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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

Historically levels were around 250 and now they're generally over 450. I wonder if I would feel a cognitive boost or just plain better in general if I were breathing 250. Do they sell home CO2 scrubbers? I can easily increase the CO2 in a room, but how about decreasing it?

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> Do they sell home CO2 scrubbers?

They're called houseplants.

Yes, but technically, several hundred houseplants would be required to offset the indoor carbon dioxide to lower it sufficiently. This has been studied.

some people really love houseplants and go to long efforts to make them comfortable. although ive never heard of a plant hoarder, i can imagine a FD inspector raising eyebrows at a plant hoarding, esp. the fertilizers.

Those are humidifiers at best, the amount of CO2 they extract is negligible during the day and it goes negative during the night, they need to breathe too.

You can form a simple CO2 scrubber by buying colorized bulk soda lime, putting it in a HEPA filter bag, and running air through it, but it's very expensive. It'll probably cost $100 a day. Also, you'll still be on the hook for maintaining good ventilation so as to remove indoor bioeffluent VOCs.

Better systems are being researched.

You can also buy an at home oxygen concentrator for around $125 usd and try it. Iirc it uses atomic sieves that filter out anything larger than oxygen and then releases the oxygen, so it can run for a very long time without replacement.

It's also fun to see how it affects things on fire. The weak little jet of air from the one I bought can turn an lit incense stick into a pillar of fire.

There are likely health downsides to them for otherwise healthy people so I wouldn't suggest using them frequently for breathing purposes, but they can help with short term aerobic output and exercise if you are training at the edge of your physical capability.

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