Saturday, November 22, 2008

The odd case of Sonic Toothbrushes

Sadly to say that I need yet another root canal. That would make the count up to 3 with this one being supposely the worst. The xray showed something realy weird and my root is at a 90 degree angle so I need a specialist. I have scheduled the work in the second week of december because I didn't want to do it potentially before thanksgiving because I might need surgery to remove (it is potentially that complicated) but I did not want to have the work start after the New Year because I did not want to start the new year like that.

Either way I started shopping for a new Sonic Toothbrush. A little useless history: My first sonic toothbrush was Sonicare. It was a maybe a year that it came out and it was horrible. It did not seem to vibrate much of anything and I followed directions to leave it plugged in and it died not long after I bought it because the brush head was too big and it did not feel right. A big waste of money so my second toothbrush was the oralb mechanical with attached water irrigator. It wasn't bad at all till a micro leak occured in the irrgator and it's spraying water. Than I went back to oral b with their very inexpensive oralb vitality Sonic version toothbrush because it was on sale. The head was too big but it was gentle and worked kinda well for 15 dollars. History lesson complete and I am now ready for bigger and better things.

I was between sonicare and oralb. The thing that annoyed me was I could not find the vibrations per second of their toothbrushes. Here's the weird thing that happened next. I fired two emails to sonicare(philips) and oralb(p&g) about what exactly is the difference between their sonic toothbrushes. Here are their response summary:

Sonicare (philips) response: A lesson on the term sonic. Apparently sonicare does not use "sound waves" or ultrasound to clean your teeth. The term "sonic" refers to frequency at which the sonicare operates which is 261hz or 31,0000 strokes per minute.

-I was obviously somewhat confused as to whether this apply to their entire line of sonicare toothbrushes.

Sonicare (philips) response2: Frequency of all the Sonicare models is 31,000 strokes per minute.

Oral-B (P&G) response: Sonic Complete, Vitality and Pulsonic goes back and forth at 31,000 times a minute.

-Oh really? My oral-b vitality is going to be as good as the pulsonic(your newest product 3-4x the price? Searching on the internet seems to find a listing of 21,000 sonic vibrations).

So in short I settled for the oral-b pulsonic because it was on sale. It was listed at least on amazon at more than 27,000/30,000 vibrations. It was NOT listed on the box or the literature(documentation inside). I also purchased the pulsonic because it seemed to be the only one using nickel-metal hydride battery(sonic complete and vitality sonic uses nickle-cadmium aka ni-cad which is antiquated battery technology) The Sonicare FlexCare and HealthyWhite are the only ones that use Lithium-Ion battery technology however at a much higher price. The Sonicare Elite and under still uses Ni-Cad.

So I hope that helps. Battery is a very important issue in these toothbrushes because they are generally not replacable so you do want the best performance, which Ni-Cad powered devices are not. The second issue should be brushhead size. I realy like the small brusheads as it does seem more intense and easier to manuever than the large brushheads. The vibrations or strokes per second seems to a non issue which could be why it's not advertised at all by both companies unless you specifically contact them to ask. Weird.

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