5 ms·

I can't help but feel like it has taken a nosedive as well. Modern homes are sealed and don't recirculate much outdoor air. As a result you have all this modern

• joemazerino 2y ago
  Modern homes have to have HRV systems for removing indoor air and replacing it.
• xnx 2y ago
  It can be disheartening. I don't know that there's much strong evidence yet that air polluted with synthetic particles leads to bad health effects, but I do know that are lungs have been subjected to things in the last 100 years that they hadn't encountered in the previous 300 million.
  • TylerE 2y ago
    Inhaled particulates are never good news. Varying degrees of bad, but none of it is good.
• readthenotes1 2y ago
  I uploaded you for nosedive and didn't read anything after that. Figured it couldn't get any better!
• mlsu 2y ago
  Air quality is much, much better than it used to be. We used to burn leaded gasoline in our cars, coal pucks to heat our homes, smoke directly into our lungs on purpose, god knows what else. I do agree with the broader point though.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Yeah, that's easy to underestimate. Where I live they've even declared a ban on open fires; a number of people have a fireplace / pit / thing in their back yard which is used for social events, but during certain weather conditions that smoke lingers. And because firewood is expensive people will use whatever they get their hands on. Also, people don't have proper stoves, and people don't know how to make a proper fire, so the result is... a lot of noxious smoke and poor air quality.
  • asdff 2y ago
    Well it was great for hundreds of thousands of years, then it was really bad for a couple generations, now it is just less bad for potentially forever. Hardly an improvement when you look at things in scales of our species time on this planet vs since grandad's day.
• woah 2y ago
  get some air filters
  • energy123 2y ago
    Not an easy silver bullet. They'll filter out pm2.5 but most don't touch VOCs. Most that claim to remove VOCs don't have enough volume of activated carbon to justify that. And even if you buy one of the ultra expensive machines that do filter VOCs, you're still left with rapid carbon dioxide accumulation which probably acutely harms cognition even at sub 1000 ppm levels, forcing you to open the windows which is self defeating. You're really left with two good solutions, one is centralized airflow with appropriate HEPA filtering which many can't afford, or to move to a location with default clean air, again a difficult proposition depending on work etc.
    • terribleperson 2y ago
      The carbon filters are also a second more expensive consumable on top of the particulate filter.
      • energy123 2y ago
        Yes and the problem is you need a lot of activated carbon. A thin sheet of it is just theatre.
• erikerikson 2y ago
  Sealed modern houses usually come with an HRV or ERV so that your air is regularly replaced filtered fresh air.
  • hypercube33 2y ago
    Really depends where you live and who built the home. Most contractors in the Midwest still aren't sure about putting network cabling in and haven't heard of air exchangers. Seems like the drive is to save 50 cents wherever possible per PVC toilet flanges vs at least PVC and metal ones
    • terribleperson 2y ago
      Finding out that the reason my toilet was wobbling was because multiple people thought PVC was okay to use structurally was infuriating.
    • JamesSwift 2y ago
      Tight homes dont happen by accident. If the contractor is just getting by, they likely arent building a home that needs passive ventilation.
• alt227 2y ago
  My house in the UK is 300 years old. It is built of stone with proper ventilation built in everywhere. It never gets damp, never too cold or hot. Air circulates enough to constantly be fresh yet not quick enough to create a draft. Its a shame homes arent built like that anymore. Looking at how houses like this work really shows how we have created solutions to our own problems in modern home building.
  • mapleoin 2y ago
    What's the average temperature in your house on a cold winter day?
  • nkrisc 2y ago
    What are average high and low temperatures where you live in the UK? I looked up the averages for the UK as a whole (which I’m sure can vary quite a bit once you get more local) but I found between 20C and 2C. Where I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan average temperatures average between 32C and -6C. As for extremes, I have personally experienced there highs around 37C and lows down to -28C (still went to work in 3ft of snow). So I will take my modern home with its ability to be well insulated and heated and cooled. Yes, people lived there long before those modern conveniences, and they were cold and hot. They kept warm in the winter by keeping fires going inside their dwellings at all times. I even spent a week in autumn living in a recreation of one as a kid. Unsutprisingly, it was cold and everything smelled of smoke by the end of the week. Think of how much smoke and particulate we breathed in to stay warm (and there wasn’t even snow on the ground yet). I didn’t even mind it. I’ll give the final word though to those living in even colder and more extreme climates, and any intrepid people living above the Arctic Circle.
