101–110 of 114 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At 18C I wouldn't even put on a sweater. People need to stop being so wimpy. 10C is a good target temperature during the winter.
Good that everybody is the same and when 18°C is enough for you everybody should be fine with it, even children, old people and sick ones.
The more we study it, the more we learn how harmful the air inside our homes is. That's why fresh air is key. Crack a window or two open. Buy an air monitor that monitors CO2 (good proxy for overall freshness), VOCs (sometimes these build up much faster than CO2), and PM2.5. If CO2 or VOCs are high, open windows more. If PM2.5 is high and coming from outdoors, turn on an air filter. Yes, this means your heating and c…
The challenge with opening the window isn't even the cost - which is substantial - from about £250/month to £400/month if I have my windows open even a little bit. The bigger challenge is with my windows open, my heating just can't even keep up! It'll be maxed out and only 18c. I do the German-style luften twice a day, but if our interiors are just absorbing the compounds and releasing it when the windows are shut, t…
https://ambientweather.com/indoor-wireless-air-quality-monit...
We have low-voc foam in the attic, which outgasses voc’s slowly and constantly. (They measure voc release at application time, not over the product lifetime).
I started actively venting the attic a two months ago. The whole house reeked of foam for a week or so whenever the windows were closed.
It’s fallen off a lot, even though the attic foam is 5 years old.
I think the sponge analogy is correct. If the house is sealed, the VOCs accumulate in the atmosphere, and are reabsorbed into the foam at the rate they are released into the air.
If you leave the house completely open, the outgassing will not be offset by reabsorption.
I think the CO2 in our place accumulates faster than the VOCs I can smell, so opening the windows when the meter tells us to keeps the net rate of outgassing high, and the indoor pollution low. It seems like the outgassing is slowing down now.
I really should get some VOC meters.
> The findings suggest that regular ventilation alone may be insufficient to remove many indoor contaminants. Physical cleaning activities such as vacuuming, mopping and dusting are necessary to effectively remove compounds with high partition coefficients from surface reservoirs. Yup. Indoor smoker homes are the worst because cleaning alone is often not enough. Cheap landlords just slap a coat of paint on to hide th…
This is also one of the saddest aspects of retro computing. Most listings fail to mention whether previous owners were smokers, and most sellers either aren't sensitive to and/or haven't experienced the off-gassing that occurs once devices warm up through actual use. So this is actually the main reason I'm thrilled about the MiSTer project and the growing number and variety of FPGA-based clones being released today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
10C is a great indoor temperature if you want condensation everywhere and eventually mold, but that's a price worth paying to not be considered "wimpy" I suppose? https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/minimum-house-temperat...
> The minimum house temperature your home should be kept at to avoid damp, mould and condensation is 18°C, according to health and energy experts. That article and the supposed experts are idiotic. Condensation is a function of relative temperatures and humidities. If your house is warmer than outdoors, then you're not going to get condensation from outdoor air.
At 70% RH and 15C air temperatures, the dew point is 10C - which could easily be achieved along the exterior walls of an older more poorly insulated house.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Heating air is cheap, it's heating all the other mass in your home that's hard Is the air cheap to heat? Even if it were, that still wouldn't solve the other issues that were mentioned.
The GP comment is technically correct, if somewhat incomplete. A 40 m3 room (about 14’x14’x8’) has about 50kg of air in it; that’s only ~300 Wh to heat every molecule of it by an entire 20C. The thermal mass of the other things is orders of magnitude larger. The reason that I consider that explanation somewhat incomplete is the behavior of the air and the embodied energy. Imagine it’s winter, the exterior air is quit…
You can also take the domestic calculations further.
If you have 50 kilos of dead weight for instance, whether it's a set of workout weights or a piece of furniture, and it's all a stable 10 degrees C through and through, it's going to take 50 kilos of 30 C warm air constantly coming into intimate contact with the dead weight however long it takes before your dead weight gets to 20 C and the air does too.
That can be a whole lot longer without forced air. But it still takes 50 kilos of air no matter what.
>the thermal mass of the air is very low
This is exactly it, along with heat exchange capacity.
If you pull out the water hose you could spray it down with 50 kilos of water in no time, but not everybody's living room can withstand that :)
Now if you had 500 kilos of 20 C furniture along with everything else, and you opened your windows and let out the full 50 kilos of air which was fully replaced by 0 C air, then shut the window to achieve a closed system once again, you'd still be sitting on 20C furniture for some time and only breathing 0C air for a short period before the overwhelming mass of the furniture itself warmed the much lesser mass of air right back up a few degrees, and to about 18 C eventually. Which none of the other heated mass will drop below.
With no additional heat added, assuming insulation was perfect, but that's the number of degrees lost from one single full air exchange alone under those conditions.
While the windows are open is the time to vacuum the carpets, drapes and furniture so you can get some forced air through them and let absorbed irritants out instead of just stir it up and move it around. The high-surface-area porous materials can soak up more than you think.
Air exchange matters again because some of the irritants are not the kind that evaporate or "dissolve in air" very fast, and they might have had all kinds of continuous time to accumulate.
You've got to figure that curtains can hold grams of unwanted stuff in their pores from previous bad air days, furniture ounces & carpets pounds plus a lot of the latter is solids which may give off odors or stir up allergens for quite some time once it has gotten into the pores and other tortuous passages. That's a lot of air exchange when you do the math.
Change your air filter after stirring things up and breathe easier after that :)
We have a basement garage in our house which has probably not seen a car since the 80s. It still smells of gasoline.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought an aranet 4, it's quite eye opening how you sometimes get a lot of CO2 buildup without even noticing. I mostly solve any issues with VOC by "Stosslueften", but if that's not enough because the air quality outside is too bad, a CR box is an effective, easy to build and almost perfectly silent design, especially if you do it with decent quality pc fans.
A CR box only removes particulates, not VOCs. To remove VOCs, you need a filter with many pounds of activated carbon.
I wonder what the air quality inside a submarine is like, after spending 60 days submerged. How does it smell?
I've toured a '60s era Cold War diesel-electric sub that's been a museum for ~20 years, and it still absolutely reeked of diesel. Combine that with the smell of a couple dozen dudes that haven't showered properly in weeks, and your answer would be not good . The long-term health outcomes are probably significantly worse for people that served in diesel subs than nuclear because of the constant exposure to fossil fuel…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The minimum house temperature your home should be kept at to avoid damp, mould and condensation is 18°C, according to health and energy experts. That article and the supposed experts are idiotic. Condensation is a function of relative temperatures and humidities. If your house is warmer than outdoors, then you're not going to get condensation from outdoor air.
The outdoor air isn't really relevant, the issue is human activity (breathing, showering, laundry, etc.) raising the indoor humidity when combined with low indoor temperatures causing surfaces to approach the dew point. Particularly external walls or windows that will be a lower temperature than the room as a whole. At 70% RH and 15C air temperatures, the dew point is 10C - which could easily be achieved along the ex…
My house is bone dry in winter with the windows regularly open. The humidity concern is idiotic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The challenge with opening the window isn't even the cost - which is substantial - from about £250/month to £400/month if I have my windows open even a little bit. The bigger challenge is with my windows open, my heating just can't even keep up! It'll be maxed out and only 18c. I do the German-style luften twice a day, but if our interiors are just absorbing the compounds and releasing it when the windows are shut, t…
Get a heat recovery exchanger. https://natural-resources.canada.ca/stories/spotlight-energy...