There are so many rooms, classrooms, movie theaters and other places with poor ventilation where you just feel dizzy, or fall asleep, not knowing it was just due to lower oxygen levels in your blood. Raising awareness is the only real solution.

Worse, when I brought the monitor home, I found the levels there were elevated even with no one home and surpassed 2000 with just two or three of us in a room.

The good news is that I stopped worrying about making my house "tight" for the sake of energy efficiency. I keep some windows cracked all year and don't worry about how tight the door seals are.

I see this pop up on X every few weeks. Is the concern about this really based on actual science? Is there empirical data proving people are less productive or are damaging themselves as a result of heightened CO2 levels? And I don’t mean observational epidemiology studies.

A good way to think about CO2 is as a proxy for dirty air. CO2 is easy to measure but what it really means:

The next breath you take has: - already been inhaled and exhaled by others several times. - contains remnants of their farts, burps, off-gasing from everything they are wearing, have, everything in the room, etc. - may have presence of other gases like radon in the winter, mold spores, g-d knows whatever else. - co2 itself has negative effects but mainly it's a signal of what else is probabilistically in your air, poor ventilation.

Florence nightingale the inventor of modern nursing wrote that making indoor air as close as possible to outdoor air (without freezing the patient) is the best and most overlooked input to wellness. I believe this is still true.

Weirdly there are people who for some reason are hell bent on denying the air quality as an input to health and cognition. The simplest way to reason about it is: the argument for organic food is the less toxin-like stuff in it the better. Same for filtered or spring water. We often fail to quantity the impact exactly but we (logically) know that less toxin is better. For some reason we hold a much higher bar for "blaming the air" which doesn't make sense.

By volume we consume exponentially more air than food or water, and it enters the blood stream faster and more directly so obviously it impacts us. The EPA ranks indoor air quality as a top risk.

Ironically we are obsessed with outdoor air quality and if you have allergies to things like pollen that's a real concern but in most cases outdoor air is the baseline for what's indoors + other shit is added.

I find that there are people who say "wow air quality here is bad" and there are people who say "oh man I'm tired lately" without being able to attribute it, but I don't ever see anyone thriving in what is objectively bad air.

In Quebec province in Canada, they added CO2 sensors in all the classes in all the schools after covid. Now what? Having data does not change anything if nothing is done.

If instead all the millions invested would have gone into adding air exchangers, now that would actually do something.

And that is assuming that CO2 levels really have an impact. From the last time I researched the subject, I found that there were few studies showing an impact.

For context, from what I remember, in submarines the CO2 levels are usually between 10 000 ppm and 20 000 ppm. Very far from 1000 or 2000 ppm.

Also, CO2 sensors are usually pretty bad. I work in HVAC and I hate calibrating them, the readings are not very consistent. Leave them alone for a few years and a good percentage will simply output bad readings.

Then you see things like a teacher leaving the windows open in winter because the sensor says 2000 ppm all the time instead of realizing the problem is the sensor. (CO2 levels should go back to atmospheric levels over the weekend for example at about 450 ppm)

https://danieldk.eu/hardware/smart-home/esphome-senseair-s88

If you want something with a display that works on batteries without spending over 200 Euro for an AraNet, the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 is pretty good option. It is regularly on offer below 50 Euro. It uses photoacoustic NDIR, but does not deviate a lot from the S88. You can use it without a SwitchBot by configuring it with a phone on Bluetooth. The meter works on external power and battery, but even when on battery, you can set the reporting interval to 5 minutes, which is good enough in practice. The meter broadcasts the measurements with Bluetooth LE, so if you want to get the data in Home Assistant, you can place a ESPHome Bluetooth LE Proxy in the vicinity [1]. This is an ESP32 flashed with ESPHome that listens on Bluetooth LE advertisement and forwards them to your HA instance over WiFi. Of course, you could also get the SwitchBot Hub, but what is the fun in doing that? :)

I would avoid the Ikea ALPSTUGA, it uses a thermal conductivity sensor, which is a very indirect method for measurements and it's often several hundred ppm off.

https://esphome.io/components/bluetooth_proxy/

Personal opinion, you can see cognitive decline at 1000 ppm. Not “ur a zombie” but it’s there. Airflow has vastly improved my life.

Another personal opinion - the coporate stupidity and inane behavior we all see tracks back in part to Co2 levels turning people into quasi zombies. It’s a lot easier to just not care, and things don’t click like they should, when in higher Co2 environments - pushing everyone to rote, process, unthinking approaches. Sounds familiar?

As other commenters noted, it's more about dirty air than CO2 levels - so, logically, should not be a problem for everyone.

If article is really written by AI though, then what if it's PSYOP? The question to ponder then is: why AI wants low CO2 levels? Maybe, for people like Sherlock Holmes to lose a concentration of thought?

IKEA now has a remarkably cheap ($35) air quality monitor that measures CO2 as well as PM:

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/alpstuga-air-quality-sensor-sma...

I don't have one yet but plan to pick one up soon. A CO2 sensor alone from Adafruit is $50+, though that one is more precise. I bought it a while ago and it's still sitting in my todo bin.

For instance, I'm now really only sure that author measured a 2000 ppm CO2 in a meeting room once. Everything else could just be LLM trying to invent convincing argument.

I swear I can feel the 430ppm already. I was born into a world with 340ppm. I can't imagine what it's going to be like when we hit 500+ globally.

