In the heavy-duty transportation industry, the Grote name stands for the best in high-quality lighting solutions and safety systems. Now, Grote Industries is putting this trusted brand and history of innovation to work to help make the roadways healthier and safer for everyone. Departing from their traditional lighting mission, Grote’s engineers have developed a safe and effective UV-C disinfecting light for the HVAC systems on public transportation. By harnessing the power of UV-C light, Grote 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 dark, damp spaces of 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 quickly and easily 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 cutting-edge UV-C technology is carefully calibrated to deliver powerful, disinfecting UV-C light at exactly the right wavelength. As an industry-leading manufacturer of LED lighting for heavy-duty applications, Grote has decades of experience creating quality 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 much simpler and easier solution.
It has long been known that UV-C technology has the capacity to reduce bacteria, viruses, molds, and other pathogens in circulated air, but in recent independent laboratory testing, Grote’s UV-C products delivered an impressive 99.987% bacterial reduction and 99.98% viral reduction after just thirty 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 the obvious advantages of 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.
With their line of UV-C disinfecting light products, Grote has stepped outside of the traditional lighting box to bring the transportation industry a new way to take safety to the next level. Enjoy cleaner air, a more efficient HVAC system, and greater peace of mind for passengers and staff with Grote’s UV-C technology.