SIonic Breeze

[Ocelaris]

Thought this might interest some people, I got the idea a while back, but somebody posted on clubrsx about it, so I figured I'd show them what's up with the EP3ers... cost me 25$ for these negative Ion generators (ionizers)... and about 3 hours.

[Ocelaris]

these are the pins... basically a negative ion generator is like a very high voltag, low amp power supply... static electricity or negative ions fly from the pins and attach to particles in the air and drag them down... or it appears as you'll see later that my vents make a static electricity field which all the dust sticks to instead of flying through the air... cigarette smoke is actually drawn into the vents (where the ion pins are) quite quickly just to show that it is working...

[Ocelaris]

uno mas

[Ocelaris]

ein kleiner bild

[Ocelaris]

Finito (is that italian?)

[Ocelaris]

looking into the vents... you can feel the static changes coming through the vents...

[Ocelaris]

And one beautiful hungarian assistant to help you hold the wires while you solder with a 300w soldering iron over your 300$ Headunit :-) (my fiancee) I'll admit it, she did more than half the work of the install, and all of the thinking :)

[Heitzke]

All i can say is wow. My mind is blown, boggled, and intrigued at the same time. Clean breathing air in my favorite place is a beautiful thing. Big ups.

[swapp99]

Very cool. I have a small plug in Ion generator one from Brookstone that I use. I have a couple of questions for ya: what is the part number and where did you get it from, do they have bigger ones, is there any heat comming from the power thingy, do ya need to clean the pins? Thanks. I love the negative Ion stuff.. I have a Ionic Breeze from SHARPER IMAGE which I can't live with out!

[chubbychu]

im still not sure what this does....???

[Ocelaris]

http://forums.clubrsx.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=90488

This is where the thread started, but I cut and paste most of the good info I put there...

The ionic breeze thing that you are looking at is simply a negative ion generator... you can get them for like 12$ online and mount them behind your air vents, have a switch to turn them on/off... But Negative ion generators won't get rid of the smell, all they do is put out ions which "stick" to particles in the air and drag them down. The side effect is some ion generators are powerful enough to create some ozone, which is 1000x more powerful than the chlorine they use in pools. Ozone will also make you stupid, but will clean out the smell of anything. If you want a quick clean out of the smell, you can take it to some detailing shops and they have huge ozonizers which can desmell your car in an hour. Or you can get a small ozonizer at a pool supply store and run that through your air vents (it needs something to suction out the ozon) for a couple hours, and smell = gone.
ok, so I bit the bullet and charged it...

http://sales.goldmine-elec.com/prodinfo.asp?prodid=2149


"ionizers" are actually just negative ion generators. Which means basically that they throw off electrons. They electronically make what you could think of as static electricity, extremely high voltage, and very small current. If you've ever seen one of those static electricity balls that makes your hair stand on end, or make a blue spark across two contact points, that is high voltage, low current.

What happens is electrons are thrown off because they're in such great abundance when you have such high voltage (which is what the pins on an ion generator are for). The negative ions or electrons have great affinity for all sorts of particles, and the ions attach and now because they have a electric charge, like static electricity, make the particle attach to any surface which has a charge, like your windows or plastic dash. It works by purifying the air through basically dragging down particles in the air. Think of it as making static electricity in the air which makes dirt particles stick to something.

If you're handy with electronics, try those links I posted on the first page, 12$ for a single unit. and the unit has 5 pins. The radio shack and sharper image ones have maybe 1 pin, and I don't even consider those effective at doing anything. I'm very skeptical as it is to the effectivness of negative ion generators as a real way to purify the air, but I don't mind dropping 25$ to put them in my car to give it a try. But certainly I wouldn't put 50$ into a dinky cig lighter 1 pin negative ion gen. There's alot of hype, and it seems all a magical thing, but just think of static electricity, and how dirt stuck to your balloon after you rubbed it on your head... that's what these things do.
The neg ion generators have a transformer which ramps the voltage up way high...

if anyone is interested in the field of static electricity / neg ion generators are in there as well:

http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/emotor/statelec.html

If you're really interested, please come back and verify the info i gave above, I believe all of it is factually true, but could be misleading, that is just my interpretation of what's happening.

Yes, that's exactly how a negative ion generator works, the particles stick to the first available item around that has a static charge, so your plastic dash, glass windows etc... is probably where the particles will end up. The professional use for these ionizers is to get a metal grill and instead of using the needles to send the ions out, spread the ions out over that grill and then the particles attach to the grill... Like think of your air filter, if you were to put a grill over that and then charged it with negative ions (like the needles are), you would then trap the particles on the grill or air filter... That's how a household static (negative ion) filter works.

[Ocelaris]

Originally posted by swapp99
I have a small plug in Ion generator one from Brookstone that I use. I have a couple of questions for ya: what is the part number and where did you get it from, do they have bigger ones, is there any heat comming from the power thingy, do ya need to clean the pins? Thanks. I love the negative Ion stuff.. I have a Ionic Breeze from SHARPER IMAGE which I can't live with out!

link above for where to get them.

bigger? no, but you can add multiple ones.

clean the pins? doh... yeah, at some point I think you do, should've thought about that before... all the household ones I have have some sort of mechanism for cleaning the pins, I need to still incorporate a LED so I know when it's on or off... so maybe I'll figure out howto clean them too...

heat from the power supplies? Not a significant issue, not that much current being pulled. I mean, I'm sure it gets a little warm, but it's hermetically sealed with like epoxy, so I'm assuming heat is no issue.

Yeah, you'll be pleased to know these ion generators cost like 12.50 a piece as opposed to the much smaller plug in ones... You might be able to incorporate a better design, the ions seem to be sorta trapped behind the vents, just sorta sets up a static field around the vents, I think... but I'll be honest, I smoke cigarettes, and rarely if ever have my windows closed to use the things, so they might be very useful, unfortunately I was a very poor candidate to be the first to get one! But smoke from the cigarettes is quickly drawn into the vents when I put my cig close to them... so it is doing something, I've just not done any extensive use or testing...

[swapp99]

Ocelaris Thanks for the info. I will give this a try. One thought comes to mind... I might try to incorporate this to the air filter system hummmm.. the one behind our glove box..so when it is under the air recycle mode it may work better or I may just build a sperate housing to fit under the dash, so it can be cleaned. I also wonder if the pins can be nodified to bigger plates like the one's on the Ionic breeze in my room..well not that big..hehe. i will also try putting a LED light and a on/off switch. Yes I also smoke and keep the windows down. The smell that is generated from the Ionic Breeze... I get addicted to the way it make the air really crisp...weird huh...
:p

[Ocelaris]

yeah, I was thinking about trying to incorporate the ion generators into the filtering system somehow, maybe a wire mesh screen placed over the air filter, the only problem is that the filters are like two seperate filters... My house's air filter has a wire mesh screen that sandwiches two layers of foam pads, assuming some sort of electrical charge is built up on the grid and/or foam... Also maybe just cutting out charcoal filter pads to fit inside the air filters... just some ideas.

But does the inside air recirculate come from under the dash? when I cleaned my air filters last week they had all sorts of rubbish from outside, like twigs and berries sort of outdoorsy stuf... so I'm wondering if the air filters only work for outside air?

[swapp99]

DAMN!! We gots too much time on our hands:D :D
Yeah I was wondering about the air filter also.
Keep me informed of what you find out.