Is breathing ozone air from air purifiers good or bad for your health?
Well, that depends on who you’re listening to. If you listen to the ozone air purifier salesman, he’ll claim that breathing ozone air from air purifiers is “good” and safe.
However, if you listen to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Consumer Reports, the answer is definitely “bad!” As far as the experts are concerned, breathing ozone air from air purifiers is harmful to human health. Here’s why.
Ozone is an irritant and breathing it in can worsen asthma and cause coughing, wheezing and chest pains. It also deadens your sense of smell, raises your sensitivity to pollen and mold and may even be responsible for permanent lung damage.
In fact, Consumer Reports, the EPA, Canada and some U.S. states have issued warnings against ozone from air purifiers. For example, California warns, “People should avoid using indoor air cleaning devices that produce ozone.”
Ozone is a highly effective killer that oxidizes whatever it comes into contact with. Sure, ozone kills bacteria and mold, but it’s also the same molecule responsible for the free radicals that can cause heart disease, cancer and premature aging.
Now, I’m not saying that breathing ozone air from air purifiers will kill you, but ozone is definitely not something you want to voluntarily breathe into your lungs. There’s just too much evidence against it.
However, ozone generator marketers say their machines are approved by the government. That’s simply not true. Air purifiers fall into a bureaucratic crack where there are no regulations. According to the EPA, a registration number on the packaging “does NOT imply EPA endorsement or suggest in any way that the EPA has found the product to be either safe or effective.”
Another sales pitch is that you can keep an ozone air purifier on low and only turn it up until you smell a “fresh laundry odor.” But as you breathe it in, you quickly become desensitized to the ozone smell. And keeping the setting on low, doesn’t eliminate the problem, it only makes the air from an ozone air purifier a little less dangerous.
How do these marketers get away with making such outrageous claims? Easy! Since ozone generators have no regulation, salespeople can say anything and everything they want, in order to sell their product. There’s no one to stop them.
As you can see, you should be concerned about breathing ozone air from air purifiers. There are other safer more effective choices available.
When you consider all the options, a HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) purifier with an additional activated charcoal filter is your best option. The HEPA system combined with a charcoal filter works like a sponge soaking up offensive cooking, tobacco and pet odors, as well as being 99.9% effective at eliminating airborne allergens down to 0.3 microns in size. That’s small. There are over 600 microns in the period at the end of this sentence.
A HEPA system with a charcoal filter provides the best benefits, with no risk of breathing ozone air from air purifiers.