Honest question - Why would one want to monitor CO₂ in their office?
Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#12Honest question - Why would one want to monitor CO₂ in their office?
Elevated CO2 levels have a noticeable impact on human cognitive ability. Indoor environments obviously have higher CO2 levels vs outdoor, but certain offices may have worse than typical indoor levels due to poor ventilation.
https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#13Honest question - Why would one want to monitor CO₂ in their office?
Elevated CO2 levels have a noticeable impact on human cognitive ability. Indoor environments obviously have higher CO2 levels vs outdoor, but certain offices may have worse than typical indoor levels due to poor ventilation. https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
The linked article is fascinating.
"They found that, on average, a typical participant’s cognitive scores dropped 21 percent with a 400 ppm increase in CO2."
If this result is reproducible, this is quite concerning considering:
"In surveys of elementary school classrooms in California and Texas, average CO2 concentrations were above 1,000 ppm, a substantial proportion exceeded 2,000 ppm, and in 21% of Texas classrooms peak CO2 concentration exceeded 3,000 ppm."
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#14Honest question - Why would one want to monitor CO₂ in their office?
Elevated CO2 levels have a noticeable impact on human cognitive ability. Indoor environments obviously have higher CO2 levels vs outdoor, but certain offices may have worse than typical indoor levels due to poor ventilation. https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
Interesting, I had no idea. Do you think it's worth getting a CO2 monitor for a home office? I don't usually have the windows open since it's cold out. Is one person enough to elevate a small 10x10 office to cognitive impairing levels?
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#15In almost every office I was there was a poor ventilation. I have extremely high co2 ppm in my university labs. I try to always open windows where it possible.
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#16This is another way to do IoT wrong - collecting data but just displaying it.
The idea is to use CO₂ levels to control your HVAC system. The HVAC system should be able to draw fresh air from outside or recirculate air from inside, depending on CO₂ level. This is a standard option on modern HVAC systems, and there are standard sensors for it. Better systems sense temperature, CO₂, CO, humidity, and smoke. This is a huge win for rooms where the people load varies widely, such as hotel function rooms and classrooms. Such control systems save money, because, when nobody is using the room, they detect that CO₂ is low and cut down the ventilation rate. When the room fills up, the CO₂ level goes up, the fans speed up and the outside air intakes open until the CO₂ level comes down.[2] There are smart control units which manage heat, fans, vents, and air conditioning compressors. The hardware pays for itself in power consumption.
And yes, you can get this stuff Internet-enabled, although that's mostly for remote maintenance. The HVAC works just fine without connectivity.
Surprisingly, this technology is a tough sell. Except for convention hotels. They get this. They're in the competitive business of keeping large numbers of people comfortable and coming back. They have big rooms where the people load may go from zero to a thousand in minutes, and go back down an hour later. It's a huge win for them.
[1] http://www.airtesttechnologies.com/support/reference/CO2SeqO... [2] https://buildingcontrols.honeywell.com/literature/Advanced_R...
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#17If you're interested in a hardware solution, I've used the MH-Z19 CO2 sensor to great results. It's an NDIR (read:not electrochemical) sensor with a UART interface and temperature compensation. It will report up to 5000ppm and comes factory calibrated. It's also $20 in singles from China. Coupled with whatever microcontroller you want, it's totally possible to have a distributed net of CO2 sensors for a low cost per…
Just wanted to add that Tasmota[0] (one of the open source firmwares for ESP8266 controllers) seems to already support MH-Z19 sensors.
This cuts down on the work if all you want is to measure your CO2 level: you can get a $3 Wemos and a sensor, (solder pins, figure out the sensor connector), flash Tasmota, and you'll have it already reporting on MQTT over wifi. I would argue it's even easier than installing and maintaining Linux on a RPi.
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#18I was looking in to a indoor quality monitor, and seems like for $80, you could just buy this which connects to homekit https://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Eve-Room-technology-Bluetooth/...
Came here to say something similar. I expected an actual circuit build (of which there are many), but this is just plugging in a USB data logging CO2 monitor (which is $116 on Amazon right now, but apparently the normal price is ~$70 USD) and using it with Prometheus. I've done something similar wrapping https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 to pick up temp / humidity monitoring data from sensors around my home, then s…
What kind of 433MHz temperature+humidity sensors are you using? What kind of battery life do you get from them in the freezer?
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#19If you're interested in a hardware solution, I've used the MH-Z19 CO2 sensor to great results. It's an NDIR (read:not electrochemical) sensor with a UART interface and temperature compensation. It will report up to 5000ppm and comes factory calibrated. It's also $20 in singles from China. Coupled with whatever microcontroller you want, it's totally possible to have a distributed net of CO2 sensors for a low cost per…
+1 for the MH-Z19.
We're looking to add a Co2 sensor to our IoT lineup and the MH-Z19 looks promising. It's also really small too :). You can also choose from 2 different ppm sensitivity from the factory and can get it on Aliexpress.
Here's the project I'm working on:
http://www.kokonaut.com http://www.instagram.com/kokonautweathersensors
Re: Show HN: Low cost CO₂ monitoring (your office) with Prometheus and Go
#20This is another way to do IoT wrong - collecting data but just displaying it. The idea is to use CO₂ levels to control your HVAC system. The HVAC system should be able to draw fresh air from outside or recirculate air from inside, depending on CO₂ level. This is a standard option on modern HVAC systems, and there are standard sensors for it. Better systems sense temperature, CO₂, CO, humidity, and smoke. This is a hu…
> Surprisingly, this technology is a tough sell.
Well, in the Office for regulating CO2-vs-O2 it's competing with the timeless, very-low-maintenance and low-cost combo of keeping-plants-and-occasionally-opening-a-window.