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I own a CO2 monitor and it is shocking how high it can get in a house with two people just existing. 800 ppm or more. Outside air is 410. In a car with air on
by JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
I own a CO2 monitor and it is shocking how high it can get in a house with two people just existing. 800 ppm or more. Outside air is 410.
In a car with air on recirculate, it was getting to >1220 ppm, a level that impairs decision making and lowers brain function. I try to drive with air on fresh from now on.
I don’t doubt the air in our conference room with 20 people gets super high in CO2 as the meeting goes on, and that would explain a lot of the horrible decisions and thought processes that happen in there. :) I’m going to bring my meter to the next meeting and see what it gets to. We are a group of scientists so it won’t be awkward or weird. If nothing else it will spark discussion and reflection on the decisions that are made there.
- gugagore 8y agoCould you recommend a CO2 monitor? How did you decide to purchase the model that you own?
- batmanthehorse 8y agoAwair Glow is a very user friendly/cheap one: https://getawair.com/pages/awair-glow https://getawair.com/pages/awair-glow It has an app (and an API) and monitors CO2, humidity, temp, and VOCs. I like it a lot. For me, it mostly serves as a reminder to open the door for a few minutes before bed and let some fresh air in.
- arkitaip 8y agoI've been opening the bedroom window before going to sleep but I wonder if it really matters during a normal sleep cycle.
- beat 8y agoThanks for the link. I'm getting one.
- wlll 8y agoI have an Awair (the regular one, not the glow), it doesn't work with Ubiquiti wifi gear unless you turn on legacy mode for the access points. Had I known that before I bought it I wouldn't have done so.
- berberous 8y agoI'd love a good looking consumer device like this, especially if it synced with Apple Health and/or Homekit or otherwise allowed data export, but all (Netatomo, Awair, Uhoo, etc) seem to get very poor reviews on Amazon, often claiming they are inaccurate. Has anyone seen a good comparison of whats out there with a suggestion for the best?
- graeme 8y agoDhh recommends awair highly. Convinced me to get one, he tested a lot. Hasn't arrived yet so I can't comment directly https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik
- jtms 8y agoI can also recommend that talk and the Awair unit seems to live up to the praise. I know some might suspect shilling by DHH for this product, but given I owe the last 10 years of my career to him, when he speaks I listen a bit closer than normal.
- jadams5 8y agoI got this model several months back and have been really happy with it: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FYWU2IS/ https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FYWU2IS/ I got it to monitor CO2 levels in a house without central air. It's pretty amazing how quickly it rises without the air on or a window open. If the air in a room feels "stuffy", it's probably over 1000 ppm.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoYep, that's the one I have. It's fantastic.
- amelius 8y agoIt says the CO2 range is from 0-5000 ppm, but exhaled breath has a much higher concentration (according to another comment). Are you able to accurately measure the inhaled concentration in case the breathing happens in a confined space (e.g. helmet or under a blanket, etc.)
- sigstoat 8y agoin the unlikely event someone manages to shove that thing inside of their helmet, do they _need_ an accurate measurement? if it hits 5000, it can just be read as "way too much".
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoI don't use it for confined spaces, so 5000 ppm is plenty for me. If any building I am in is over 5000 ppm I need to leave immediately! https://www.burntec.com/images/co220b.jpg https://www.burntec.com/images/co220b.jpg
- JoeDaDude 8y agoI have been considering making a CO2 sensor myself using commercially available CO2 detectors [1] , [2] and an Arduino or similar microcontroller, insructions for which abound on the intertubes [3], [4]. Such a device can be made fairly inexpensively. However, there is a known issue in calibrating the device, as the IR emitter and light sensor change characteristics over time. The calibration requires immersing the device in nitrogen or pure CO2 and is costly and complex. The workaround is to calibrate the device outdoors where there is an assumed 400 ppm CO2. [1] https://www.co2meter.com/collections/0-1-co2 https://www.co2meter.com/collections/0-1-co2 [2] https://www.epluse.com/en/products/co2-measurement/co2-sensor/ee894/ https://www.epluse.com/en/products/co2-measurement/co2-senso... [3] https://www.dfrobot.com/blog-70.html https://www.dfrobot.com/blog-70.html [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1uOHOcVZrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1uOHOcVZrE
- fma 8y agoI have a foobot. https://www.amazon.com/Foobot-Quality-Monitor-Homeowners-Renters/dp/B06Y8VLCH8 https://www.amazon.com/Foobot-Quality-Monitor-Homeowners-Ren... I believe you can hook it up to IFTTT and turn on the AC etc if levels are high. You can get real time stats, historical reporting...If you don't want to keep looking at your mobile device it will light up if the air quality is bad. It also has a VOC monitor, which is rare. I have a new construction house and the VOC was pretty much deadly.
- ars 8y agoNote that that one does not measure CO2.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Rudebwoy10 8y agoYep, I made that mistake too. They have estimated CO2.
