Separating the science from the silly is one of the things I like to turn my attention to every now and again. Luckily there’s no shortage of silly out there to work on. When I started researching water I was amazed at how many people thought they needed an ionizer and how little was generally understood about the purpose of ionization.It reminds me a bit of some of the remedies from the turn of the 19th century when they used to make beds with an electrical current running through them to promote fertility, or drank radioactive solutions of radium to promote good health. Electrical engineers and physicists of the day tried in vain to tell people that there was nothing magical about electricity, even if it could make a mixer turn without anyone cranking it. But to a public that had grown up with horse drawn carriages, electricity was poorly understood so there was no shortage of unscrupulous people willing to capitalize on their ignorance.Now today if you tell a man that mild electrocution will increase his health and virility, he’ll justifiably tell you you’re an idiot. But the same man will happily spend $1,200 on a water ionizer to make him healthy. What our hypothetical man doesn’t realize is that an ion is just an atom or molecule with an electric charge.When a particle picks up or loses an electron, leaving it with more or less electrons than protons, we call it an ion. Ions will naturally seek to return to a state of electrical neutrality by either grabbing an electron from a surrounding particle or giving an electron up to a surrounding particle. That’s it, no magic…just chemistry.Ions will not make you calmer, they will not make the water healthier, and they won’t cure cancer. They’re simply a poorly understood phenomenon that gets sighted in the techno-babble of way too many sci-fi movies. “The answer’s simple captain, we’ll just reverse the polarity of the ion stream.”

“Now wait a minute!” you might say, “didn’t I just see an air purifier that uses ions being sold on this very website? Didn’t you just tell me that ions are useless?” I told you they’re not magical. Just as electricity is a pretty good way to drive a motor or light a light bulb, ions are real and useful for a limited scope of applications. The superoxide ions produced by the air purifiers are oxygen molecules with an extra electron. That extra electron is not going to cure your diseases, nor will it fill your home with a harmonious sense of well-being.

It will, however, grab onto carbon in a desperate bid to become electrically neutral and do it in such a way that it will tend to pull bacteria, viruses, mold spores, and those bad smelling volatile organic compounds, right apart. It will also cling to dust and pollen the same way it clings to your T.V. screen. With the added weight, they will settle right out of the air. In fact, recent research has shown superoxide ion production in your body to be one of the key mechanisms behind how your own antibodies fight disease and may one day allow us to create a universal antibiotic that can treat any bacterial infection. Of course that’s still a long way off. Our air purifiers just clean the air. But they clean the air exceedingly well—like no other air purifiers I can find—which is why I own two of them and think you should too.

Airwise Air Purifiers