PhoneSoap Charger

[A.D.A.M]

Considering I don't lick, or indeed eat off of, my mobile devices, I'm really failing to see how this product is useful for me. If I was really desperate to have a sterile phone, I'd just use some isopropanol, which I have lying around anyway.

 

You're a "medical graduate" who doesn't know how to spell "Petri"?

Wikipedia says its sometime spelled like that,: "A Petri dish (sometimes spelled "Petrie dish" and alternatively known as a Petri plate or cell-culture dish".... 

[FullNuclearBreakfast]

Wikipedia says its sometime spelled like that,: "A Petri dish (sometimes spelled "Petrie dish" and alternatively known as a Petri plate or cell-culture dish".... 

Well I look like an idiot now don't I

[KaareKanin]

I really like the new style of intro you have going on!

[pizzadave2]

This product is on the same level of dumb as hand sanitizer.

[razvan_and]

No, this product is on antibacterial-soap-dumb-level.

1. There are cheaper baby product sanitizer kits, that also use UV.

2. Even if it would sterilize your phone (it doesn't), your phone still has dirt/skin grease/"poop" on it, that you have to clean anyway. Alcohol is better (isopropyl or ethanol) and faster. I wipe my phone once-twice a week with cotton wool and sanitary alcohol (70 % ethanol), than I wipe it with an absorbent paper tissue.

3. If you have a Galaxy S5 or Xperia Z1, 2, 3 you can clean it with dish soap and water (if you really want to).

[VintageCake]

hey everyone.

 

just watched the video and i saw some concerning stuff about your testing.

and yes i do realise that you are not pros and this is not a rant about that, i would just like to point out things that were dangerous for your team.

 

as a medical graduate i had a lot to do with agars and swabs and taking and reviewing samples, so i can tell you that opening a grown petrie dish

is VERY DANGEROUS AND SHOULD NEVER BE DONE. AFTER U GROW YOUR CULTURE YOU SHOULD BURN IT. specially because some pathogen bacteria that grow in there .. given the right surcumstances can grow in numbers so critical that if before the test there were not dangerous, if you increase the number of them can be very very bad for your health.

 

many of the so called california bacterias (fecal bacteria) that you grew in the petrie dish, can cause many serious issues if you inhale the spores, which fly away into the room after you open the dish.

 

so for your safety i would recommend not to open them.

 

love your reviews and i will continue to watch your wan show and other videos.. so please keep them coming.

i had similar concerns, bumping this

[ChrisCross]

we actually have a lab in our school where we did nearly the same thing. but instead we used saccharomycete (i hope google translator got that right). i built the plant and i can say theoretically that thing makes. because uv-c rays are absorpted by the air so that you cant just put your phone into the sun. but they transport more energy than uv-b or uv-a rays which means they are a higher thread bacteria. we tested if uv-c rays can kill bacteria and the results were quite impressive. with a 9W lamp it is possible to kill a whole plate in 2min. but the lights of the soap charger have actually a wavelength of round about 254nm what means for uv-c they are quite soft and non-aggressive. and when i look at the lamps they are cheap and i dont think they are more than a watt, what would make them nearly useless. when you use weak uv-rays you may better better the situation a bit but you will never get your phone clean and also when you dont kill nearly everything you risk to get bacteria on your phone that is a little more resistant to uv-rays.

by the way this is how higher powered uv-lamps look like. this is from  to right 5w, 7w and 9w.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20740327/Halogen%20UV-Lampen.jpg

[BenHTBDT]

Hey, science!

Just wanted to give a little feedback and respond to some utterly glaring scientifically wrong responses.

 

What a ridiculous product!

 

The UV light kills the poop but it's still there! I prefer my precious isopropyl alcohol (60 bucks ~2 gallons of isoprop on amazon).

 

Your testing methodology was rudimentary but not bad. You could've repeated the experiment 3 independant times for verification but i think the major problem is that you didn't use a sterile lab. Call me up next time for latter one.

 

You do not need a sterile lab or a biosafety cabinet to work with agar plates. Repeating it 3 times would have been helpful- but see below for my recommendation on a 3rd control - I think that also addresses your concern about the sterility..

 

 

hey everyone.

 

just watched the video and i saw some concerning stuff about your testing.

and yes i do realise that you are not pros and this is not a rant about that, i would just like to point out things that were dangerous for your team.

 

as a medical graduate i had a lot to do with agars and swabs and taking and reviewing samples, so i can tell you that opening a grown petrie dish

is VERY DANGEROUS AND SHOULD NEVER BE DONE. AFTER U GROW YOUR CULTURE YOU SHOULD BURN IT. specially because some pathogen bacteria that grow in there .. given the right surcumstances can grow in numbers so critical that if before the test there were not dangerous, if you increase the number of them can be very very bad for your health.

 

many of the so called california bacterias (fecal bacteria) that you grew in the petrie dish, can cause many serious issues if you inhale the spores, which fly away into the room after you open the dish.

 

so for your safety i would recommend not to open them.

 

love your reviews and i will continue to watch your wan show and other videos.. so please keep them coming.

 

This is just plain wrong. Agar plates are not dangerous unless you put something dangerous on them. It's a considerably different circumstance with plates in a medical setting due to the origin of the bacteria, but just growing cultures of a swab of his phone is NOT dangerous.

 

You need not burn them, or be worried about opening them. Try not to lick them.

 

Obviously, ideally you'd want to autoclave them after use before putting them in the garbage. You probably don't have one. You can put them in boiling water if you're really paranoid, but honestly, there's little difference between an agar plate with this kind of swab and rotten food.

