What does it take to produce cheap CO2 sensors? Ikea would be my best bet to provide a large enough market for good-enough sensors to bring prices down. A CO2 sensor should be in every classroom and every office, but it's not affordable enough yet.
Personally I have a CO2 meter in my tiny office room but I don't need to look at it as I pretty much know that it will be in the red after being in the room for a while with the door closed.
It's actually quite difficult to keep it below 1000 for us, and getting these sensors in every room has been quite the 'curse' :D
I spend a good bit of winter working outside but with physical activity it is much easier.
Do you have other ideas? I mean, it would be nice? I cant think of anything else besides migration.
As someone from said countries and regions, people living outside freeze to death here. Long before you get to that point your water pipes will freeze, leaving you without running water. The pipes will then burst and flood your house if you don't address it quickly enough. You can certainly heat it to a lower temperature and occasionally crack open a window for some fresh air, but there's a difference between conditioning yourself to be comfortable at 17C and -30C.
If you only have a single room then your options are limited, however moving rooms or opening a door to a different room and turning on a fan to increase circulation?
If it is CO2 then you could invest in a houseplant or two.
The long term answer is to improve the HVAC: reconfigure for more external air mixing (commercial), or find a way to install an HRV or ERV, or open a window, but that can be expensive or impossible depending on the situation.
Like a button that does nothing.
This seemed wrong to me, so I checked and it seems like you'd need hundreds of houseplants to make any significant difference: https://www.realhomes.com/news/do-house-plants-remove-carbon...
I also keep a humidifier running full blast (silently) because otherwise it will get crazy dry on some days.
Heh, I usually keep the dehumidifier running, I don’t think I’ll ever need a humidifier. Currently, 80% RH (7g/m³) outside, with indoor levels all slightly above 60%.
The problem in the winter here is keeping enough humidity in the air. It would be nice if I ever had to worry about condensation. ;)
Obviously you also need the appropriate building for it. (So no fancy passive house. No fancy air conditioning – which is quite uncommon where I’m from anyway.)
Generally, if you only open the windows for five minutes or so the air will cool down substantially (the right moment to pull on that sweater) but everything else (walls, furniture) will not really cool down that much, meaning the room will be quick to be back at an appropriate temperature.
We learned and did this in school, often do it in offices and meeting rooms and also at home. Though, admittedly the temporary unpleasantness does frequently lead to people postponing opening the windows forever and ever. (Once every 90 minutes in a classroom setting might not be enough.)
In those settings a CO2 traffic light as an obvious visual indicator would be super helpful.
“Take a break. Go outside. Walk around the block. Never come back.”
No, I think you've got that backwards. It's other pollutants that may (but also may not) go hand in hand with CO2.
CO2 is the only pollutant constantly produced by people and that works as the main indicator of air quality.
Things like PM2.5 or VOC levels, if they are being produced at all, will also be trapped in stale air. But my apartment, for example, generates virtually none of those, except for when I'm cooking, when it generates massive quantities of PM2.5.
I use a CO2 monitor in my living room and I adjust the crack in the window several times a day to keep it around 550 without wasting too much on heating. It's not even remotely common sense, you absolutely need a sensor.
It's more efficient to air out by opening the windows fully and creating a draft for a few minutes several times a day than to leave the window cracked when it's colder outside.
CO2 levels build up higher than I want within half an hour so I'd have to be doing that all day long. And it would result in a periodically freezing apartment.
It's much more efficient for me to keep it open a crack.
I bought my Dad a NetAtmo weather station one part is outside and one is inside.
During Christmas with guests over I looked and saw the CO2 was 1000ppm it felt very stuffy (no air handler in an old house). I opened a window and let some fresh cool air in and CO2 out. It felt so much better.
It was nice to know why it felt stuffy. It wasn't just all the turkey and potatoes that I had eaten.
Strong disagree based on direct experience. I have a HEPA unit that keeps air in the entire living unit clean (from VOCs, particulate matter, NO2, etc.) but doesn't alter CO2 levels. There is little to no human-detectable effect from CO2 levels rising up to 2500ppm (according to my separate CO2 monitor).
My understanding, admittedly driven by 3D printing, is that they only last about a week before the substrate degrades. Fortunately activated carbon is cheap.
Presumably this should also hold for other carbon filters, then, but I don’t know how I would verify that.
This is from experience.
The CO2 level in my bedroom gets high whilst I sleep.
I open the window and the CO2 drops quickly but the pollutant levels rise.
This is from experience.
The CO2 level in my bedroom gets high whilst I sleep.
I open the window and the CO2 drops quickly but the VOC pollutant levels rise.
Check out a video here to see how these things work (this demo is an HRV, so it doesn't help with humidity, but you can see how well it works when there is a big temperature difference between indoors and outdoors).
ERV == Energy Recovery Ventilator
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recovery_ventilation
Other models are laser based (NDIR) and more expensive.
There's also eCO2 which is estimated based on VOC levels and basically useless.
So in other words, adding real CO2 would increase the price a lot. At least double it (since the sensor cost isn't the only factor obviously)
This would totally change the value proposition and target market. I guess they did their research and decided against it. There's other devices that do CO2 for around $100.
It's just the way CO2 sensing tech works.
I wonder why they don't just calibrate them off the factory line then? I mean, 50ppm is not much. In auto mode you won't get much better accuracy than that because you don't always air the house well enough to get down to 400 (let alone in a city's CO2 bubble).
You have the microphone in your smartphone.
Even if air quality sensors would have saved lives (see covid and air pollution) that's not what companies optimize for.
However, I can imagine that with Android devices calibration is going to be an issue (with iPhones, you know which sensor is being used)
Bulk retail is closer to $20, so OP may not have been referring to negotiated wholesale volume pricing.