Xtar a company primarily known for it’s battery chargers and batteries along with a few other things such as flashlights, has a new product, and a new category for them. In front of me I have the Xtar AF1 Portable ozone generator.
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Ozone Disclaimer
Ozone isn’t super safe and before you use an ozone generator you need to be aware of how to safely use it. It can cause eye and lung irritation as well as difficulty breathing in higher concentrations. You shouldn’t use an ozone generator in the same room or space as people or pets are in, and then make sure you thoroughly ventilate the space after the treatment is done to dissipate any remaining Ozone. Ozone is heavier then air so it tends to collect at the lowest point in the room. I would encourage you to do your own research if you do decide to buy any ozone generator.
Tell a few Specs
The AF1 is a small portable Ozone generator that’s 2.74” in diameter, 1.4” thick and weighs 3.7oz. It has an internal lithium polymer battery so it can be run without AC power, or you can hook it up with the included USB-A to USB-C cable to a power source (It supports USB-C to C) for longer runtimes. It’s made of aluminum with a metal grill on top. If you look carefully you can see the small single plate ozone generator inside in the middle.
On the bottom you have a nice set of specs that tell you charging current (4.2V @ 0.38A), and a rated power of 3W. The AF1 has 4 modes that each put out ozone to treat a certain size space.
- Mode 1 – 0.01m3
- Mode 2 – 0.1m3
- Mode 3 – 0.5m3
- Mode 4 – 3m3
UI
I find the UI here frustrating, it’s simple but I just have trouble getting it to work reliably. You long press to turn it on and then it blinks the power level to you. The easiest thing to do is just to let it go and in about 3 seconds it turns on to the lowest mode, you then quick press the button to go up in modes. Long press to turn off. It works fine but is a little counter intuitive, when it’s blinking I want to press the button again to start the generation but it doesn’t work this way.
Conclusion
This is a bit of a tricky one to make a conclusion for. The AF1 definitely generates ozone, but it’s not a ton, it will struggle with trying to improve odors in a room, or moderately sized car in my experience. I wish you could hook it up to a power source and it would run until the power source was depleted or if you had an AC adapter it was unplugged, however that’s not the case, so when I ran it in a car, with a large capacity battery or an AC adapter plugged into a wall outlet it ran for 2 and a half hours before shutting off via a timer. The internal battery is nice especially on lesser settings in small situations. The large Ozone generators you can buy online for about $75 produce orders of magnitude more ozone and these are more appropriate for larger spaces like rooms or entire cars with strong odors like smoking.
https://i.imgur.com/sBYOHvN.jpg
The better use for the AF1 I think are small applications, deodorizing a gym bag, putting it in a shoe box or plastic bag with smelly shoes etc. A large plastic tote filled with hunting gear you want to get rid of the human scent etc. Here the AF1 can produce enough ozone in a small enclosed space to actually make a difference especially if your running it for a few cycles hooked up to a large battery.The EPA doesn’t recommend Ozone as a method to kill viruses currently, so I don’t recommend it for that. One application I plan to try is use in my refrigerator as that’s a popular use of ozone too at low rates.
An low power ozone generator is probably something most people don’t need but something I think many would find useful.
Pick it up on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3dkyl6v