Grote Industries announces disinfecting light for bus HVAC

Grote Industries (Grote) has developed a UV-C disinfecting light for HVAC systems on public transit buses.

By harnessing the power of UV-C light, Grote says it aims to help public transit and bus companies disinfect circulated air to keep people safe on the road.

The HVAC systems on most commercial passenger buses have no disinfection capabilities beyond simple filtration. In the evaporator compartment, viruses, bacteria, allergens and mold can gather and grow, slipping through filters to circulate widely throughout the bus’s ventilation system and passenger cabin. Grote’s UV-C light assembly installs into the HVAC system’s evaporator compartment, safely functioning during normal bus operations to effectively destroy microorganisms as they pass through the evaporator.

Assembled in North America utilizing the latest generation of highly efficient and reliable LEDs, Grote’s UV-C technology is calibrated to deliver powerful disinfecting UV-C light at exactly the right wavelength. As a manufacturer of LED lighting for heavy-duty applications, Grote has decades of experience creating products tough enough to resist the vibration and moisture present in a bus’s HVAC system. LED technology requires low DC voltage to operate, reaches full output with no warmup time, operates under a wide range of temperatures and features a life span of more than 13,000 hours. Although mercury-vapor lamps have been used as a source of disinfectant UV-C light for decades, new advances are leaving this technology in the past. With no fragile tubes of hazardous mercury to replace, and no bulky ballast and power inverters needed to function, Grote’s UV-C LEDs offer a simpler and easier solution.

In recent independent laboratory testing, Grote says its UV-C products delivered a 99.987 percent bacterial reduction and 99.98 percent viral reduction after 30 seconds of exposure. Such a significant reduction of hazardous microorganisms passing through the HVAC system could have important health benefits for passengers, drivers and maintenance workers. In addition to cleaner air, the continual disinfection of the evaporator compartment inhibits mold and biofilm growth on the A/C evaporator fins. A cleaner internal environment allows the HVAC system to function more efficiently, increasing overall airflow and heat transfer capability, thereby conditioning the bus air more effectively and requiring less system cleaning and maintenance.