[burntoutfire]

I live in an apartment in one of the smoggiest cities in the world. An air purifier makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, it works best if you don't ventilate the flat at all, which of course leads to unhealthy levels of CO2... So it's a game of ventilating enough to get the CO2 out, but not enough to make the flat full of smog. Additionally, the conditions outside differ wildly during the day - when a chimney in proximity to my windows is active, the numbers outside temporarily go up 2-4x, so then it's definitely not a time to ventilate.

Overall, it's a fertile ground for automation, but unfortunately I can't think of cheap ways to automatically open/close windows, so I'm sticking to manual management throught the day for now. My next step will probably be installing central air in the apartment, incl. a central air purifier. This way, the air inside the flat should always be well-ventilated and never reach unhealthy levels. It's a shame that I must invest in expensive and bad for environment technology to protect myself from another shitty technology (burning fossil fuels), but that's unfortunately the current the state of my country.