
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.
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.
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.
How is it actually surprising though that the uvc lamps are so cheap? I mean, aren't they just common fluorescent lights without the phosphore coating?
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.
@bigclivedotcom Sounds good. Btw, i saw a video of you testing UVC lamps with a cheap UVA/UVB sensor. Is that also kind of reliable to measure UVC output of a lamp?
Would be interesting to put it through a spectrometer - if your glasses block UVA there must be something else or you wouldn't have been able to see it... No?
There are a few weak bands in the visible spectrum that give the distinctive turquoise glow. the prominent UVC wavelengths are invisible to the human eye.
Speaking of UV transmittance tests I shone my amazing UVA torch at a very fluorescent piece of plastic with various glasses in between and surprisingly my prescription sunglasses don't filter all of it while my clear prescription glasses do. According to the seller the sunglasses should filter UV but I wonder how rigorous my test actually is, LOL. Any idea clive ?
you cant technically see UVA (365nm etc), the purple glow you see is not UV the same way the Cyan glow here is not UVC these are just the stray wavelengths being emitted. but you can see some near UV wavelengths like 395nm but they appear rather blurry. the only true wav to test would be to shine the torch through the glass onto a uv detector card ir a uv meter.
@@pvim I know UVA is invisible. In fact the flashlight I'm talking about is the exact same one Clive featured in this and another video. It comes with a ZWB1 filter that blocks pretty much all visible light and when I'm saying that I use a glowing piece of plastic I mean it's only the invisible UVA that's making it glow. So of I shine the light directly at that plastic it glows BRIGHTLY. If I put my transparent prescription glasses in between it doesn't glow at all and same with my ski mask. If however I put my sunglasses in between it doesn't glow as brightly as if there was nothing however it's still more than with the clear glasses. Hope that makes sense.
@@psirvent8hmm i see, some sunglasses dont block UV fully they are just polarised generally cheaper ones or ones specialised for such (this can be nore harmful than wearing no glasses in some cases), also your prescription glasses must have a coating to block all UV since normal glass should let UVA pass, this is common with prescription glasses.
![A Small, Cheap Micro-Spectrometer - Review [Pt 1]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MOXryggwr_Q/mqdefault.jpg)
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!
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 🙃
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.
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.
Those tubes are used in pond filters too, fits inside a quartz tube and the water flows around it.
"Watch your eyes, the light is coming back. Please never mind the germicidal lamp"
I had the same thought!
4:13
That UVC meter sounds like it has a really nice button click.
That UVC fixture is a universal fixture they make for all cheap lighting devices.
I always chuckle every time Clive says chube
Shh... If you mention it he'll stop saying it. RIP millamps and greaze.
chyoob
Just watching this video made my eyes itch :)
Cool! Now I'm feeling disinfected, haha.
Polystyrene…protects anything during shipping with the added bonus of keeping everywhere looking like Christmas 👍
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.
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."
2:29 "It's not idiot-proof, but that's OK, we're not idiots."
✌😎 I LOVE THAT LINE
Speak for yourself!
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.
*_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!
"Is this live?"
Proceeds to touch metal...
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 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! 😅🤣😂🤣😅
As always an excellent product review. Your the best.
I love how your "process" works. I've been in "the dark" about UVC, thanks for your video. 👍❤️
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!
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
As always funny and interesting video. I love your videos. Thx for all the knowledge.
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.
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 )
quite an exciting light source
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.
Oh nice, excellent addition to your toolkit.
Yes, feeds my addiction to UV tubes.
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.
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.🤪
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.
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
Looks like a Ave knife. Great videos. I love them.Keep em up ehh😁
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.
Nice investment , the power button is very "cliky" :D
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.
Interesting to see what it reads on a sunny day.
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.
Lucky that my phone does not have a full spectrum screen. Thanks Clive.
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.
The glow is certainly pretty.
Ozone is not so fragrant however.
3:44 immediately smelling the Ozone....
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.
I have a 24 watt UVC lamp from a pond skimmer and that thing is absolutely scary to operate the instant you turn it on you smell the ozone and burning flesh
ive got a 35w UVC lamp for fluorescent minerals that conveniently has the cooling fan vent right in your face as you run in. Its in a housing so you are safe from the light but oh boy the ozone!
@alexdrockhound9497 my friend bought an air tiger that had a 24 watt tube and fan for fungus control in a crawl space and it was brutal .it was like a good smack in the face of ozone when you entered the area,always smelled like someone Tig welding .It had a tiny window on the stainless and that's how you knew not to open it .Works fantastic at killing bugs too
@alexdrockhound9497 Not sure if you need the ozone but there are UVC lamps not producing ozone too you could use
Nice product! good to know ... this us actually quite useful
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
I am very interested in your UV content. Please make more.
How about testing some of the blinding car headlights?
Hi Clive. Whats the reading min max on 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.
Any value recorded by this meter needs to be μW/cm² @ 38cm. The distance is the industry standard for comparing flux.
I'd be interested to know if the UVC sensor has any markings. I wonder if it is available separately.
I have an annoyingly small letterbox, the tube would probably make it to the UK intact and get broken by the postman trying to force it through my tiny hole.
Who hurt you?
@@mattmanyam Royal Mail, I guess. Actually, whoever installed the stupidly small letterbox in my door, and me for not installing a bigger one.
@igotes lol. And here I thought you were being cryptic with your Postal innuendo. 😅
If you install a bigger letterbox then make sure it's well away from the lock so people can't get thin arms through and unlock it.
I would definitely have fun with that.
I’d test everything just for the sake of it.
Just got this notification, thanks for the great videos as always clive
Happy New Year Clive 🎉
Why did I look away after Clive turned on the lamp?? Silly me!
Also, Clive is on fire in the comments.
