[deleted]
The bottleneck might be the air in the room
101–110 of 499 posts
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the problem is with the price of the sensors. Just look how expensive the Aranet 4 home shown in article is. There are worse devices for less like the IKEA alpstuga. I also don’t know how much electricity they pull.
I would hesitate to say the IKEA is worse. Inside the IKEA is a reputable Sensirion all in one sensor module. It's much cheaper and smaller because the CO2 sensor in it is using different (newer) technology that only released a few years ago from Sensirion. (Upd: the IKEA does have lower accuracy, with ±100 ppm instead of ±30 ppm. From the SEN63C datasheet)
No, it is crap. Yes, it is Sensirion, but it uses a thermal conductivity sensor, which is a very indirect method of measuring CO2. One part of the sensor emits heat and the other senses it and the idea is that heat transfer changes with different CO2 concentrations. However, a lot of other factors influence this as well, such as ambient temperature/humidity (which is why the sensor incorporates measurements from an SHT sensor), but also gas mixture, etc. You only get good readings at lab conditions. Even below 1000 ppm, I would often see readings that are 300 ppm from more expensive, known-good CO2 meters.
If you want a CO2 meter on the cheap, either wire up an optical NDIR sensor like the SenseAir S88 (22 Euro) up to an esp32, which is possibly the best sensor you can get for the money (slightly cheaper version of the sensor that the AraNet4 uses). Or if you want something standalone with a display, get the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 for ~50 Euro, which uses a photoacoustic NDIR, but is still miles better than the sensor in the ALPSTUGA. Can also be hooked up with HA through an ESPHome BLE proxy or with the SwitchBot Hub.
You can find a comparison of the IKEA sensor with other affordable sensors here:
https://danieldk.eu/hardware/smart-home/ikea-alpstuga
(Upd: the IKEA does have lower accuracy, with ±100 ppm instead of ±30 ppm. From the SEN63C datasheet)
You forget to mention that it is ±100ppm plus ±10% of the ambient ppm, which makes a big difference. At 1000ppm it's ±(100ppm + 0.10*1000) = 200ppm and that's only in an environment with 25C, 50% RH, and 1013 mbar. So, that does not tell you much, given that thermal conductivity is very sensitive to environmental factors.
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#103Two 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 a…
As a middle ground I can also recommend this unit: https://apolloautomation.com/products/air-1
Looks like it's increased in price unfortunately but I like the idea, it's basically just what you would do as a DIY project but ready built. So you can either use it like a normal commercial product, or you can just fork the ESPHome config that's on GitHub and flash it exactly like any normal ESPHome project.
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Raising awareness is the only real solution. You'd have to raise awareness on every single person in the room and them sustain pressure to the organization in order to have proper CO2 levels in the room/organization. And then you have to align every other person on every other organization to do this as well and hope for the best. Or, you can do the right thing and have the state introduce regulations
I can just imagine the horrors and skin crawls that your last sentence has evoked in some people's minds. Not the state!! But seriously, so much care needs to be taken here. OK, well "care" at least. Employers certainly would benefit from scrubbing CO2 from the air, in terms of productivity. I'm willing to bet that with central air it would be quite easy, and even with heat and AC off, lots of places still circulate…
It is not that complicated. You need to introduce CO₂ threshold levels that make sense from a medical standpoint. Then you need to enforce them in the same way other basic environmental regulations or worker rights are enforced in regions of the world where these work.
The main question is: If your workplace, city, whatever forces you to work or live in an harmful/unhealthy environment, do you have any realistic course of action to improve the situation? In the US you would call this (gasp) regulation, I would call it a basic human right.
If we talk about stairways, nobody complains about building regulations that mandate handrails. CO₂ levels are not totally different.
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the problem is with the price of the sensors. Just look how expensive the Aranet 4 home shown in article is. There are worse devices for less like the IKEA alpstuga. I also don’t know how much electricity they pull.
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…
I have HA send me a notification to ventilate my office when the air reaches 1000ppm CO2. The IKEA ALPSTUGA is often off by 300ppm even under 1000ppm. If I'd use it, I'd be getting notifications at 700ppm.
It is a thermal conductivity sensor, which is a very indirect way of measuring CO2 and is very sensitive to environment factors. You only get somewhat good readings in lab conditions.
Don't by the ALPSTUGA for anything but very rough trends, there are much better affordable options.
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#106Aranet detectors are superb, and – best of all! – made in Latvia.
Support European!
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Raising awareness is the only real solution. You'd have to raise awareness on every single person in the room and them sustain pressure to the organization in order to have proper CO2 levels in the room/organization. And then you have to align every other person on every other organization to do this as well and hope for the best. Or, you can do the right thing and have the state introduce regulations
I can just imagine the horrors and skin crawls that your last sentence has evoked in some people's minds. Not the state!! But seriously, so much care needs to be taken here. OK, well "care" at least. Employers certainly would benefit from scrubbing CO2 from the air, in terms of productivity. I'm willing to bet that with central air it would be quite easy, and even with heat and AC off, lots of places still circulate…
You’re talking about oxygen like it’s California Rocket Fuel or meth.
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can it work with Zigbee network or is Matter/Thread required?
I'm using a bunch of IKEA's "smart home" stuff, all via Zigbee+HA, works great. Look for the Zigbee icon on the package, and the pairing for Zigbee vs their own home controller might have slightly different pairing sequence on the device, otherwise it just seems to work.
ALSTUGA does not work with Zigbee.
They recently overhauled their lineup and replaced all Zigbee devices by Thread + Matter. Some of the new devices (mostly those who support TouchLink, e.g. some of the lights) have a secret pairing mode with which you can use them with Zigbee, but it's only a subset of the new products.
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hesitate to say the IKEA is worse. Inside the IKEA is a reputable Sensirion all in one sensor module. It's much cheaper and smaller because the CO2 sensor in it is using different (newer) technology that only released a few years ago from Sensirion. (Upd: the IKEA does have lower accuracy, with ±100 ppm instead of ±30 ppm. From the SEN63C datasheet)
No, it is crap. Yes, it is Sensirion, but it uses a thermal conductivity sensor, which is a very indirect method of measuring CO2. One part of the sensor emits heat and the other senses it and the idea is that heat transfer changes with different CO2 concentrations. However, a lot of other factors influence this as well, such as ambient temperature/humidity (which is why the sensor incorporates measurements from an S…
if you just want to know if CO2 is too much, 300ppm precision is fine.
I dont need to know the exact level, just give me a green/yellow/red LED and make it cheap so I can have a sensor in every room
Re: The bottleneck might be the air in the room
#110I wonder how many high impact political decisions (eg EU treaties) have been made in rooms like these.