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The complete junk business of pool ozone generators

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peter-h:
This is a very old topic. I used to run a pool in the 1990s and used the then popular Teledyne Laars ozone generators. They were very expensive junk; burnt out every year or so. Since then, on another installation, I have used various others, most recently a Prozone one, which is also expensive junk.

They use two main principles.

The powerful ones (Teledyne) just do a corona discharge into an air stream passing through them. These fail by carbonisation of the various insulators, which shorts out the inverter output and - being a crap design - blows up the inverter.

The less powerful ones use a UV source to make ozone in the air inside the box, and you pass air through the box. These fail by the UV tube burning out, which usually blows up the inverter :) These pics shows the failed tube in a Prozone unit - also an expensive piece of junk despite being made in the US




The problem is no matter what one buys, it is ALL junk. It is as if there was a parallel universe where everybody making stuff is useless and the customers just pay whatever... $1k/year for replacing this junk.

I am wondering whether one should simply buy a UV lamp, of the type which makes ozone, like this



(most of these are just UV; you have to get a specific type that makes ozone, but they look the same)

and when that blows up you just unscrew it and screw in a new one.

Is there some better way to make ozone, which is more reliable?




coppercone2:
well you won't be doing anything with the tube, at best you can run more tubes at lower power, if this is possible, and add a circuit which detects tube failure and prevents it from being destructive, so higher quality inverters.

tom66:
I don't think you could submerge a tube like that in the eBay auction (as it's a CFL with a built in inverter) so you'd need to find a separate inverter and tube combo, or a good old magnetic ballast that will survive nuclear armageddon.

peter-h:
The tube is not submerged. It merely has air passing by it. The air is drawn via a venturi on one of the pipes with water pumped, so there is suction.

The thing I don't get is that all this stuff is such junk and the users just keep paying, and nobody has looked at doing it properly.

I reckon, if you use a separate inverter (i.e. not buying one of the chinese UV tubes which have the inverter in the base) then a tube with terminations spaced further apart would last much longer.

rhodges:
Maybe a neon sign pro could make you something with the right voltage and gas?

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