It's not a bad habit/reflex to have... Just remember that IRL reflexes off walls/ceiling/ objects can get you too😭
Thank you BC 👌👏👏
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.
changed a hospital's UV unit, new bulbs, but had to retrieve my phone I left in the room during testing. Ended up with a strange tan, glad I at least had UV filtering sunglasses on. I do have better ones for my laser engraver.
Nice unit! Any rating on the sensor sensitivity over time? ones I worked with in the past in the day job changed quite a lot over time. (as did the UVC tube emissions). It was kind of a moving target but we were trying to ensure consistent emissions and calibration method for a therapeutic device over time. Cheers!
No tear down? What makes it chooch?
I’ve just got arc eyes watching this video Clive 😂😂😂
Teardown (non-destructive) to see what's inside?
not much....
@@muppetpaster well, probably a known well-specced photodiode operating in photovoltaic (shorted) mode with a transimpedance amplifier, but still, could be interesting!
Just two days ago I got an email from ebay for a product recall of one of these lamps. Apparently it emits unhealthy amounts of UVC. Who would have thought?! Too bad there's very likely no one there who cares, because I would like to tell them that that's exactly the reason why I bought the lamp.
(I used the ozone to get rid of smells in basement rooms that got too humid in the summer; I put the lamp into a metal can so almost no UVC gets out, but with vent holes for the ozone; it pretty much worked as expected)
Please, can you share the UVC lamp link?
What, no schematic? No reverse engineering? I’m at a loss for words.
The UVA blinded me through my phone lol
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.
"We're not idiots"
Clive are you sure about that
Unfortunately there are quite a lot of them.
Thanks for the tan, I needed that.
Btw ….How is Naomi ?
Naomi is fine. I should drop her an email.
Does this mean you will be retiring your aromatic seared palm detector?
*Is this live?* - proceeds to test it with the knuckle of his finger. :D
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.
Can you check some regular florescent lights while you're at it? I'm curious about how complete the conversion from UV to visible light is.
The standard glass of those tubes blocks the UVC wavelengths.
"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.
"Do not gaze upon the turquoise forbidden light"
What are you measuring? mW?
Good to see that spectacle lenses block UVC, does that go for all lenses, or just plastic/just glass?
It actually requires high purity glass to be able to pass UVC. Most will block it.
222nm uvc is said to be safe and still germicidal.
Almost an essential tool for clubs these days, what with the stories of staff accidentally installing UVC in them...
Thanks :)
What happen to Naomi Wu? her yt ch. last ported back in 23
China happened l heard. She can leave, but not some people that she cares for, and they were using that against her.
She's lying low for political reasons.
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.
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.
How is it actually surprising though that the uvc lamps are so cheap? I mean, aren't they just common fluorescent lights without the phosphore coating?
The tube is quartz, not glass. Glass would block the very wavelength it's supposed to emit.
I think they are popular in China and they may have a lot of excess stock from the peak of the pandemic.
Have you ever made a 13 pin trailer tester that uses an arduino or similar to remotely send the signals to a phone app?
You do get trailer lighting connector testers that have a cluster of LEDs for direct display.
A device that keeps "germicidal" lamp makers honest.
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.
DON'T LOOK AT THE LIGHT ! I can't help it, it's SO0oo.. beautiful....
Would true UVC LEDs work as photo voltaic detectors for a DIY detector?
Possibly. I should test that.
So will this light keep bread or cheese from going moldy?
UVC is used in industrial bread machines to sterilise them.
Trace ozone will control bread mold.
Have you ever experienced any UVC exposure sympthoms after recording videos like this?
Yes. One where I had to do multiple takes with a powerful tube, I did wake up with slight eye irritation one night. It was fine by the morning.
@bigclivedotcom Sounds good. Btw, i saw a video of you testing UVC lamps with a cheap UVA/UVB sensor. Is that also kind of reliable to measure UVC output of a lamp?
@@albysHub2006 It was a crude improvised way during the pandemic.
Would be interesting to put it through a spectrometer - if your glasses block UVA there must be something else or you wouldn't have been able to see it... No?
There are a few weak bands in the visible spectrum that give the distinctive turquoise glow. the prominent UVC wavelengths are invisible to the human eye.
"is it live?" i'll just poke it. lol
Speaking of UV transmittance tests I shone my amazing UVA torch at a very fluorescent piece of plastic with various glasses in between and surprisingly my prescription sunglasses don't filter all of it while my clear prescription glasses do.
According to the seller the sunglasses should filter UV but I wonder how rigorous my test actually is, LOL.
Any idea clive ?
you cant technically see UVA (365nm etc), the purple glow you see is not UV the same way the Cyan glow here is not UVC these are just the stray wavelengths being emitted. but you can see some near UV wavelengths like 395nm but they appear rather blurry. the only true wav to test would be to shine the torch through the glass onto a uv detector card ir a uv meter.
@@pvim I know UVA is invisible.
In fact the flashlight I'm talking about is the exact same one Clive featured in this and another video.
It comes with a ZWB1 filter that blocks pretty much all visible light and when I'm saying that I use a glowing piece of plastic I mean it's only the invisible UVA that's making it glow.
So of I shine the light directly at that plastic it glows BRIGHTLY.
If I put my transparent prescription glasses in between it doesn't glow at all and same with my ski mask.
If however I put my sunglasses in between it doesn't glow as brightly as if there was nothing however it's still more than with the clear glasses.
Hope that makes sense.
@@psirvent8hmm i see, some sunglasses dont block UV fully they are just polarised generally cheaper ones or ones specialised for such (this can be nore harmful than wearing no glasses in some cases), also your prescription glasses must have a coating to block all UV since normal glass should let UVA pass, this is common with prescription glasses.