Hello everyone! This is Paddy from Smart Air and today I'm gonna be covering whether
or not you can microwave your mask. So we've had hundreds of people ask us ask this
question and right now with COVID-19 and the coronavirus spreading around, we are
all facing the problem of having to reuse our masks so microwaving them is
just one of the crazy ideas that's cropped up.
And today we're going to
answer that question of whether or not it actually works. First off, to
answer this question, we want to split it down into two parts.
We want to
see whether or not microwaving items can actually kill viruses that are on them.
So onto this question we're going to look - a piece of research done by some
researchers and scientists in Germany, what they did was take common
microwave so just yeah everyday microwaves you have in your home and
they used them to test whether or not they could kill hepatitis C and HIV on
syringes and cigarette filters. They wanted to do this because they wanted to
see whether or not microwaving syringes and cigarette filters could be a good
way to stop the transmission of hepatitis C and HIV amongst drug users.
So what did they do, they took the plastic part of the syringe and the
cigarette filters and then contaminated them with hepatitis C and HIV. They then
subjected them to three minutes in the microwave at different power levels. You
can see all the power levels here that are the ones that they use.
The results showed that microwaving at 360 watts for three minutes was enough to
significantly reduce the virus infectivity. Here are the graphs. Pretty good at
360 watts for three minutes. But to be on the safe side, these researchers
recommended microwaving at 600 watts for two minutes or longer. The good news is
most household microwaves on high can reach up to 600 watts. Here's the
conclusion from these researchers. If you want to see the full paper, you can
check out the link in the comments below.
Okay, so that research was done for HIV
and hepatitis C.
But what about the coronavirus? well spotted, the coronavirus
is different from HIV and hepatitis C. So how long can that last
when subjected to microwaves, there's very little research done right now on
the COVID-19 specifically, but we can look to a piece
of research done on the human parainfluenza. So that's an RNA virus
very similar or similar in some ways to the COVID-19 virus, that both from
the RNA virus family. So what these scientists did is they took petri dishes
and they put them in the microwave for 3 minutes on high and they found that yes,
that was enough to disinfect the petri dishes from the inhuman parainfluenza.
Again that's still not exactly the same as a coronavirus but it's perhaps close
enough and it also backs at the first experiment.
Okay so we know that
microwaving items can actually kill viruses on them.
Now the next question is
if I microwave my mask, will I actually affect its performance?
Will I still be able to use it and wear it?
So it's one to this question i commandeered the
microwave in Smart Air Office and I took a 3M N95 just like this one I'm holding
here, and I took it apart. Now here's the actual one that I took apart and you can
see, I had to really pick it to pieces because there was lots of metal in this
mask but I had to take off. And to be perfectly honest in doing that, I pretty
much destroyed the mask and very unlikely I'm gonna be able to use that
mask again.
But, to continue with the experiment and to see whether or not
this microwaving masks would actually damage the filtration efficiency, I
continued and I took this mask and I put it in the Smart Air microwave for three
minutes on high.
After a couple of minutes there started to be a smell
not great but I persevered and I continued with the experiment.
Fortunately, we managed to get around to three minutes with no big mishaps.
And took the mask out of the microwave and I went to test its filtration performance.
I used a similar method or the same method that I've used on other
experiments, you can find out those in the links below, such as this one where I
tested kitchen towel paper to see whether or not that was an effective
material for masks. And what I found with this N95 mask was actually
that microwaving didn't affect its effectiveness, and didn't affect its
filtration efficiency. So good news that microwaving the mask didn't affect its
filtration efficiency. But, however putting your mask in the microwave may
well cause other problems. For example, there's this guy in UK as reports
of this guy who put his dishcloth or kicked her or his tea towel in the
microwave and he manages set fire to his kitchen. So there's always the risk of
putting items like this in the microwave, you may well set fire to them or you
may well damage your microwave.
So bottom line in short, yes microwaving items
using common household microwaves can kill viruses if you have them on high
for at least three minutes. But however putting a mask in a microwave first of
all you might have to destroy your mask to do it and secondly, your mask
may well catch fire or you may damage your microwave. So probably not
recommended, not one of the things that we would recommend doing to disinfect
your mask.
That said, there are much more reliable ways that also don't damage or
affect the filtration efficiency of your mask.
You can check out one of those ways
in the links below. Leave any comments any thoughts you guys have on the video.
Great talking to you and I hope the open data from Smart Air
has been useful and will help you all protect yourselves at this time.