Question about ozone exposure from an ionic breeze, help please?

Question

My mother had an ionic breeze running in the basement all night long on the highest setting. Though the basement is somewhat large, there is no air circulation down there to disperse or diffuse the ozone produced by the "air purifier" as the air conditioning is currently malfunctioning.

I was down there for approximately a half hour when my nose began to burn, and it was at this point that I immediately thought to ascertain whether or not the ionic breeze was on. Seeing that it was, I promptly returned upstairs and the pain in my nose subsided and eventually abated.

I'm asking this because I'm curious if I could, feasibly, have been inhaling unhealthy amounts of ozone - and if so, could my lungs, olfactory lobe in my brain, or any other internal organ have sustained cell damage?

Answer 1

I once was working with a high voltage power supply when the power supply developed a very small short circuit. Anyway, it started making ozone at the short (by a very similar mechanism to your purifier).

Whats interesting is this was quite a major workplace incident when some big purifiers probably matched it's output.

In theory, ozone damage to the cells lining your nasal pathways could indeed be responsible for your temporary pain.

However it should be pointed out that people are very sensitive to smelling ozone. We can smell at conc. as low as 0.02ppm-0.2ppm dependent on the person. A general safe limit is 0.5ppm. So if you didn't smell it your probably okay.

In case you don't know the smell. Ozone has a clean refreshing smell at low levels (like air after a thunderstorm). At higher levels it's very sharp and unpleasant and altogether ones of life's run away from the badness moments.

If you search wrongdiagnosis.com for ozone you'll find a story of the dangers of ozone.