You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

By Jeff Kaufman 🔸 @ 2025-12-13T13:11 (+93)

Far-UVC is something people have talked about for years in a "that would be great, if you could buy it" sort of way. Coming soon, once someone actually makes a good product. But the future is now, and it costs $500.

Many diseases spread through the air, which is inconvenient for us as creatures that breathe air. You can go outside, where the air is too dilute to spread things well, but it's cold out there, and sometimes wet. You can run an air purifier, but cleaning lots of air without lots of noise is still the world of DIY projects. Ideally you could just shine some light, perhaps in the 222-nm range, which would leave people alone but kill the viruses [1] and bacteria. Yes, let's do that!

Last year if you asked "if far-UV is so great, why isn't it everywhere?" one of your answers would be:

There are very few providers, and hardly any of them sell an off-the-shelf product. You usually can't just buy a lamp to try it out—you have to call the company, get a consultation, and often have someone from the company come install the lamp. It's a lot of overhead for an expensive product that most people have never heard of.

This has changed! You can buy an Aerolamp for $500, shipped. Proudly displayed at Thanksgiving:

Here are four silently cleaning a whole lot of air at a dance I help organize:

At $500 this is out of (my) Christmas gift range, but I think we're now at the point where dances, churches, offices, rationalist group houses, schools, etc. should consider them.

(I have no stake in Aerolamp and they're not paying me, I'm just very excited about their product.)


[1] Ok, yes, I know viruses "can't be killed" because they're "not alive", but far-UVC causes them to become unable to infect and replicate which is close enough to "killed" for me.

Nathan Young @ 2025-12-15T10:10 (+5)

@Gavriel Kleinwaks (who works in this area) Gives her recommendation. When asked whether she "backed" them:

I do! (Not in the financial sense, tbc.) But just want to flag that my endorsement is confounded. Basically, Aerolamp uses the design of the nonprofit referenced in my post, OSLUV, and most of my technical info about far-UV comes from a) Aerolamp cofounder Viv Belenky and b) OSLUV. I've been working with Viv and OSLUV for a couple of years, long before the founding of Aerolamp, and trust their information, but you should know that my professional opinion is highly correlated with theirs—1Day Sooner doesn't have the equipment to do independent testing.

I think it's the ideal outcome that a bunch of excellent researchers took a look at the state of the field and made their own product. So I'm not too worried about relying on this team's info, but you should just have that context.

Fwiw, Mox (moxsf.com), run by Austin Chen, has installed a couple of Aerolamps and they were easy to set up and are running smoothly.

NickLaing @ 2025-12-13T13:45 (+5)

EDIT: Basically answered here... https://aerolamp.net/pages/faq

Lazy question What big an area can one $500 UVC cover? Do those 4 in the dance room genuinely clean the whole area?

Surely to be actually mass-practical we need one that can just be a lightbulb and attach to a regular fitting? Obviously it must be harder than all that,,,,

Jeff Kaufman 🔸 @ 2025-12-13T14:47 (+2)

How big an area they cover depends on how long the sight lines are: the more air the light can travel through the more it can clean. It's not linear, though, and there are different effects for different pathogens because some are quickly inactivated with low levels of UVC and others need more. The modeling tool Illuminate can be very useful here; here's something I wrote up when I was figuring out what made sense for the dance hall: Assessing Far UVC Positioning.

Manuel Allgaier @ 2025-12-19T07:51 (+4)

Cool! 

Could be a worthwhile home investment for particularly immunocompromised people too. 

I sent this to a friend who had really bad covid several times. 

Tessa A 🔸 @ 2025-12-18T11:51 (+4)

Thanks for the post! On faruvc.org, you say:

Far-UVC is most valuable in crowded indoor spaces where people spend extended time together. Because it is based on light, it also has the strongest advantages over alternative methods like air purifiers in larger rooms, where beams of light can travel further.

The two lamps you recommend on that site are Aerolamp (500 USD for one lampp) and Nukit Torch (345 USD for 4 smaller lamps). Do you have any sense of:

  1. What kinds of rooms would be better cleaned by the 4 smaller lamps vs. the 1 larger lamp (and whether that's the most salient difference between Aerolamp and Nukit)?
  2. When it would be better to invest in a Far-UVC lamp vs. a high-CADR air purifier? I think HouseFresh is fairly trusted as a review site ― to be more concrete, who would you recommend buy a CleanAirKits Luggable over a UVC lamp?
jvb @ 2025-12-25T03:10 (+17)

The Nukit torches put together have about half the output of Aerolamp. I expect Nukit (and most other non-USHIO KrCl bulbs) to last about 1-2k hours while Aerolamp should last 10k-14k hours. All published at reports.osluv.org

There's no other salient differences. Multiple small lamps spread out the light more and might be easier to set up portably, and might be safer in low-ceilinged (<8ft) spaces. But in terms of value for money, the output and lifetime differences are much more important imo. If you plan to use the lamps rarely (like at one-off events, a few times a year ar a few hours at a time) then the torches may make more sense.

I estimate that an Aerolamp in a 250 sqft room will deliver about 1000 CFM CADR with respect to flu/covid, while a high-quality air purifier will deliver ~250 quietly or ~400 loudly. So an Aerolamp is roughly twice as cost effective on a $/CFM basis (in quiet mode) or on par (in loud mode). 

That being said--and I say this as an Aerolamp founder--absolutely, absolutely get an air purifier first, and a far-UVC lamp as an additional supplement. I like the Levoit 200S personally. For one thing all estimates of far-UVC efficacy are based on the assumption of a well-mixed room--an air purifier will provide that, eliminate any air chemistry concerns from the UVC, and will provide other health benefits as well. 

Jeff Kaufman 🔸 @ 2025-12-18T13:11 (+4)

What kinds of rooms would be better cleaned by the 4 smaller lamps vs. the 1 larger lamp (and whether that's the most salient difference between Aerolamp and Nukit)?

I think the biggest difference between the Aerolamp and Nukit is the bulb: the Aerolamp uses a Care222 bulb which I expect to last much longer.

When it would be better to invest in a Far-UVC lamp vs. a high-CADR air purifier? I think HouseFresh is fairly trusted as a review site ― to be more concrete, who would you recommend buy a CleanAirKits Luggable over a UVC lamp?

It depends on how important it is to you to minimize noise, and how big the room is (since filter-based purifiers clean a given amount of air per minute while UVC depends on the size of the space). https://illuminate.osluv.org/ is not super user-friendly, but will calculate the CADR-equivalent for you of a given UVC setup.

Eli Rose🔸 @ 2025-12-13T22:16 (+2)

Wow awesome thanks for letting me know!