31–40 of 327 posts
Please, not the open air movement again. Edit: for the non-stewards of History that have no idea what I'm talking about: http://digg.com/video/what-was-the-open-air-movement-and-how...
Back in college, I worked on a project whose goals were to examine the effects of closed room vs. fresh air cognition. The solution was a partnership between the Architecture and Biotech departments to develop so-called "living walls" to continuously recycle air. In accordance with this article, test subjects showed improved cognition and memory working in fresh, low co2 ppm air. I unfortunately do not have a paper b…
Is average outdoor air optimal?
A long time ago I received advice that if a news title ends with a question mark the most likely answer is NO. Does this still hold?
Back in college, I worked on a project whose goals were to examine the effects of closed room vs. fresh air cognition. The solution was a partnership between the Architecture and Biotech departments to develop so-called "living walls" to continuously recycle air. In accordance with this article, test subjects showed improved cognition and memory working in fresh, low co2 ppm air. I unfortunately do not have a paper b…
Is average outdoor air optimal?
No. I wrote up the computations explaining why. See http://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/co2_closed_rooms/
I now am very conscious about keeping a door open and getting some fresh air into the room. This is a challenge in modern, well-insulated buildings in Florida in the summer.
Boston winters sometimes make cracking open windows impractical, but if you're in a typical old multi-unit building with old steam/water centrally-controlled heating, there's a good chance that your unit is too warm anyway (though some other units might be too cold). I've heard that some of these old heating systems were even designed assuming cracked-open windows.
The main downsides I'm aware of to open windows here usually are outside noise and seasonal pollen. For the pollen, you can run an air filter and HEPA vacuum robot and/or (supposedly) install special window screen material for the pollen. If you're in a very noisy area, that sometimes means opening and closing window based on noise at the time. If outside noise at night or early morning can be bad where you are, that might mean frontloading bedroom fresh air in the evening before bed, but shutting window before bed.
I don't know about air pollution from fossil fuels, industrial, etc.
I own a CO2 monitor and it is shocking how high it can get in a house with two people just existing. 800 ppm or more. Outside air is 410. In a car with air on recirculate, it was getting to >1220 ppm, a level that impairs decision making and lowers brain function. I try to drive with air on fresh from now on. I don’t doubt the air in our conference room with 20 people gets super high in CO2 as the meeting goes on, an…
800ppm is a fairly typical value for indoor CO2 and not really that shocking. Fun fact: We've known since ~1850[1] that we should probably stay below 1000ppm for indoors, but we based the measure back then on body odor :) (It still bugs me that oddly cognitive impairment starts at the same point a body-odor measure from the 1800s put CO2 levels, and I keep wondering if we're seeing confirmation bias in action) In gen…
That said, I doubt humanity spent enough time in caves or other restricted airflow environments for such a response to evolve...
I own a CO2 monitor and it is shocking how high it can get in a house with two people just existing. 800 ppm or more. Outside air is 410. In a car with air on recirculate, it was getting to >1220 ppm, a level that impairs decision making and lowers brain function. I try to drive with air on fresh from now on. I don’t doubt the air in our conference room with 20 people gets super high in CO2 as the meeting goes on, an…
School classrooms (20-30 people, 1-2 hours, closed windows, no ventilation) are probably worse than any conference room.
I’m not sure it was an improvement: the blowers were noisy and made the classrooms much less comfortable (colder in winter, warmer in summer; it was an older school and the HVAC systems weren’t great). Teachers constantly talked about how they wanted to destroy the blowers. I seriously doubt grades improved. I wonder how previous students managed before our enlightened times.