 

Not trying to call you out, but spreading incorrect "let's freak out when there's no reason to freak out" information like the above is actually considerably harmful. I can understand if you worked in a medical lab and you simply misunderstood why that applied to you then, but does not apply in general.

 

 

How would this compare to just using rubbing alcohol?

 Isopropyl alcohol IS rubbing alcohol. But he used a higher concentration than is actually useful. Higher is not better! Using 70% Ethanol (not more, as the bacteria are able to survive) or 70-75% Isopropyl alcohol would have been ideal. Using the higher concentration prevents the alcohol from actually penetrating a lot of the cells, and allows them to live.

 

-----------------

 

I wanted to give some serious feedback regarding the experiment, so here goes:

 

• 1. The 99% isopropanol shown in the video probably did not clean as well as you think it did, use industry standard 70-75%.
• 2. i would have liked to have seen a negative control used. Basically, clean with ~70% isopropanol, let dry, and immediately swab and do a plate of that.
• 3. The plates shouldnt grow for more than 24 hours. After that point you have a serious risk of get outside bacteria to get in and grow. You only want to see colonies of the bacteria that were present in "large" numbers on the phone, not tiny colonies that just happened to get in other ways and had time to grow like crazy.

I think the reason they used the "spray culture" was because it was a antibiotic resistant vector, so they could grow it up in plates with antibiotic, so *only* that bacteria would grow. That allowed them to actually determine whether the phone soak works or not, because random outside bacteria wouldn't be able to grow (for example, if they had just been on the plate already).

 

I love that you guys branched out to do some science!

[KamiKatze]

schnipp

 

 

I do agree that i liked the science approach!

 

The experiment would've obviously been better with one of these bad boys (and the rest of the equipment)

 

 

 

But then again, do we really need to go that hard on the fence about a $60 product?

 

 

If you wanted to work with antibiotics, you would need a certein bacteria colony to "infect" the phone with in the first place. Working without antibiotics is better 95% of the time.

[PabloSG]

What kind of agar were you using? it could be any bacteria or fungus not only the fecal ones.

[4Strings]

I usually clean my phone with 70% isopropyl swabs (the kind for sterilizing blood-sugar testers) about twice a week....

[ygohome]

so after this product kills the bacteria and germs, are they just sitting there on my phone still?  Dead, but still there... touching your face.

[Jephrey]

I'm no expert on this but I do know that when I interned at a biochemical lab, we always cultivated cells in absolutely sterile environments in order prevent contamination. Even touching certain things within a sterile environment could cause contamination so there was a lot of care in handling the cells. It is a possibility that some of the bacteria did not come from the clean phone but instead, from the surrounding environment. Also, it doesn't matter how many bacterial colonies were on the algar since some bacteria is good. The main focus should be to identify how much harmful bacteria is on the dish. These are the only problems I have with the testing methodology. Obviously, it would be really difficult for you guys to address this and I'm impressed you guys even performed your own tests at all. 

[afevans2]

so after this product kills the bacteria and germs, are they just sitting there on my phone still?  Dead, but still there... touching your face.

It kills bacteria by inducing the formation of Pyrimidine dimers with in the organisms DNA. This overwhelms normal repair mechanisms and kills the organism. So yes they are dead, touching your face, and most likely so common in your day to day environment that they are already all over your face, clothes, and everything else you come in contact with on a day to day basis.

 

These UV sterilizers were created to sterilize lab and surgical equipment to prevent contamination of specific environments (human body, anaerobic chambers, media..ect) and eliminate experimental variables. Any one with mysophobia would be better served by regular cleaning with ethanol. That way you would at least remove the sweat, dirt, and cell debris that the bacterial would be feeding off of.

[SMURG]

Biomedical scientist here.

The issue with the testing methodology you used was that in a microbiology lab the environment is kept sterile - at the very least work is done near a naked flame to eliminate aerosolised microbes as far as possible. If you just made some agar, left it open for a few minutes and then put the lid back on and cultivated it, you'd see bacterial growth all the same because bacteria are ubiquitous in our environment. At the same time, chances are if you had a trained microbiologist look at your plates you'd find that a lot of the stuff you cultivated was harmless anyway - I personally think I spotted some E. coli (which are normally harmless depending on the strain, and can be identified from the distinctive smell as much as anything else) as well as some fungal growth as well. Not that I recommend cultivating them though, since if you do manage to grow something nasty then having it in high concentration in close proximity to you like that is probably bad. Really you're supposed to keep the lids on until you have adequate protection before removing them, and then after you've done whatever it is you wanted to do you put the lids back on and destroy them.

As someone else said, the 99% alcohol you used also probably didn't do a very good job at cleaning because higher isn't actually better. 99% alcohol evaporates too quickly to be effective so the highest I've ever seen used for cleaning is 80-85%, with 70-75% being used most of the time.

[Joey1203]

Thanks BenHBDT for your explaination, as a microbiological analyst/technician I couldn't agree more.

 

 

At the same time, chances are if you had a trained microbiologist look at your plates you'd find that a lot of the stuff you cultivated was harmless anyway - I personally think I spotted some E. coli (which are normally harmless depending on the strain, and can be identified from the distinctive smell as much as anything else) as well as some fungal growth as well. 

 

This is absolutely true, I have a lot of experience with bacteria that live on and near humans. Most (dare I say all) bacteria on our phone are the bacteria that live on our skin, and are totally harmless to us.

About the Escherichia coli, most likely true, however the agar luke used looks like bouillon agar (broth agar, not sure if any other names are used for this agar), and this a general growth medium, if the temperature in the server room was approx 37-40 centigrade (celcius) it is most likely a stain of E. coli. However bacteria like Salmonella thypi and S. parathypi A look the same on this agar, but grow at lower temperatures.