Discussion summary
Discussions highlight air quality as a potential bottleneck in decision-making and meetings, with suggestions for outdoor walks and CO2 monitoring.
What the discussion says
- Indoor air quality can hinder decision-making.
- Walking meetings could improve air quality and mental health.
- Using CO2 meters helps monitor indoor air quality.
“A terrible way to make decisions.”
“Meetings while walking outside offer air quality and mental benefits.”
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- Hacker News
- I've noticed that cooking with gas is easily the worst thing for CO2 levels. Even with lots of ventilation my kitchen will hover around 1200ppm until it's over with.
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.
by bob1029 - What have you found so far?by Schiendelman
- I swear I can feel the 430ppm already. I was born into a world with 340ppm.
You’re probably about my age, then, and I’m old. It might not be the baseline CO2 levels. :-)
Kidding aside, that would be hard thing to baseline.
by mikestew - Controlling indoor CO2 is important, but it's a proxy metric for the escalation in indoor bioeffluent VOCs which are a tiring subset of total VOCs. This is why scrubbing indoor CO2 will by itself never produce the pro-cognitive result you want. See https://www.aivc.org/resource/effects-carbon-dioxide-and-wit...
Also, when you cook on a gas stove, it produces numerous other toxic gases which too are critical to ventilate before they even escalate, failing which the lung cancer is risked.
Scrubbing indoor CO2 is sensible only when you want to go below the outdoor CO2 level, not at levels above it.
by OutOfHere - Having CO2 sensors is mostly useless.
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)
by tmp147963 - I very much doubt submarines operate that high
The ISS runs at 3000-6000ppm CO2. over 7000 is dangerous
by shawabawa3 - Not useless.
You cannot solve a problem when you don't know you have a problem.
by spixy - >Having CO2 sensors is mostly useless
I got one because old apartment and bad ventilation. Was able to open a window when I felt the effect before, but now I can get an alert earlier. Since getting it I could consistently feel the effect at around 11100-1300.
by Hikikomori - This article is rated 100% on my AI smell meter, making it less trustworthy despite convincing arguments.
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.
by Aperocky - Yeah, I clocked it as AI the moment I read "Here is the uncomfortable part". Pangram detects it as 100% AI-generated:
https://www.pangram.com/history/c410d4b4-abfd-4ca0-b52d-db0d...
- Glad someone else is saying it. It has that exact LLM cadence to it, horrible.
The worst thing is, I'm pretty sure humans are starting to mimic that cadence too...
by girvo - Don't forget too, if the CO2 is 1000 ppm, then half of the air in each breath you inhale was recently exhaled by someone else. Yes, airborne viruses are still spreading. I still wear an N95 mask whenever I'm in an indoor space with other people outside of home.
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.
- Doing that all the time might not be the best idea for your immune system and neither for the respiratory one too.
The first needs to occasionally see new threats to stay up to date and healthy. The second will not like the constantly restricted airflow.
by hypfer - could you observe an effect on your health after starting to wear the mask? like sickness days per year?by boernard
- Oh this is absolutely so relevant and I wonder if there are any high quality studies that have analyzed driving performance against CO2 buildup in cars. Cars often ship with circulate air feature in the aircon, and people use it aggressively, nonchalantly at least where I live, having no idea about the dangers of possible hypoxia and sleepiness that might be inducing in them while driving. It is absolutely critical in my opinion for cars to have CO2 monitors. We put so many sensors in cars these days that this seems to be a really cheap and fairly high value of life addition that could possibly prevent accidents on roads. I keep a portable CO2 sensor in my car at all times, because sometimes circulation is not something I can avoid when stuck in traffic or when passing by a drain.
- Yeah, I measured over 5000ppm in a taxi with two passengers. Showed the driver how to enable air intake (he didn’t know about the feature) and tried to explain this is deadly. Pretty sure this is commonplace globally.
Generally it’s a miracle to me so many people survive traffic on public roads, statistically.
by infofarmer - Cars aren't hermetically sealed vessel. This is hilarious.by esikich
- Cars are not sufficiently sealed for that to make any kind of a difference.
- Buildup of CO2 and reduction in O2 are two different effects. We're not in danger of running out of O2 in any everyday situation.by inigyou
- Relevant video of someone experimenting with a CO2 monitor in a car: https://youtu.be/hr9w-ZixAqcby _thisdot
- Your comment actually has me convinced that this isn't an issue. I've been a recirculation dude for my entire life, I literally don't drive any other way.by prodigycorp
- Got a firsthand experience with this. I was dropping off my girlfriend and we stopped to talk in the car, with all the windows up. Over the course of the conversation we got more and more agitated at each other until I had a thought and pulled my Aranet out from my backpack. It was >3000ppm CO2. We opened windows and within 2 minutes all the agitation went away.by npunt
- There needs to be a meter for the amount of AI writing in blogposts. Same physics, same climb, same afternoon fog.by oasisbob
- Yeah, it's really tiring reading Claude's output all day, every day. Nowadays I yearn for a different style.by stavros
- This reads to me as AI generated. Apparently it's still good enough to the general audience to be the #1 post on HN right now though. Which is honestly a troubling signal for the state of the world...by naet
- I've actually been tracking the front page of HN for AI posts for a while now: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector
This post evaluates to 99% AI generated.
by salahadawi - Two tips: if you want a stationary CO2 meter in a room, you can make one very cheap with a SenseAir S88 sensor (22 Euro) and hooking it up to an ESP board. Flash ESPHome and you can get live statistics in your Home Assistant dashboard. The S88 is a pretty good optical NDIR Sensor that auto-calibrates by putting it in the outside air or in a well-ventilated room every N-days (N is in the data sheet). A bit more info about hooking up the S88:
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.
by microtonal - Thanks for mentioning that, last week I got 2 SwitchBot hub mini, 3 temperature sensors each, for 70€ total, they are really neat. Even put one in our fridge, I didn’t expect the signal to pass but it’s working :)
Will look at adding the CO2 monitoring
Edit: actually, they only sell them as part of a 6-in-1 device, with a display, and a bunch of other sensors. That feels overkill, I wish they would just sell the CO2 sensor itself
by dgellow - As a middle ground I can also recommend this unit: https://apolloautomation.com/products/air-1
Looks like it's increased in price unfortunately but I like the idea, it's basically just what you would do as a DIY project but ready built. So you can either use it like a normal commercial product, or you can just fork the ESPHome config that's on GitHub and flash it exactly like any normal ESPHome project.
by bjackman - I would recommend Ruuvi Air, its sensors are high quality, and is quite open for devs to do pretty much whatever with it. Works by broadcasting sensor data over BLE, so if you have a smartphone or a home assistant server with BT connectivity, you can display or store the data live. The iOS app sends alerts when different custom thresholds are crossed, like for co2 ppm.
They do have a gateway product, but it’s not necessary if you have HA. If Apple homekit routers supported BLE as source it would work seamlessly in the ecosystem, but a bridge software is required on HA.