    • alt227 2y ago
      We have highs of mid 30s and lows down to -10. Stone is an incredibly efficient thermal material which is why animals and humans have lived in caves for thousands of years.
      • amluto 2y ago
• lm28469 2y ago
  Air tightness is fine, because when it's done anywhere close to the right way it comes with filtered heat recovery ventilation. You're right about building materials, but that's true regardless of the air tightness: engineered woods, all kind of glues, all kind of foams, paints, sealants, hard to tell how nasty they are but they for sure aren't beneficial.
  • amluto 2y ago
    > all kind of glues Glues are getting better over time. Slightly nasty polyurethanes [0] and quite nasty solvent- and bitumen-based products are gradually being replaced with STPE, and STPE seems to be considered quite safe. It doesn’t even have a prop 65 warning! [0] Polyurethane may well be harmless when fully cured, but the uncured isocyanates are most definitely nasty. Fortunately, they’re so reactive that they will aggressively react with water (even just moisture in the air) or almost any alcohol and produce much safer products.
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Sealed houses in favor of climate control / energy usage has a big impact on people I'm sure. I'm lucky ish in that my house is well insulated but has central ventilation, but only 'suck' so it draws in fresh air from outside. In the same neighbourhood, they built houses with recirculation systems with a heat exchanger so that outside air was pulled in through that. But because the system was noisy (constant fan noises), people would turn the system on low or completely off, causing health issues due to buildup of CO2 and the like. That was uh, a bit of a problem for them and the builders.
  • amluto 2y ago
    The constant fan noise issue always seems a bit absurd to me. There’s an excellent mitigation available that also happens to be to extremely cheap: insulated flexible duct. The cheap mylar-fiberglass-mylar sandwich stuff that’s reinforced with a steel spiral, is sold in big boxes, and is favored by cheap contractors because it’s easy to transport and install. This stuff is amazing: not only is it safe (no airflow in contact with fiberglass) and fairly well insulated, but it has excellent acoustic insertion loss. If you take 100 feet of rigid galvanized steel duct and talk into one end, someone at the other end will hear you loud and clear. If you take that same duct and install duct liner (and incredibly annoying process) like a fancy commercial installer, you won’t hear much at the other end. If you use 100' of flex duct, you will hear basically nothing. This stuff mostly outperforms even the most expensive commercial acoustic solutions! Here’s a spec sheet from a random brand: https://www.flexmasterusa.com/Portals/2/Downloads/Flex/6B.pdf https://www.flexmasterusa.com/Portals/2/Downloads/Flex/6B.pd... Wow, 12 feet of 6" duct attenuates 250Hz sound by 43dB! That will make that frequency close to inaudible even if the equipment end of the duct is quite loud as HVAC gear goes. Use wider duct or a longer run (or both) to get it even quieter and to make a bigger dent in the lowest frequencies. So you stick you fancy fan somewhere that you won’t directly hear it (in mechanical space with a fiber-insulated wall between you and it) and you connect it to the living space with ducting that contains at least a decent length of insulated flexible duct. And you keep the grilles and ducts large enough to keep face velocities low so that the ducts and grilles themselves don’t make much noise, and you have a fantastic system. Or you use extremely expensive specialized semi-rigid ventilation duct or rigid galvanized steel or uninsulated flexible aluminum, and you’re sad because your duct is a speaking tube.
• amluto 2y ago
  Competently built modern houses are well sealed, so not much air filters in through leaked walls, doors, etc. Instead, outside air is actively introduced through a filtered intake, by a fan (or by deliberate negative pressure, but that’s riskier, as air will come in through other paths too, bypassing the filter and potentially introducing contaminants from the structure and/or soil into the building). There are plenty of systems to do this. My favorite is an ERV, with an aftermarket, oversized, upgraded supply filter.
  • macNchz 2y ago
    While it's totally possible to build competently, my impression is that, in the US at least, there are tons of existing houses—built roughly between the 70s (energy crisis) and the mid-2000s when ventilation requirements became more common in building codes—that are fairly tightly sealed but lack any sort of real ventilation systems beyond like, kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans. Having grown up and lived primarily in (uncomfortably!) drafty old houses, I've noticed the phenomenon ever since I was little kid because they have a distinctive stuffiness and smell of furniture/carpet/plywood even if nothing inside is actually new. I think many people are just used to it/consider it a normal smell of a house because so much of the housing stock is in this category.