I'm in the market for an active CO2 scrubbing solution that I could deploy at home. Scrubbing the entire planet won't work but I could make a small room feel like 1960 again.

The article talks about "within the hour". With four people in my living room doing normal things it jumps within 20min to around 1000ppm. If I am wrestling with my kids much sooner.

In offices companies often neglect it.

edit: if you are cooking on gas it also has an immediate effect on co2 of course apart from other small particles

Stoßlüften.

CO2 is just a tip as office or home is toxic environment anyway. Plastic (e.g. carpets), formaldehyde in furniture, air fresheners… add home office and cooking at home (-> small carcinogenic particles)…

If you start reading How not to die by Michael Greger, you find out that dust, soda and sitting - not CO2 - are real killers…

It's similar to how people think sharks and airplanes are the biggest killers - when in reality it is coconuts, mosquitoes, and motorcycles.

You will take ~ 1000 breaths per meeting hour. really gross!

If your CO2 levels are that high then you should fix the HVAC system and get it up to code or lobby for fixing the code. In many countries, a full air exchange in any office space every X hours is mandatory. In other countries that's optional and they need to get their act together.

After testing a variety of AQI sensors, I ended up acquiring multiple Airthings-branded devices.

They provided the best mix of CO2/VOCs/PM sensors in a single device with a decent enough app.

There may be better options now, but I have these at both home and office.

Highly recommend doing the research and learning about the environments you’re in, especially if you have little ones at home.

Edit to add: opening windows is usually the easiest/best solution!

One of them seems to have much worse ventilation to the extent that it reaches double the level. Opening the window slightly 24/7 keeps it low.

My fiance's chronic headaches/migraines/idk became noticeably less frequent after this change and when they do occur it's usually because the window was accidentally left closed.

Anybody who struggles with this kind of thing might want to try checking their levels. Or just open a window I guess?

Maybe it's not just the air but also the multi-hour meetings that drive people to a sense of "oh god let this finally end now", which leads do decisions that fall short.

I watched the sensor rise from 800 to 1700 PPM by the time the last group left the

It’s quite easy to build one and deploy with esphome and breadboard with stuff you can order on Amazon and have an LLM walk your through hardware and setup.

It is interesting where the rate of speech quickens as the co2 rises and the body starts to notice the co2, or maybe that was just the coffee.

Interestingly the Inkbird and the SCD4X quite often diverge by anything up to hundreds of PPMs; I kind of back the SCD4x (on a Pi in my case) for accuracy after lots of experimentation, reading the datasheet and ensuring the correct calibration procedurs are followed (basically expose the sensors to outside air once a week).

It's also interesting how much it varies day to day in my one-person office - possibly down to how windy it is outside, even with windows closed one day it never goes about 800ppm, other days it'll hit 1500ppm by lunchtime if I don't open a window.

N.B. Quite possible the Inkbird uses an SCD4x internally, seems reasonable kit so I have no explanation for the differences in readings.

If you notice, that monitor has a "traffic light" gauge at the bottom to tell you if the current CO2 level is critical. That traffic light is currently showing RED, i.e. highly critical.

The thing is essentially sounding the alarm and prompting immediate action. However, became the traffic light colors are printed on and static and the only dynamic indicator is a small e-paper bit above the color gauge, the effect gets lost completely.

In most office buildings (towers) that's impossible. You have to deal with what the A/C gives you.

Comprehensive AIR monitor system is must to get most efficient output. Author is right here!

I didn't gather concrete data on this but this is just what I eyeballed over the last few years. Does anyone know why could this be the case?

I heard a Freakonomics podcast recently with similar takeaways - that air pollution has a direct effect on cognition skills.

It's on my desk and I can confirm, opening the window if it gets orange helps a lot with thinking.

Some days in the morning it shows red and I barely can't think or get awake. Opening the window and it changes instantly.

I once woke up with the fam in a hotel with airco at 5500 ppm. It is then that I learned the airco does not blow fresh air (logical after thinking about it).

Perhaps using non-ozone negative ionizers would also help.

Natural CO2 in a room probably correlates strongly with other things given off by humans... Farts, water vapour, viruses, etc.

The effect needs to be properly understood before totally redesigning the nations ventilation systems on a possibly wrong premise.

Even though this article is conveying good (and useful) information, it seems to be completely AI-generated.

Pangram clocks it as 100% AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/c410d4b4-abfd-4ca0-b52d-db0d...

Someone else in the thread lists it as 99%: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector

Also, it sort of jumps out at you if you're used to reading AI writing. Claude loves to start paragraphs with "Here is the uncomfortable part".

I'm not necessarily saying this automatically makes it bad, but everyone should be aware of the source of their information.

Why that matters? You need good ventilation regardless, but instead of just thinking of CO2, try to minimize compounds in your air by selecting things for the room that smell less and off-gas less.

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/carb...

Also, take walks. I am lucky to be able to walk to and from work and it helps immensely.

but Ikea now makes the most affordable PM2.5+CO2 sensor, at $35 a no-brainer

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/alpstuga-air-quality-sensor-sma...

in there is a very nice/expensive Sensirion SN63C sensor that costs nearly as much as the Ikea itself

https://sensirion.com/company/news/press-releases-and-news/a...

unfortunately Ikea requires Matter network not plain wifi for communication so I've been looking for a cheap Matter hub or DIY SPR

Support European!

https://aranet.com/en/home

A terrible way to make decisions.