How does ozone smell and when can you smell it?

Question

How does ozone smell and when can you smell it?

Answer 1

It smells like sparks. Old time amusement parks had electric bumper cars, and ozone always hung heavy in the air around them.  If you really want to know, you could take a small battery (NOT a car battery!) and sacrifice it by taking a wire and short-circuiting between the terminals to make sparks.  Again, use something small, like a 9 volt battery, it's dangerous to short large batteries.

Answer 2

It smells like burning electrical equipment or wires. You can smell it when around active heavy electrical motors. It is generated around the rotors and sparking brushes.

Also when flying thru the lowering ozone layer around the poles above 30,000 feet you can smell the ozone coming thru the engines and bleed air into the cabin. Not healthy...

Pat---

Answer 3

Every home has small electric motors with brushes, like blenders and small drills, after a few seconds of those motors running, you can smell the "acidic", chlorine like smell.

there are ozone generators to be put in electric sockets, just like bulbs at home, those generators are used in grain deposits, ozone is an excelent insecticide and leaves no negative effects or residues for human after its use.

Answer 4

Um, it's hard to describe the smell of ozone exactly.  It has a chemical smell similar to chlorine, but is more "electrical" or "metallic" to the nose (well, my nose anyway).

I've smelled it in several places:  indoors where people use those ionic air purifiers (they create ozone, which is ironic since ozone is an air pollutant down here at the ground), and outdoors in summer when we have high ozone air pollution (from cars).  They say you can sometimes smell it around electrical equipment like toasters, or anything that makes a spark, but I haven't noticed the ozone smell with these sources.

Answer 5

It smells watery to me.  Its the smell in advance of a storm.....

when you can "smell" the rain.  Electric motors DO create

ozone but that metallic smell is not it.  Ozone is O3 (little 3)

oxygen we breathe is O2 so its possible ozone doesn't even

HAVE a smell.

Answer 6

It is a metallic smell and for good reason.    Read the site below to get a better sense of smell.. w/ Ozone/