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Comment by thousand_nights | Hacker News Reader

a lot of these seem to be making the front page lately, i assume these are pointless if you regularly keep the windows open and air out the house?

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In a small enough unventilated room you can fill it with enough co2 to make it unpleasant to be in with an hour. E.g. a study in the usual suburban house.

Yep. Even if the building as a whole is generally well ventilated, particular spaces in a building can still build up CO2 pretty quickly. It's actually quite dramatic to see the rise in chart form at times.

These sensors are really nice to help validate ventilation anywhere.

Yeah, location matters a ton. I have 2 Awair Elements and we ran them in different places until we knew what "normal" looked like, then move them on.

Because of what I saw in my house we switched from a gas stove/oven to electric induction, installed an air exchanger and set our central air/heat to recirculate more often (only important for us during spring and fall when we aren't heating or cooling much).

I don't like noise when sleeping, so I liked the bedroom door shut. CO2 gets way too high, so I switched to using an earplug and leaving the door open more.

It is so nice to have the data, make informed choices and see measurable results.

Yep, I also run central air in fan only mode much more often now. Since I'm in coastal California, I don't need to run heating/cooling for much of the year, so previously that meant central air was rarely on.

Now, I'll run it fairly often for the recirculation. And, since my house is old and leaky, aside from evening out levels, it no doubt results in more indoor:outdoor air exchange too. That alone made a massive difference at night, since I will usually have the bedroom door closed.

And, while I haven't switched the range over to induction yet (it's on the list to eventually do), I did get a portable induction burner that I use fairly often instead of the gas range. Induction is pretty amazing, so I look forward to eventually going all the way.

Sure if you are already airing every hour you don't need it. Then for me it was surprising how often I have to air and for how long (also depends on draft and temperature difference). Once you take into account the more harmful particulate matter coming in from outside, it's about finding a compromise, and without measuring you are tapping in the dark. But in the end people get old without all that stuff.

Let's be honest - the AirGradiant people/person are submitting these.

Which is fine - they seem like a good company with a strong open source commitment, but they do go a little overboard on HN submissions.

Achim, founder of AirGradient here. Just want to clarify that this submit was not done by me or our team.

Maybe not this one but look at your other submissions :)

Winter is coming, some won't keep windows open regularly.

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