Teardown: When it comes to germicidal lights bought online, buyer beware

During the coronavirus pandemic, there’s been a lot of interest in using germicidal lamps to disinfect surfaces rather than hosing everything down with bleach or disinfectant. But there have been reports that a lot of the germicidal lights based on LEDs are actually fake. So we did a little test. We went online and bought two germicidal lights, one based on a conventional low-pressure tube, the other which used LEDs. And we ran our test to see what we really had.