- Rudebwoy10 8y agoA many others have said... getawair.com seems to have different monitors for this. DHH swears by them. They also just look better imo. More comprehensive - https://www.amazon.com/Awair-2nd-Invisible-Quality-Chemicals/dp/B07F282LF4 https://www.amazon.com/Awair-2nd-Invisible-Quality-Chemicals... Cheaper (smart plug version) - https://www.amazon.com/Awair-Glow-Breathe-Quality-Monitor/dp/B06ZXY8ZQZ/ https://www.amazon.com/Awair-Glow-Breathe-Quality-Monitor/dp...
- k__ 8y agoHow many plants are needed to counter this?
- Filligree 8y agoFar too many to be plausible. You'd need to live in a terrarium. Which would certainly be nice, but it's a lot of maintenance... There are plants that do pretty well at air filtering, though not as well as a HEPA filter... but for CO2, they won't absorb more than they can use. This means you need dozens, and also that you'd need grow lights to keep them photosynthesizing as fast as possible. I've seen an office that was built like that, and it was actually a very nice experience. The owner enjoys spending as hour gardening each evening, though, which is important.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoDepends on the plant and other aspects of the environment, and actual numbers are hard to find. Also, you need the plants to actively be growing; their steady-state metabolism just temporarily captures carbon and then releases it again.
- graeme 8y agoDoesn't work. Try exhaling near a co2 monitor and you'll see why. Humans emit a ton of co2, relative to indoor space size. Ventilation is the only solution.
- dredmorbius 8y agoA typical person exhales just over 1kg of CO2 daily. You'd need emough plants to fix about the same amount of CO2 from the air, under indoor, shaded conditions. https://www.reference.com/science/much-co2-human-exhale-3f8cfdd9076c129 https://www.reference.com/science/much-co2-human-exhale-3f8c... The fastest rate of carbon fixation by any plants are photosynthetic algae eds, which fix u to 4.4 kg of carbon per square meter per year, or 16.3kg CO2/(m^2 * yr). http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ocean-phytoplankton/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ocean-phytoplankton/ That works out to about 22 m^2 or 240 ft^2 of algae. Most land plants offer at best about 1/10th this rate, in full sunlight, and far less in indirect, partial, or shaded light. A lot.
- 83457 8y agoHow does air recirculation with increasing co2 compare to having to breath/smell car exhaust, cigarette smoke, etc through vents? I started doing recirculation as my default years ago due to that.
- brixon 8y agoYou don't need fresh on all the time, but for long trips I will switch to fresh for at least five minutes each hour. You just want to cycle the air in the cabin for less re-breathed air.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoMy tests with my meter don't imply that is correct. Almost immediately on recirculate the PPM goes up and stays there.
- soulofmischief 8y agoIsn't that just... what outside smells like? What do you do about smelling people's breath in the air (??) whenever you exit your car?
- mertd 8y agoA side street would see a few cars per minute. Compare that to a freeway where you are continuously surrounded by multiple cars doing high rpm.
- blattimwind 8y agoSchool classrooms (20-30 people, 1-2 hours, closed windows, no ventilation) are probably worse than any conference room.
- sevensor 8y agoApparently there was a fad for building schools with no windows. There's a 70s era middle school in the (U.S.) town where I live; it won a design award for its total lack of fenestration. It was supposed to reduce distraction or something.
- asdfman123 8y agoMy schools were all like that. "Kids aren't paying attention to our standardized-test preparation studies! Perhaps we should make schools more like bleak prisons, and force people to spend the bulk of their formative years there! That will certainly result in a more capable general populace."
- tdumitrescu 8y agoMy HS in central NJ had neither windows in the classrooms, nor WALLS. It was designed like a giant open office bullpen thing and classes were supposed to congregate in vaguely defined areas. By the time I got there in the early 90s, they had already erected borders everywhere out of movable chalkboards, so you basically got a traditional classroom layout but with noise pollution from all the other classes going on nearby. Great job all around. (Though I suppose from the CO2 standpoint we were probably doing better than most!)
- vdnkh 8y agoSounds like HHS. I was there in the 00s and the borders were these "permanent" accordion wall things
- Broken_Hippo 8y agoThe walls were part of a new teaching fad. I lived in a city that tried it out in one school. Each floor was an open plan for the classrooms. This one elementary school was their trial. The teachers had a love/hate relationship with this plan.
