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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

So the idea is to make every room a negative pressure room of sorts? I think this is probably long overdue, but I'm afraid I don't really see the paradigm shift.

Haven't all of these steps been taken on airplanes already, to some extent? From what I see, the "personalized ventilation" idea is substantially similar to what aircraft ventilation does, just adapted for a workspace/building setting.

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It's more important to think about FLOW and also the quality of air exiting an air-handling system. BTW, how often are those ducts cleaned, if ever?

I would personally love a well designed slightly positive pressure dwelling with particle scrubbed inflow and egress (some kind of circulated water system like industrial sites have). Get rid of that pollen and everything else please.

There's an interesting system called "Phenomenal Aire" that I recently installed. It sort of achieves what you're talking about, but uses a very different mechanism called "Cold Plasma Generation" (caused by dielectric barrier discharge). The air smells noticeably "fresher" though that might just be due to the ozone. It does seem to have a dramatic neutralizing effect on VOCs [0].

Interesting article re: use in meat packing plants [1].

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33876887/

Isn’t ozone supposed to be very detrimental to indoor air quality though?

It is. It's a strong oxidizer and damages your lungs. It makes the house smell better because it oxidizes volatile organic compounds in the air, but it's horrible for you.

It's an extremely strong oxidizer. It will poke holes in your lungs. But sure, it'll also oxidize the other crap in your air.

What would be the cost implications of this? I assume we're talking about a massive energy requirement/climate impact to implement this for all public indoor spaces.

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