Ultrasonic cleaning has been around for over half a century, mostly used in industrial settings to clean parts with complex shapes that aren’t easily cleaned using other methods. It works relatively simply – you put the object you want to clean in a fluid, agitate the fluid using ultrasound, and let the mechanical vibration it creates scrub all the dirt away. The SterilPure offers to bring that piece of industrial tech into homes.
Billed as a “portable ultrasonic dishwasher,” the device is designed to be used on the kitchen sink, so you can just fill it with water, throw all your dishes in, and use the vibrations generated to scrub all the grease and dirt away. Since it’s portable, of course, you’re not just relegated to using it in the sink, since you can use the same tech to do ultrasonic cleaning in a bucket, a bowl, or anywhere else for that matter. We don’t know if it has enough power to clean big objects in the bathtub (it probably doesn’t), but we bet some folks will immediately try that upon getting one.
The SterilPure consists of a small device about the size of an alarm clock with a vibration plate attached to it using a 40-inch cable. Using it is quite straightforward, too. You start by simply filling the sink (or any container) with water and putting whatever you want to clean in the water. From there, you take the device, plug it into a power source, place the vibration plate in the water, and set the length of time you want it to run. After that, you just sit back and come back when it’s finished.
It runs at a preset 37kHz, which is in the standard range for ultrasonic cleaning, which usually runs anywhere from 20 to 40 kHz. According to the outfit, running it between nine to 12 minutes is all that’s needed for a standard load of dishes, although you can adjust your settings if you want a more thorough cleaning (or if you have a bigger or smaller batch).
The SterilPure clearly isn’t just a high-tech portable dishwasher, of course. According to the outfit, you can use it to, pretty much, clean any items that won’t suffer from being submerged in the water. Heck, they even recommend using it for rust removal, so you can just leave your rusting tools on there and have them come out like new. Can it clean the gunk off the grates from your charcoal grill? If it can handle rust, we bet it can clean that, too, making it a potentially very useful tool to have around the house.
Aside from cleaning, the outfit also recommends using it to defrost food by simply running it at the same 12 minute setting as a regular batch of dishes. The device is equipped with a 12V active oxygen generator and an integrated air pump, by the way, which allows it to produce ozone at a 0.013 ppm concentration. This supposedly helps eliminate bacteria and reduces pesticides on produce, which makes it a good tool for washing your fruits and vegetables, too.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for SterilPure. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $199.
