Pepper Spray – Heat Levels Matter
When shopping for pepper spray products, you usually take into account factors like pepper spray pattern, price, and size. Definitely, those are important but you also have one more thing to consider, and that’s the heat rating of your pepper spray product.
More Heat Equals Longer Effects
That’s basically what greater heat levels can contribute to your personal safety. The effects of pepper spray are inflammatory by nature. This means that affected areas will immediately sting. If it hits your eyes, they’ll close in reflex to prevent further harm. That means staying partially or completely blind for a certain period of time.
If your respiratory system is affected and you inhale enough capsaicin, you’ll start coughing and choking and experience nausea. Your nose could also start to run as mucus is produced as another reflex response to the presence of capsaicin.
The effects don’t stop there. If you try to rub it away, you will only succeed in having the inflammation spread to other areas. That means more parts of your face will hurt.
How long all these lasts will, as we’ve said earlier, depend on how much capsaicin a pepper spray product has. On average, pepper spray effects last twenty to forty-five minutes. You have two ways to determine a product’s heat rating. First, there’s the easy way – just check out the product label and the perentage of Oleoresin Capsicum or OC indicated.
The typical pepper spray product uses a 10% OC solution. This is equivalent to 2,000,000 SHU – but we’ll talk about that later. Others have 18 and 20% OC content and are consequently more effective to use against your attacker.
Understanding How SHU Works
SHU stands for Scoville Heat Units and used for the Scoville Scale, a measurement system devised by American chemist Wilbur Scovile for gauging the heat levels of pepper. More specifically, it measures the amount of capsaicin in a given pepper or pepper spray product.
Peppers you see often used for cooking spicy dishes can have SHU ratings anywhere from zero (sweet bell pepper) to 8,000. The more exotic dishes may have peppers spicy enough to register with more than a million SHU.
And with pepper spray products, there are those that have excessively high capsaicin content to score 16,000,000 SHU in the Scoville Scale. You can just imagine how hot that can be!
Be More Effective
Having a pepper spray product with a high heat rating is good, but it can be better if you combine with a triple action attack: there are self-defense weapons that combine a pepper spray, tear gas, and UV dye marker all into one.
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