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What You Need To Know About Personal Breathaylzers
Getting pulled over by a police officer and taking a breathalyzer test is not the way to discover that you've had too much to drink. Drunk driving kills thousands of people and does millions of dollars worth of damage every year. You can avoid all of the trauma and expense of getting a DUI or OUI arrest by doing one of two things – abstaining from alcohol or buying one of the many personal breathalyzers available. How Do Breathalyzers Work?
Part of the reason that you can smell alcohol on a person's breath is that alcohol vapor is not entirely digested. Some of it is picked up by the lungs' alveoli (air sacks) and mixed in with the normal exhalations of a person. Personal breathalyzers measure the content of alcohol vapor in a person's exhalation. This has proven to be a very predictable indicator of how much alcohol is in the blood. How does alcohol in the air translate to monitoring alcohol in the blood? Because all blood moves through a person's body, so they will pass through the alveoli in the lungs which has already been saturated by the alcohol. It picks up the alcohol in the lungs as well as the digestive system. A legal blood alcohol count (BAC) is 0.08 or less. That means there is 0.08 grams of alcohol in one milliter of your blood. Check for your particular state or province, because the drunk driving or DUI laws change frequently. How Effective Are Personal Breathalyzers?
Personal breathalyzers are every bit as effective as the breathalyzers used by law enforcement to detect people driving under the influence of alcohol. They do vary considerably in size and with various extras. Price ranges in America start at $15 and go up to $100. The ones on the lower end of the scale rely on your breath making a chemical change. Then is gives you a color. You do have to know what the colors mean to interpret the results. The more expensive ones are usually called "intoxilyzers" and utilize infrared technology.
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