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Honestly? I recommend a VMC. Simply because monitoring allow to let you know something you can already know enough from your feelings, a VMC allow to breathe more oxygenated air.
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These are great. I have two of them and access the readings over Bluetooth using some Python code: https://github.com/Anrijs/Aranet4-Python (there's also a mobile app which I've never used) The eink display is really nice and if you disable Bluetooth the battery seems to last forever. It's 40% off right now which makes me tempted to pick up a third!
This python code looks fantastic. Worked right out of the gate. Thanks! Also I was not aware of the Aranet Radiation sensor. There goes some of my fun budget towards picking one of these up.
Honestly? I recommend a VMC. Simply because monitoring allow to let you know something you can already know enough from your feelings, a VMC allow to breathe more oxygenated air.
I have search for "VMC" but I am not sure what you mean. Do you have an example of a VMC that you recommend?
VMCs are essentially one or two ventilators in a device designed to push and/or extract air from a closed space to the exterior. Simple flux generally extract, then since you do not vacuum a home external air enter the home from various passages, it's good to exchange air, but not much in energy consumption terms. The double flux suck air out of humid places like kitchens and bathrooms, push exterior air in rooms etc balancing the volumes, with a central point to exchange heat. The passive one is roughly simple, essentially air flux are divided by a set of passages and the dividers allow the heat to pass from the outgoing air to the incoming. They can't recover all the heat/freshness but they still help because you get let's say hot exterior air in summer that get cooled in the device by the outgoing interior air, the opposite in the winter, a small extras to dump condensation, some filters to protect the ventilator etc. The active one is a heat pump, like a minisplit, where the exterior side is in the outgoing flux and the interior side on the incoming, so in winter you pick heat from the outgoing air, witch is normally MUCH "hot" than the incoming, and in summer you push heat in the outgoing air witch is normally much "cooler" allow for a significant COP.
In mild climate and insulated homes an active (also called thermodynamic) VMC suffice to ventilate, heat and cool the home, in less mild climate can be integrated with others appliances too heat/cool the home.
Personally in the Alps I have an active one in a new (5 years) home and with ~10kWh/day suffice for most spring and autumn alone, integrate minisplit in summer and water-water heat pump in the winter. A passive double flux VMC can be just 1-2kWh/day but of course it can't regulate humidity and can heat/cool the home, just allow to waste much less heat/cool while exchanging air.
They are normally present in cold climate home where insulation was a thing since decades, so we need to exchange air anyway, they start to appear in hotter and mild climate since many have started to realize that a home for cold climate works as well in hot climate, because insulation is the same, you only need to tune the thickness and choose elements to shield the Sun in summer/allow it to penetrate as much as possible in winter. The same overall design from the arctic to tropic.
Genuinely curious, what are the advantages of a CO2 monitor? I mean, I get you can “track air quality” but what exactly does that mean on day to day basis?
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I have search for "VMC" but I am not sure what you mean. Do you have an example of a VMC that you recommend?
Where possible a double flux one, passive if you are in a mild climate, active (a small "inverted" heat pump) otherwise. VMCs are essentially one or two ventilators in a device designed to push and/or extract air from a closed space to the exterior. Simple flux generally extract, then since you do not vacuum a home external air enter the home from various passages, it's good to exchange air, but not much in energy co…
VMC stands for controlled mechanical ventilation in French.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where possible a double flux one, passive if you are in a mild climate, active (a small "inverted" heat pump) otherwise. VMCs are essentially one or two ventilators in a device designed to push and/or extract air from a closed space to the exterior. Simple flux generally extract, then since you do not vacuum a home external air enter the home from various passages, it's good to exchange air, but not much in energy co…
Please, define your acronyms on first use. I read all that and still had no idea what you were talking about. But the context was enough to search. VMC stands for controlled mechanical ventilation in French.
In more broad terms a modern home is composted of:
- a compact design to minimize surface dispersion of heat, a sphere would be ideal but obviously it's not much practical so we tend to the "cube" instead;
- aligned to the north-south axe to maximize the Sun intake in winter, so with more or less large windows to capt as much as possible with something to cover them and most of the exteriors in Summer when heating is not needed. This part obviously vary depending on the latitude; at arctic/antarctic I doubt we want to cover the Sun more than the minimum to sleep in summer, at equatorial latitudes I imaging heating in the winter is not much needed so large windows are just a choice there and Sun shields are the more shielding possible all of the year, in any case though the design still hold;
- with big insulation, as much as is reasonable, thermal simulation at hand, witch obviously the maximum thickness at boot too cold and too hot climate and the opposite in the most mild climate, again still the same design;
- air-tightness to keep the most separated possible the inside and the outside, but obviously it we do not exchange air we die inside... So airtight ok, but with a mean to exchange air keeping heat/humidity separated as much as possible. Still the same design, with some extras: in coldest climate we need pre-heating the incoming air, eventually get via a Canadian well (essentially a tube, around Ø200mm, laid out underground at a various depth and length to use the ground temperature to mitigate the incoming air), eventually with a classic resistive heating or a combination of both, and the same Canadian well not with a heating but a pre-cooling systems for most hot climate. Same principle and mostly the same tools all over the world;
- the way to exchange air is just pushing outside the internal air, sucking inside the exterior keeping the same pressure inside and outside, possibly regulating the humidity as well. This could be done passively or actively depending on the climate but the general principle is the same and the aeraulic (pipes) network is the same as well, we have some "different" solutions using multiple devices on perimetral walls, some grabbing air, some pushing, with some internal heat exchanger but they are not much effective and costly, used in general only to retrofit this system on pre-existing buildings where creating a pipe network is not much doable;
- the rest is direct air cooling, minisplit or centralized, the heat-pump principle is the same, only much bigger then the small one of the ventilation, and instead of exchanging air they make interior and exterior air turn in the interior and exterior unites without exchange, at a much bigger rate (let's say a home ventilation could be 300m³/h, while an aircon is at least 3000).
- the winter heating tend to be low inertia, low temperature, liquid to liquid or air (exterior) to liquid (interior) heat pump, the similar compressor of all the overs, but home side you get a long pipe under the flooring, rarely with some wall elements near the floor, where mildly hot water slowly flow releasing heat inside, while outside it's or a similar pipe underground, spread or deep in the soil, or an air-unit like the aircon.
The goal of all the above is achieving the largest scale possible to lower the price of anything an the ability to guarantee an electrical absorption from the grid low enough to been able to aliment homes for potentially all humans given our generation capacity, this means normally around 1kW per home in mild climate, 4-6-8kW maximum in "extreme" climate. Another measure is the theoretical amount of energy the home need per internal walkable surface per year used as a generic "rating guideline".
That's my best to avoid naming specific machines or acronyms, I hope it's clearer now.
I really like the airthings view plus which also measures radon. https://www.airthings.com/en/view-plus
I've got one per floor in a 3 floor house and all get to the BT -> wifi gateway reliably.