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Comment by bottom999mottob | Hacker News Reader

Or it could be that people spend more time in their luxury vinyl planked house, vaping and having ingress air filled with formaldehyde from traffic

It'd make more sense and be less ethical to expose people to either formaldehyde or tire dust in a confined area, but that study is definitely not getting funded

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Modern construction is insanely "tight" in the sense that most of the inside air stays in and most of the outside air stays out. Some of the most energy-efficient buildings need convoluted ventilation systems to prevent the humidity from getting out of whack and causing mold.

My older house might leak conditioned air like a sieve, but it's also venting away the various VOCs from whatever cheap crap I have recently brought inside.

AFAIK, the ventilation systems are only convoluted in the sense that they use a heat exchanger to minimize the temperature difference with the incoming fresh air. It’s not a hack or afterthought: The idea is that airflow is very important, but it needs to be controlled to maximize energy efficiency.

Relying on passive ventilation that wasn't designed as such is also not a good way to achieve removal of these nasties. You can see that if you open a window when you have high CO2 - it doesn't drop at any speed.

Huh for me it drops down to 400 within minutes when I open a window

Relying is the important point. Sure, it may be fine, but it often isn't, and probably is uncomfortable in winter. And that's before we get to energy losses.

I guess you and the person before might have different circumstances in how your windows and rooms are set out, local prevailing wind and so on.

I have to open two windows in my home office, otherwise the co2 just hangs around.

Is not just traffic, Biologists are exposed to formaldehyde vapors each day for example, and gloves don't remove it entirely so you end having skin problems.

What does vaping have to do with this? It doesn’t contain formaldehyde.

Shouldn't contain formaldehyde, but does appear to

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321928

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5954153/

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