What’s all the Hubbub over Electrostatic Spraying?

We are all familiar with standard handheld sprayers. The simplest example of these is a spray bottle used for spraying things like window cleaners. These are called large droplet sprayers and have been used for years. But it seems like in the last several years all you hear about are things like foggers, misters, and electrostatic sprayers.  What’s all the Hubbub over?

The short answer to that question is related to the effectiveness of each sprayer type.

When you look at any sprayer for spraying a fluid you need to consider a couple of major items. You want to consider the flow rate of the sprayer, the size of the droplets being sprayed, and the coverage of the surface.

When considering the flow rate of a sprayer, you are looking at how fast the fluid comes out of the device. You could be getting good coverage, but the spray rate determines how fast you will be able to spray a surface. Think of a sneeze. You can have good coverage of the surface (hopefully the crook of your arm), but it isn’t continuous and would take a while to cover an entire desk much less a whole room.

Regarding the droplets being sprayed, you don’t want the droplets to be too big or too small, depending on the flow rate and the coverage rate you are looking for. Think of a water balloon and one big blast or “drop” of water. When a water balloon hits a surface, you get incredible coverage at the point of impact, to the point of oversaturation, but you get limited coverage anywhere else. Too small of droplets however and you can’t get anything wet or covered unless the spray rate is high.

Coverage of a surface is related to both the size of droplets and the flow rate. If your droplets get bigger, or the spray rate goes up your coverage goes up so long as the other factor stays the same.

Now there is a fourth component that is truly unique when it comes to sprayers, and that is the electrostatic aspect. This involves the application of an electrical charge into the fluid that you are spraying. An electrostatic sprayer still has certain flow rates and droplet sizes and gets a certain coverage rate, but the electrical charge increases your coverage rate and lets you do it with smaller droplets.

An electrostatic sprayer puts a positive charge in the droplets and those positive charges are attracted to the negative charges of other surfaces. This magnetic bond causes the fluid to be attracted to the surface and therefore results in fewer particles floating aimlessly through the air. Because of this attraction, you can spray smaller droplets while also getting better coverage due to the minimization of wasted product in the air. You also get more even coverage because you don’t have as big of droplets hitting the surface.

Another benefit of the electrostatic feature is what is called wrap-around coverage. With an electrostatic sprayer, even though the droplets are charged and attracted to surfaces, you will still get an overspray that goes past a surface. Think of the armrest of a chair. You will get spray on the top of it, but there will still be spray that goes around the armrest. But the difference is that with the positive charge, the droplets will wrap around the armrest and adhere to the back of the armrest as well. That means an electrostatic sprayer allows you to cover all sides of an object by spraying towards only one surface, whereas a regular sprayer will only cover what is directly in front of the spray pattern. This results in great efficiencies in speed and thoroughness of coverage and much less waste of product.

All this boils down to smaller droplets, less waste, and better coverage. This allows you to save time, use less product resulting in saved dollars, and you get the best coverage — what we call 360° of coverage.

Well you might be asking why don’t I just put my current infection control product through an electrostatic sprayer and get all those benefits? Unfortunately, it is not that simple. A lot of infection control products contain high concentrations of alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. These are chemicals that when ingested are very harmful to humans. One of the drawbacks to smaller droplets is they get lodged deeper in air passageways. So, if you put these chemicals into an electrostatic sprayer, you run a greater risk of health hazards due to inhaling more of the chemical.  This is why the EPA has certified only certain products as allowable to be sprayed through electrostatic sprayers.

Additionally, since alcohol evaporates quickly, disinfectants that contain high concentrations of alcohol are not suitable to be sprayed through an electrostatic sprayer because the tiny, aerosolized droplets of alcohol evaporate before the product hits the surface, therefore reducing the efficacy of the product.

So, while electrostatic sprayers are great infection control technology you have to be mindful of their use. If you are thinking of purchasing an electrostatic sprayer to add to your infection control protocol, we recommend you look on the EPA N list to see if your product is approved for aerosol application.

The products that we spray as part of our MediClean and Shield process are EPA certified for electrostatic sprayers and have some additional properties that make them extremely safe when put into aerosol form. Our products kill electromechanically rather than through a chemical disinfectant. This makes our product much safer on upholsteries, safer for people and pets, and a great long-term infection control solution.