Those of you who offer your services using natural cleaning products might want to take a look at what can be accomplished in this area by simply running an electrical charge through either plain tap water (good) or through salt water (better). First you want to go to www.boston.com, which is the website of The Boston Globe newspaper. When you get to the home page there, enter "MIT" and "cleaning" into the search box. Then read the first article that comes up, which begins:
"Electrolyzed water....." I would be interested in hearing what people think. If you're interested in more on this subject, go to the website
www.zerorez.com or myzerorez.com. A southern California company is using electrolyzed water as its main cleaning product AND its primary marketing theme.
And remember - you heard it FIRST right here at the Challenger Forum. Hmm, maybe I'll go and buy one of those electrolysis machines, generally referred to as ionizers.
The website Brian referred to is run by a retired professor of chemistry at Simon Fraser University in Canada, so it is obviously well grounded. He primarily takes on the claims made by manufacturers of home sized water ionizers with regards to health, aging, the treatment of wounds, etc. with alkaline water. He also touches a bit on the cleaning aspects of water separated into alkaline water and acid water, but with not quite as much contempt. MIT's science has to be as least as good as Simon Fraser's, so I am not totally willing to line up with the debunkers of water treated electrically.
The Tennant Company, which manufactures a line of cleaning and floor maintenance machines, now sells what it calls the ec-H2O scrubber, which has an onboard ionizer. While it has its critics, it also has received quite a bit of positive commentary as well. If you do a search under "converted water technology" a lot of results come up. I think the main "green" claims have to do with the elimination of possibly nasty cleaning chemicals, lack of cleaning solution residue, no packaging, no shipping, etc. The primary market motivator might end up, however, being cost, since once you invest in one of these machines sized to your specific cleaning needs, there's no need to buy any more cleaning products.
I can see these ionizers possibly being built into truck mounts, offered as retrofits to older truckmounts, as well as fitted onto portable HWE machines. I for one am curious as to how high alkalinity water might work as a substitute for what I now use. It could be tried as a pre-spray, and pads could be immersed in it before being squeezed out and used to scrub soiled carpet.
