Far-UVC Efficacy And Cost-Effectiveness Calculator
Calculate whether Aerolamps will be cost-effective for your workplace.
Your workplace
Explanation
The more people you already have sharing a workplace, the more cost-effective far-UVC lamps become.
Markers are a rough guide from office-planning benchmarks: call-centre desks take about 40–65 sq ft each (BCO, via Usable Buildings); dense layouts 80–150 sq ft per person, average offices 150–250 and spacious ones 250–500 (YAROOMS).
Explanation
Pathogens in the air get cycled out naturally with your preexisting ventilation.
At least one air change per hour is commonly enforced in building codes.
Explanation
Average fluence rate (amount of light) from the lamps in the room. See our room calculator for details; this is determined by how many lamps you set up, what kind of lamp they are, and where they are located.
Likely values for this will be between 0.5 and 1 µW/cm² with our recommended setup of 1 lamp per ~250 sq ft of space.
Lamp setup
The spacing follows Aerolamp's guidance. To check the intensity in your own rooms, use the room planner.
Explanation
The share of infectious disease spread that happens in rooms that you intend to fit with lamps.
Determined by how many lamps there are and where you decided to put them.
From the research
Explanation
Share of staff's airborne infections picked up at work rather than at home or elsewhere.
Low end: a model of Italy's 2009 flu pandemic put 3% of all spread in workplaces, mostly because children drove that outbreak (Ajelli 2014). High end: open-plan offices had 62% more sick days than private offices (Denmark), and working in close physical proximity raised flu odds about 1.5× (Sweden).
Explanation
Within lamp rooms, the share of pathogens spread by ambient room air rather than direct face-to-face conversation or touched surfaces. (There's some evidence that far-UVC light sterilizes surfaces over time, but we're ignoring that here.)
Difficult to measure directly; it's a judgment call.
Explanation
How fast airborne pathogens are killed per unit of light dose.
Coronavirus: 8.8 cm²/mJ, from HCoV-229E 4.1 and HCoV-OC43 5.9 (Buonanno 2020), SARS-CoV-2 2.6 (Kitagawa), and HCoV-OC43 12.4 (Welch 2022), 15.9 (OSLUV's preliminary reanalysis of Welch 2022), 14.3 (Lu 2025) and 6.5 (Romay 2025). Influenza (H1N1): 10.6, from 1.8 (Welch 2018) and 20.1 (Buonanno 2024). The default, 9.7, is midway between the two.
Explanation
This is an adjustment for imperfect air mixing.
For example, 70% here means "I think it's probably 70% as effective at killing pathogens in real life as it is in studies."
Explanation
Adults average about 2–3 colds a year, plus flu (~5–10% of people a season) and COVID (~10% a year recently, and falling). This equals about 2.7 symptomatic respiratory infections a year.
Less virus in room air as lamp output rises
Show as table
| Lamp eACH | Less virus in room air |
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Does it pay for itself?
Your costs
Explanation
US median for full-time workers in Q3 2026 was about $64,000 a year. Management and professional jobs: about $87,000. Office and administrative support: about $53,000 (BLS).
Explanation
Total employment cost as a multiple of salary.
Wages were 70% of total compensation for US private-industry workers in June 2026, which works out to 1.43× (BLS).
Explanation
Aerolamp's guidance is about one lamp per 250 sq ft, or one for a typical room in a house. Note that if you increase this slider it causes expected fluence in shared rooms to go down, which makes efficacy decrease.
Lamp costs
Explanation
The lamp is $500. Its guaranteed life is at least 10,000 hours to 70% output, which is the default here; testing has seen up to 14,000. Orders of $10,000 or more (20+ lamps at list price) get 20% off the lamp price, applied when the discount box is ticked. 2,000 hours is 8 hours × 250 workdays; running 24/7 is 8,760. Running cost covers power.
From the research
Explanation
Minor illnesses such as coughs, colds and flu were the top cause of UK sickness absence in 2024 at 30%, with respiratory conditions another 7.3% (ONS). The minor-illness group also includes stomach bugs.
Explanation
When people go to work sick, they're tired and unproductive. This calculates the value of that lost output for each infection prevented.
Explanation
A cold disrupts about 5 workdays, and people typically take 1–2 of those off (ACHOO survey), so about 3 are spent at work while unwell. Most people do keep working when ill (review). Shorter or longer colds put the range at 2–5 days.
Explanation
US adults working with a cold reported 26% lower productivity on average (ACHOO survey).
Explanation
Further people each prevented staff infection would have gone on to infect outside work. First-generation spread only, so it's conservative.
Anchored on a ~16% household secondary attack rate across a typical household (call-center outbreak), plus some community spread. Longer transmission chains would push it higher.