4 ms·
Get a co2 scrubber or a bunch of plants.
by ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Get a co2 scrubber or a bunch of plants.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoIs that a thing? Like a CO2 scrubber you can run at home? That's what I want.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoThey exist but you'd have to contact a commercial HVAC supplier. Easier just to get a bunch of plants.
- MertsA 4y agoThere's not an HVAC vendor on the planet selling a CO2 scrubber for a building. All commercial HVAC manages CO2 levels via ventilation with outside air. They'll often use economizers and such to avoid losing all the energy put into conditioning the air for heat and humidity but none of them can ever bring CO2 levels down below outside atmospheric conditions. The only HVAC applications that actually try to reduce CO2 instead of just ventilate are submarines and spacecraft, so good luck trying to make that practical for a house. If I for some reason wanted to try something crazy like this I'd probably look at some of the carbonate solution carbon capture projects out there and try to make that work. As others have already pointed out, plants are a bit of a fools errand here. You'd need to live inside a large greenhouse.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoOk, not HVAC. But air scrubbers exist. https://www.alfaintek.com/products/air-scrubber/ https://www.alfaintek.com/products/air-scrubber/
- Reason077 4y agoWhat you really want is a heat exchange / heat recovery ventilation system. Brings in fresh, filtered air from outside, and warms it up by swapping heat with the stale, warm air that it removes.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoIf the air comes from outside, it's 450 ppm CO2. I want 330 ppm CO2. Is that possible?
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoYes it is possible but you won't find a scrubber on Amazon.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoWhy not? That's exactly what I want. I have money.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoBecause there isn't a market for home CO2 scrubbers. Here's a company that sells them. https://www.alfaintek.com/products/air-scrubber/ https://www.alfaintek.com/products/air-scrubber/
- rufus_foreman 4y ago"As low as 400 ppm". I want 330.
- pifm_guy 4y agoCO2 scrubbers exist. They're commonly used by deep water divers and as part of anaesthesia equipment in hospitals. If you're happy to do DIY stuff, I'm sure you could buy some and hook it up in your house. Some things to beware of: * CO2 scrubbers can turn some not-very-dangerous pollutants into highly toxic compounds. There are various papers suggesting that they seriously impact the mental health of people undergoing surgery for example. * You need a lot of CO2 scrubbing to have any impact. Unless you need a wheelbarrow when you're changing the filters each week, your filter is probably too small for a typical house.
- xenonite 4y agoPlants increase CO2 levels at night, though. Photosynthesis unavailable then, thus they use dark breathing, setting free CO2.
- jefftk 4y agoI think maybe some plants do their carbon fixation at night? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC540897/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC540897/
- jefftk 4y agoYou would need absurd numbers of plants. You breathe out ~11L/hr CO2, which is ~22g. Over a day this is ~0.5 kg. So your plants would need to be getting collectively 0.5kg heavier daily by pulling CO2 from the air just to balance out your own breathing, let alone the CO2 coming in from the outside.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoWhat's the math if I have a cat?
- jefftk 4y agoMaybe the cat weighs 5% of what you do, and respirates 5% as much as well? In which case it's within the margin of error of the above.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoI'm from the midwest. The cat weighs like half a percent of what I do.
- jefftk 4y agoA really small housecat weighs 5lb. For that to be 0.5% of your weight you'd need to be half a ton, at which point my math above is a bit low.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoAll right so do the math. Have you ever been to the midwest?
- jefftk 4y agoYes, several times, touring with my (niche) band. But I acknowledge that "people who go to contra dances" is not a uniform sampling of the population.