As I touched on in a previous post, we often get caught up thinking that technology is just IT and gadgets. In fact, if you look around you you can find interesting applications of technology in the broader sense everywhere you look.

Right now in the office, I can see examples of technology in construction (advanced building materials), thermodynamics (air conditioning, double glazing and heat-capture), biology (an article I’m reading on Mogrify) and chemistry (we’ll get to this next).

Before I get on to the topic, let me just say why I decided to write about this. My wife brought this little bottle of magic home a few weeks ago, and since using it I started wondering how it does such a better job than other things we’ve used. So I started asking questions.

Chemistry at home

Sitting in front of me I have a bottle of chemistry magic that solves an awkward problem all of us experience at some point, and some of you might have had to deal with just before reading this article – hopefully not whilst reading it.

Smells.

Seeing is believing, they say, but in this case smelling is believing and this little bottle of magic really is able to not just mask bad smells but banish them from existence. I’ve put it through its paces, hunting out some pretty nasty smells around the home to see how it copes. From stinky wheelie bins, sport bags, bleach, cooking smells, cheese and of course, the bathroom after the kids have left it.

I think I might now have become a bit obsessed with this, whenever I detect a new pong, I run for the bottle to give it a try, and so far it’s knocked the (smelly) socks off anything else I could use.

Most other odour neutralisers I’ve tried leave an over-powering whiff that can be a bit of a choke and also just shout “HEY! There’s a nasty smell here I’m trying to cover up”.

Discombobulating

Ok, so perhaps I didn’t absolutely need to use that word, but there’s not many times in my life I can honestly use it in a context that makes sense, and it really describes how I feel when this bottle does its magic. One second I’m gagging from the stench of the wheelie bin, the next I’m breathing fresh air, wondering if I was just hallucinating that nasty odour before. It’s an odd feeling, but quite amazing.

The technology behind it

Oderase eliminates smells using a hydrophobic cavity – Image courtesy of Werner M Nau

To get a better understanding of what was going on, I spoke to the makers of this magic, a company called Aqdot.

The product itself is called Oderase and is a water based mist spray that essentially captures and contains the miniature molecules that cause smells. Their patented technology is called Aqbit and has an hydrophobic cavity in which it captures the smell molecules.

Yeh, hydrophobic cavity didn’t really make much sense to me either. What it means is that there’s a small pocket in the Aqbit molecules that make up Oderase that repel water, ensuring no matter how humid the environment you are in, the little pocket can still capture and hold the smell molecule.

That little feature is more important than it first seems, because that means the Aqbit molecules can be suspended in water. Other products apparently can only be suspended in things like ethanol, which cause other complications that can irritate allergy sufferers as well as needing strong smells (roses etc) to cover up the nasty ethanol smell.

Think about that – with other products, you have to create a strong smell to cover up a smell that is created whilst covering up another smell.

Oderase is simply a water mist spray with a neutral smell that basically gets rid of nasty smells right in front of your nose.

So good my Mum likes it

My benchmark when writing this blog is that if my Mum likes and shares it on Facebook, then I’ve done a good job of explaining it. In this case though, I sent a bottle to her to try and she posted it straight on Facebook. Awesome. 🙂

Special offer

Having spend sometime speaking with Aqdot about this, they gave me a special offer discount code to share with my readers, so if you fancy giving it a shot, this little code will save you a nifty 10%.

Social Media Challenge

If you do give it a go, why not post a picture of the things you used Oderase on, and tag me on Twitter or Facebook using the coupon code as a hashtag #ODOURFREE10

Here’s my little collage of banished whiffs …

Chemistry not your thing? Why not read one of my other articles