I was curious about the levels of CO2 in my room so I went and bought a sensor for my bedroom. I was somewhat appalled when I woke up this morning with heavy eyelids to see the concentration at 1700 ppm.
Guess I have to leave my door open now.
Does your HVAC have a “circ” setting? On mine, it turns on the fan only (i.e. no climate control, just air movement) every 30 minutes.
In the event of a house fire, a closed bedroom door can truly save your life.
Oh huh, maybe I should install a cat door on my bedroom door. Though my landlord would probably not like that very much
Doors come off their hinges super easy with usually 6 phillips head screws. Remove the existing door, stash it, install whatever door you like with attached cat door. When you move out, reinstall the old door.
Isn’t it easier to just rubber mallet the 2-3 hinge bolts out?
Could be, depends on the door and the one you’re buying to replace it. When I did it I got a door without hinges on it for cheap and hung it off the existing hinges.
Did this for my home. Doors are all 100 years old, didn’t feel right cutting a hole for the cats, so bought a solid core door for the basement so they can go up and down as they please.
I went down the rabbit hole on this. Plants cannot help because it takes like 100 fast growing Palm trees to offset one person or something like that. Your only option is ventilation. I did this by installing a switch to the bathroom fan, which is connected to my room and expels the air outside, meaning it must pull in air from outside from some poorly sealed door or window somewhere. The switch I set to go during the hours my wife and dog and I are all sleeping in the room with the door closed and it solved the problem.
I’ve got a fan box that pulls air from the outside and puts it through a heat exchanger against air from the inside. Fresh, filtered air and about 90% energy recuperation. Condensate drips down on the pipes on the outside and finally I can sleep with a somewhat free nose during allergy season.
I’d be curious to see how adding a few plants affects that.
When there is no light, the plants also breathe like humans, so it could be even worse.
At night they burn sugars and emit CO2, during the day they make sugars and remove CO2
I reached out to Amazon and they told me the best solution would be permanent daylight. Just set up growlights, let the plants remove c02 24hrs a day and never sleep. I can work 18 hours a day and I’m thinking I may be able to just remove the bed and convert it to a home office so I can work my side hustle through the night. This gives me plenty of time to use the bathroom and eat 3 times a day. A simple brain implant to allow my body to switch over to AI mode for 8 hours a day allows my brain to rest and productivity to never drop. I’m planning a vacation so I can take a weekend trip in 2029. Maybe I’ll go to the beach, I don’t want to do something to expensive.
I did a quick search and a paper + some articles say that you need a lot of plants (10-15). Just a few only make a negligible difference.
From what i saw you breathe out something like 7-8kg of CO2 during a night. So in a sealed box you would need an amount of plants plants that are capable of absorbing that much CO2 in a single night. Basically 1kg of new plant material per hour, not counting the water ofc.
What you need is something like a whole greenhouse. Like a mini version of this kind of facility.
This is basically a sealed box that was designed to sustain life for 8 people and a bunch of animals for two years with nothing (except electricity) going in or out. It was filled to the brim with plants and algae. And even then they had to eventually activate CO2 scrubbers because the plants couldnt keep up. They also ran out of oxygen and had to inject more to not cancel the project.
Even if you completely fill your room with plants it would probably barely register the difference on the sensor. Plants also only absorb a lot while doing photosynthesis so during the night the whole idea wouldnt work very well. House plants also dont grow very fast (cuz that would be annoying af) so you would need even more. In the biosphere they used specially picked plants that grow and absorb very fast.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
This also gives you a scale for how many trees and algae we need in order to absorb global CO2 emissions. If you need a small greenhouse for just a single human, imagine how much you need for our global yearly 35 trillion kgs of CO2 emissions.
There was an infamous documentary about that.
Looks more like a comedy lol also:
Bio-Dome was panned by critics, gaining a record low score of 1/100 on Metacritic. It is often considered to be one of the worst films ever made.
Thats nuts, i might have to watch it.
It was among the finest of terrible 90’s movies. 10/10 recommend!
There’s a guy on YouTube who tested this. Ended up switching to 10 gallon barrels of algae just to make a difference in his little 5x5 sealed test chamber.
To offset one human, you need about 10,000 leaves. Plants do have other benefits, and they are worth having indoors!
Sitting at a stop light on my motorcycle caused enough CO2 from my breath to build up inside my helmet that I became dizzy and had to pull aside and open my visor and breathe.
From what? Your own breathing?
I’ve been sneaking into OP’s home at night and opening up canisters of CO2 as a prank, they just haven’t noticed until now.
yeah. I think so, anyways.
Is your room really small? 1700 seems really high for just breathing. Unless the sensor is like right next to your mouth.
I have a somewhat small room. The sensor was mounted on an opposite wall so I’m not sure what could be causing this high reading besides me and my CPAP machine. I think it might be coming from the sump pump that’s a few floors below my room. I calibrated it last night outside and it set itself to ~400ppm. As I’m writing this the room has mostly settled back down to 770ppm. To be fair though, my room regularly does feel muggy and hard to concentrate in (less so with a door open), so I’m not entirely doubting this reading.
It seems about right to me. Fortunately just a little ventilation goes a long way. You really only need a little fresh air per person to keep levels low. You can go crazy with online calculators to determine an exact CFM number for a given number of people in a room of a certain size, or you can just experiment and watch the sensor.
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So you sleep between 2 and 10 am with no ventilation. RIP lungs.
What CO2 meter would you recommend, and is it open source, usable with different softwares beyond “only that from the manufacturer”?
I’d like to add that to my home automation, bit I’d need something that works open, not some closed source thing that can’t be used or mixed with anything wlse
I’ve seen recommendations for AirGradient. It’s fully open, AFAIU.
AirGradient just got added to the Works With Home Assistant programme. Looks pretty cool, though I haven’t used it.
If you get the DIY kit you assemble yourself, it’s a similar price to the one OP has.
From what I’ve heard, buying the components and fully assembling it should be about half the price of the kit.
Yeah it’s on the website linked from the blog post.
Indoor kit is $230USD or $138 for the DIY.
Outdoor kit is $225 or $125.
No, I don’t know why the outdoor kit is cheaper than the indoor one 🤷
The components look like they’d cost closer to $60 USD, but you’d need to print a PCB and create an enclosure.
My biggest question, for both the DIY and make it from scratch versions, is since they don’t get tested like the prebuilt, how do you know it’s measuring accurately?
The sensors are preassembled, so I assume the result would be the same. If there’s variation in the enclosure that changes the airflow, then yeah, that could cause differences.
I got a qingping monitor (with NDIR sensor) because of the price. It’s not open source though.
Here’s my personal recommendation. It’s currently 30% off for $175: https://aranet.com/en/home/products/aranet4-home
I’ve had it for at least a year now and it has been an incredible peace of mind. I live in an apartment, and I now make sure I have fans pulling in fresh air from outdoors at all times all year around so the CO2 doesn’t build up
Now we’re cooking with gas!
Do you have a fan to circulate air at all?
