Making Your Own Sanitizer: How you make it can be difficult …or as easy as flicking a switch

Hypochlorous Acid (HOCL), also called electrolyzed water or EOW, is a product formed when chlorine dissolves in water to create a substance with powerful antimicrobial properties. Due to these properties, many commercial deodorants and sanitizers use these oxidizers as their primary disinfectant agents. Interestingly, the white blood cells in the human bodies also contain HOCL, which they use to effectively fend off alien viruses and pathogens that invade our bodies. The internet has a plethora of online resources about how to make hypochlorous acid. However, to be an effective disinfectant, it’s important to produce HOCL with the right chemical composition and consistency, or else it may be ineffective for its intended use.

A Challenging Feat: Striking the Right Balance

Producing effective sanitizers and disinfectants requires striking the right balance of pH levels when making HOCL. You could use one of the many HOCL-making “recipes” found online, and produce your own solution at home or in a commercial office. However, there’s no guarantee of the effectiveness of the resultant product. The key to creating a powerful HOCL disinfectant is to produce the solution without elemental chlorine – which can be challenging when attempted at home or in a commercial kitchenet. 

Without the right HOCL-making equipment, DIY electrolyzed water-makers find it impossible to balance the pH levels in their formulations. And there lies the dilemma:

– Increased pH levels result in reducing the efficacy of chlorine

– Lowering the pH levels (around 4.0 or less), make it a highly unstable product

How do you balance the pH levels for your sanitization application? For example, food grade sanitizers require an ideal pH value of between 6.5 and 7.0. But learning how to make hypochlorous acid, and producing an effective sanitizing agent, without the right equipment, is often a tall order to fulfil!

Doing it Right

Fortunately, with the right HOCL-maker, producing HOCL with the right consistency, and the desired efficacy for your application, is easy. The good news is that residential users, and small businesses, can now produce their own  HOCL disinfectant in-house. And, you can do it with equipment that’s no larger than a coffee-maker. 

In fact, these devices don’t require special power (high voltage) or reinforced concrete foundations: They can just sit on a table or counter, and use power from a regular residential or commercial power socket – like the ones used by your electrical kettles, toaster ovens and coffee-makers!

There are larger versions of these devices also available, which are ideal for businesses such as:

– Hospitals

– Gyms

– Food processing plants

– Restaurants, Bars, Hotels and Diners

– …and other industrial/commercial organizations

Making HOCL requires just three ingredients: Salt, Water and Electricity. Knowing how to make hypochlorous acid, however, doesn’t guarantee that the sanitization solution you produce is killing or neutralizing the pathogens on target surfaces or products.   The use of HOCL-making technology ensures you can produce solutions of any desired concentrations. 

Ideal for home or small office use, smaller devices can produce 1 liter (at 40 ppm) of powerful, eco-friendly disinfectant in 3 minutes. Larger electrolyzed water machines, which are low-maintenance, industrial-grade systems, can deliver up to 24 liters per minute at 40 ppm concentrations. You can change the concentration of HOCL disinfectant produced, using handy settings, that users can change by themselves, depending on your unique requirement.