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The bottleneck might be the air in the room

blog.mikebowler.ca

81–90 of 499 posts

Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room

#82

Submarines operate in the 1000s of PPM CO2 range and the sailors aboard generally do not experience any ill effects. This was tested and no deficits were found even at 15,000 PPM: https://asma.kglmeridian.com/view/journals/amhp/89/6/article...

If that study was of submariners, is it possible long-term high-level exposure causes the body to adapt? I am suspicious of 0.1% having a significant effect though, given oxygen is around 20% and we naturally exhale a couple of percent CO2.

I mean that can't be right, as the body's breathing response is triggered by that amount of CO2 buildup. It's not about what's in the air. It's about what the body can take up. Maybe submariners are self-selected to be more physically fit, e.g. larger heart, lung capacity etc. to compensate.

Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room

#84
I remember some years ago after coming from work at 6 pm I was dead tired at home thinking it was due to hard work during the day. Then one summer day decided to code side projects on my balcony and I was building until midnight full of energy.

Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room

#85
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.

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

Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room

#86
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the ikea sensor, I’d say it’s way more accurate than you need for personal use. I wouldn’t use it as a scientific instrument but it’s well good enough to see if the room is ventilated enough. I was shocked to see just how fast CO2 climbs while in a room, and how just opening the window just a crack was enough to restore the room to baseline co2. The thing runs on usb 5v so the power consumption is negligible. I…

Can it work with Zigbee network or is Matter/Thread required?

It’s part of the new range which is all matter over thread only. The existing ikea hub can do thread though.

Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room

#88
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is correct. The concentration of CO2 in air is about 0.04%, whereas the concentration of oxygen is 20%, so the partial pressure of oxygen is about 500x higher. This means that if, for example, 10% of the oxygen in a room spontaneously disappeared, it would be replaced about sqrt(500) = 22x faster through leaks in the room than a 10% spontaneous CO2 increase would dissipate. (This ignores a small ef…

Ok, fair points, including the sister comment, it's likely not a drop in O2 levels. But then why can we see problems with concentration in studies of people in poorly ventilated rooms, but not replicate that when just adding CO2 to normal air? What is the CO2 that we can measure in meeting rooms actually a proxy for?

The Satish 2012 study that seems to have started this trend was a small cohort of 22 people split in 6 smaller groups where they also just injected pure CO2 in a small room. There have been several attempts to reproduce, which sometimes found no clear effect, or a significantly smaller effect.

This original study has been used to market these CO2 monitors for years, but the evidence is quite thin and doesn't support a strong effect. It seems likely that there is a small effect, and it has been wildly exaggerated thanks to a small study with N=22.

Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room

#89
post #13

I’m not saying this isn’t a legitimate concern but this really seems to have exploded amongst the tech community as the next obsession. 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.

It's peak HN meme material because 1) it (allegedly) affects your intelligence which everyone here values highly 2) you can measure it, it's a number 3) requires tech to measure it

So perfect for HN, you can obsess over numbers and tech and how to measure it endlessly and overhype the significance to trick yourself into thinking you're doing something useful.

You get to have your cake and eat it, no wonder everyone loves this topic.

(Also if you're a doomer type you can link this in with rising atmospheric co2 levels for extra points)

Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room

#90

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.

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