4 ms·
I'm eager to hear the results. I recently got an Awair 2.0 after seeing this talk by DHH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik https://www.youtube.com/wa
by jere 8y ago
I'm eager to hear the results. I recently got an Awair 2.0 after seeing this talk by DHH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik
It quickly confirmed that, without turning my thermostat fan to "ON", my bedroom CO2 jumps from about 1000 ppm to 2000 ppm within a couple hours of us going to sleep.
In the fall, my wife and I started waking up in the middle of the night feeling like we couldn't breathe. What I figured out is that the neither the heat nor cooling was running because the weather was pretty much perfect. We have to keep the door closed because our cat will swat at us in the middle of the night otherwise. I figured there would naturally be enough of a draft to not make this a concern and it's a fairly large connected master bedroom/bathroom with high ceilings to hold a lot of air, but I guess that isn't enough. So that's when I learned about the "fan" function on my thermostat.... never had a need for it in my life.
Now I just need to figure out how to get lower than 1000 ppm, which is already a hit against cognitive function. Our house has no screens currently and even if we install some, it's not like I want to have windows open in the middle of winter. I've heard house plants don't have a huge effect, but I'm willing to try.
- colek42 8y agoInstall an air exchanger. Panasonic makes some that are reasonably priced.
- zrail 8y agoOur HVAC system has a “circulate” option that we sometimes keep on. It turns the variable speed blower on the lowest setting a few times per hour and keeps air flowing well.
- Klathmon 8y agoYeah, we have a Nest in our house and I have it set to circulate the air for 15 minutes out of every hour. We started running it like that only at night as we found that the bedroom would get pretty warm during the summer while the center of the house (where the thermostat was) would stay nice and cool, but after running it like that for a bit, decided to just let that routine run all 24 hours of the day since it equalizes temperatures so well across the whole house.
- olyjohn 8y agoWow, I never realized that this would help equalize temps through the house. Our bedroom gets so hot when 2 people sleep in it at night. I have been considering putting a vent in the wall above the door so heat could escape to the rest of the house. Though all this time, I thought it was just the heat. I wonder if the CO2 levels are also what is keeping me waking up at 4-5am every day... I'm going to try this circulation trick with my Nest now and see how it goes.
- Klathmon 8y agoIt works fantastically! At first I was worried about the extra electricity usage or the extra wear and tear on the HVAC system, but after trying it at the recommendation of a neighbor, I've been nothing but happy, and I haven't noticed any change in my electricity bill so there's no worries there.
- thisisweirdok 8y agoYou'd need hundreds of houseplants to mitigate the co2 created by one person completely, I am not sure if a few would be better than nothing.
- sooheon 8y agoThere are more variables at play than just co2, humans are not perfectly elastic spherical CO2 emitters ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/greengood.aspx https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/greengood.aspx
- gyrgtyn 8y agoDo you know a chart of how fast a plant turns over carbon dioxide? I'm trying to search, but the results are mostly global warming related.
- thisisweirdok 8y agoIt varies by plant type, health, and other factors. So it's hard to be specific. https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-many-plants-would-i-need-in-an-airtight-room-to-be-able-to-breathe/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-many-plants-would-i... >back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest you’d need around 400 houseplant-sized plants.
- nanomonkey 8y agoOr you can grow spirulina or other microalgae which is much more efficient at converting CO2, and at absorbing the available sunlight. I believe you need about 5 m2 of southern facing window in a bioreactor that is 6 inches deep to convert the 1 kg of CO2 that a person creates. Can't find the citation sadly.
- MikeTV 8y agoI'm casually experimenting with this too, to improve AQ in my home office. Do you recall the surface area in the 6-inch-deep bioreactor (or total volume)? The only hard numbers I've found are from the Russian BIOS-1,2,3 experiments, which suggest 18L/person of Chlorella will 75-100% compensate for a person's CO2. I have 18L of Spirulina, which appears to be having some effect, though not anywhere near a complete offset. Though, my setup is quite sub-optimal, and I've seen articles that suggest Chlorella is a couple times more efficient at biofixation than Spirulina. Continuing to tinker :)
- Robotbeat 8y agoIf the human race gets to 5-6C of warming, the entire outside will have about 1000ppm of CO2. At 4C, about 800ppm outside, perhaps by 2100. https://www.co2.earth/2100-projections https://www.co2.earth/2100-projections My kids may well see stuffy room CO2 levels outside within their lifetimes.
- farnsworth 8y agoReading reviews of the Awair, seems that many people complain that the measurements are not accurate or consistent with other measurements... can you speak to that at all?
- jere 8y agoI can't really. I don't have other sensors besides the temperature matching what the thermostat says. In the talk I linked, DHH said he had tried dozens of other sensors and found this one surprisingly accurate for the price point. He did mention the temperature and humidity readings were not as accurate as he expected since sensors for those are so cheap, but that's not really why I got one.
- vellum 8y agoHave you thought about installing a screen door in your bedroom? You could also look into reinforcing it with chicken wire or hail cloth to keep the cat out.