There is something that our immune systems, organic crop production, wound healing, eye care, veterinary care products and even the South Korean COVID-19 testing stations have in common: hypochlorous acid. Hypochlorous acid is the incredibly powerful yet gentle disinfectant that’s hard at work across all these examples, as well as in the DIY Force of Nature cleaning system. Force of Nature is a little appliance that uses electricity to convert salt, water & vinegar into hypochlorous acid, and the best part is you can make it yourself at home.
How to Make Your Own Force of Nature Cleaning Solution
A lot of us looking for safer cleaning options turn first to DIY cleaners with vinegar. The problem is that even undiluted vinegar isn’t strong enough to kill viruses including MRSA or dangerous bacteria like staphylococcus. Vinegar isn’t an EPA registered disinfectant and not powerful enough to be useful for sanitizing settings like hospitals, schools or even your own home. Another major limitation with DIY vinegar cleaning solutions is that you shouldn’t use vinegar on stone surfaces like granite, marble, limestone, onyx or travertine because it can etch and dull the shine on them. However, vinegar can play a role in creating hypochlorous acid, which at the right concentration, can be a disinfectant that can kill 99.9% of germs, and is also safe on sealed stone surfaces.
Here’s how Force of Nature works.
Steps to Create DIY Force of Nature Cleaner
Force of Nature uses a technology called electrolyzed water, which is a technology used in the industrial applications we mentioned including wound healing, produce preservation, eye care, veterinary care, organic crop production, and also in green cleaning & sanitizing to create hypochlorous acid & a common detergent. Here are the steps involved in the chemistry change:
- When an electrical charge is passed through a salt (NaCl) solution with exactly the right concentration, the sodium separates from the chloride. Chloride is negatively charged and is attracted to the positive side of the electrical charge where it bonds with oxygen and hydrogen from the water. It gets converted from Cl- to HOCl, which is hypochlorous acid.
- The sodium is positive and is attracted to the negative charge, where it also bonds with oxygen and hydrogen and is electrochemically converted to sodium hydroxide or NaOH. Sodium hydroxide is a common detergent used at different concentrations in products ranging from toothpaste to moisturizer to cleaning products. As you can probably guess, concentration is the critical factor when it comes to safety. Typical cleaning products commonly contain from 1-5% of NaOH, and as a result can be highly toxic to humans. Force of Nature creates a concentration of only 0.0000003% which is gentle enough to use without rinsing.
- The pH of the solution is another critical safety factor. At precisely the right concentration, vinegar can be used as a pH adjuster that can either create a solution that’s predominantly bleach (sodium hypochlorite), or instead hypochlorous acid. The pH also determines whether the solution is at high enough concentration of hypochlorous acid to meet EPA requirements as a disinfectant that kills 99.9% of germs, and just as importantly, how long that concentration lasts. An interesting fact is that in some industrial applications, where the solution is produced and “consumed” on site, HOCl is created at a concentration that dissipates after only a few hours. HOCl is known for having a short shelf life, and that life can get truncated dramatically depending on concentration.
How to Make Force of Nature Without Making Bleach
If you’re like most people, you might have done a double-take at the idea that it’s a minuscule difference in concentration, and thus pH, that can create bleach or instead hypochlorous acid. This is the most important thing to know in making a DIY Force of Nature cleaner solution. Imagine thinking you’re creating a disinfectant gentle enough to spray on your baby’s toys and you’ve made bleach instead. You spray the toy, hand it back to your baby, and then she puts her hand in her mouth or touches her eyes. That’s an incredibly dangerous situation you want to avoid. Or, what if you’re in a situation where you have to be completely sure you’re killing 99.9% of viruses and bacteria – such as during the COVID-19 epidemic. If the concentrations and pH you’re creating aren’t precisely right, you won’t be able to create a hospital-grade disinfectant that kills the pathogens you need to kill.
Another example that’s less about child safety but also worth noting, is that if you make bleach instead of hypochlorous acid and spray it near your rug or furniture, you’ll end up removing the color from anything in its path.
So given how sensitive the chemistry is, how do you make sure you’re making the right concentrations of hypochlorous acid & sodium hydroxide when you make your DIY Force of Nature cleaner? That’s the reason we provide our pre-measured Capsules of salt, water & vinegar, so that you have precisely the right concentrations of each ingredient and the solution has exactly the right pH level. In fact, the chemistry is so sensitive that the EPA requires us to provide Capsules. The EPA regulates all disinfectants and sanitizers, given that killing the viruses and bacteria you think you’re killing is a health and safety issue that impacts us and the people we come into contact with. If you have the right concentrations, pH and chemical composition change, you create a solution that meets EPA-required anti-microbial standards and also has the right shelf life duration & stability.
Disinfecting & Sanitizing
At Force of Nature, we totally get how hard it is to keep your home disinfected and sanitized, while at the same time keeping it free from dangerous chemicals that can harm the little hands and paws in our homes. That’s why we created the ultimate DIY cleaner and disinfectant, one that starts with salt, water & vinegar, and uses electricity to catalyze a pretty amazing chemistry change. It’s a multipurpose cleaner and EPA registered disinfectant (the only one you can make yourself at home!) that kills 99.9% of viruses and bacteria when used as directed. It’s EPA registered for use in hospitals, ICUs, schools, daycares and veterinary clinics and more. It even saves you money, because it costs less than a dollar a bottle and replaces kitchen, bathroom, glass & rug cleaners, deodorizers, disinfectant sprays and wipes.