- groby_b 8y ago800ppm is a fairly typical value for indoor CO2 and not really that shocking. Fun fact: We've known since ~1850[1] that we should probably stay below 1000ppm for indoors, but we based the measure back then on body odor :) (It still bugs me that oddly cognitive impairment starts at the same point a body-odor measure from the 1800s put CO2 levels, and I keep wondering if we're seeing confirmation bias in action) In general, where you end up is based on airflow. To get below 800ppm, you'll probably need to increase outside ventilation to >10dm^3/s. [1] von Pettenkofer, "Ueber den Luftwechsel in Wohngebaeuden"
- ryandvm 8y agoFascinating. If you were a fan of evolutionary origin stories, you could easily imagine that the negative association with body odor is an evolved "canary in the coal mine" mechanism. That is, once you start being irritated by your cave-mates BO, it's time to step outside for some fresh air (before you are asphyxiated). That said, I doubt humanity spent enough time in caves or other restricted airflow environments for such a response to evolve...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- travisp 8y agoAdditionally, to support the idea that we evolved to detect and dislike body odor, you'd have to make sure that humans even have this trait. Too many evolutionary just-so stories generate hypotheses from limited cultural observations. This article about one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer people left, the Hadza, might lead you to question the idea that humans have a "dislike body odor" trait: > While Hadza have a word for body odor, the men tell me that they prefer their women not to bathe—the longer they go between baths, they say, the more attractive they are. Nduku, my Hadza language teacher, said she sometimes waits months between baths, though she can't understand why her husband wants her that way. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2009/12/hadza/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2009/12/hadza/ And this despite the theory that hunter-gatherers are probably even better at smelling than we are: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180118142744.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180118142744.h...
- Klathmon 8y agoI picked up a CO2 monitor a while ago myself, and the biggest surprise was having it on in the morning in our bedroom with the doors closed. It was easily over 1000ppm IIRC. Ever since then I've made sure to set my AC system to run the "house fan" for 15 minutes or so every hour at night just to circulate the air in the house, and while the numbers went down significantly, anecdotally I swear that I wake up easier in the mornings now. Another surprising place that really high CO2 concentrations show up? The inside of full face motorcycle helmets when at a stop. IIRC they quickly reach as high as 20,000ppm! There is also some speculation that full-face motorcycle helmets that stay closed in an accident are more dangerous in some ways, as the high CO2 concentrations in the helmet can be really dangerous to an unconscious person's brain function.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoHelmets? That's interesting; I tend to open the visor a bit when at a stop, it gets really warm in there really fast. I know you shouldn't try to take off a helmet in case of an accident, but is opening the visor at least okay?
- Klathmon 8y agoYeah ever since I read that, I crack the visor or open it when i'm sitting still. And for opening the visor in accidents, I'm no expert but I believe it would be safe to do if you can do it without moving their head. IIRC the reason you don't want to take off the helmet is because you could strain their neck doing so. If you could move the visor without moving their head, it probably won't hurt, but at the same time I'm not sure if I'd worry about that in this kind of situation (having seen a motorcycle accident, the amount of co2 that person is breathing is, to me anyway, far down the list behind "call 911" and "make sure they don't get run over again"). I think the findings were more to try and get the helmet manufacturers to design systems which let more air in during an accident or when stopped. [1] has the study I remember reading about, and it turns out that according to their abstract, opening the visor at a stop has little effect on average! So maybe my behaviour of cracking the visor isn't doing much... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15893291 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15893291
- czechdeveloper 8y agoI have one too and I can get over 1 000ppm by myself in quite big room while my room also has automatic air recuperation. I can't imagine how it is in any "van dweller" or "tiny house" place. If you drive motorcycle, you can get 10 000ppm in your helmet, that is close to being out of mind.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- roel_v 8y ago"We are a group of scientists so it won’t be awkward or weird" Story of my life right there
- jgrahamc 8y agoDo you have a recommendation for a specific CO2 monitor model that you like?
- jtms 8y agoI have an awair and I’m very happy with it. I have done some highly unscientific testing with it and it seems to definitely register spikes on all sensors when inundated with a given pollutant
- bagacrap 8y agoIf you're in a heavily trafficked road, particulate matter from other vehicles' exhaust is a far worse threat than elevated co2. Always recirculate on the highway, especially if you sit on it for multiple hours a day for you commute.
- charlieo88 8y agoFor in the car, with the air on fresh, does your monitor indicate the amount of CO as well?
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoNo, only CO2.
- ajmurmann 8y agoThanks for sharing your experience! What monitor do you recommend?
- annbolsen 8y agothere's a podcast Ashes Ashes (07 - "Last Gasp") that did a whole episode on CO2 and the studies that track the various effects on our health depending on how high the ppm gets. Apparently has a big impact on cognition, and they made the point that all of civilization could be dumber because of base CO2.
- wnevets 8y agowhich Air/CO2 monitor is everyone using?
- pryelluw 8y agoWhat kind of car is it? Year/model/mileage if you dont mind.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jxramos 8y agoHow much would the influence of house plants shift things?
- kortilla 8y agoYou’ll be shocked to find out that’s bunk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863319
- banku_brougham 8y agocan you link some models? i have a hard time picking one as i don’t know which to trust.
- oliv__ 8y agoTry owning an EMF meter and not going out of your mind. The levels of constant radiation we are being subjected to on a daily basis are just off the charts in urban environments.