[flacebo]

I got a DIY basic kit, and was pretty surprised when I saw that after 8 hours of sleep the CO2 level was 3600 ppm in the bedroom. My wife still jokes about the way I woke her up. I immediately said "We're basically suffocating". Maybe it was a little bit too dramatic sure, but kind of true.

The levels go above 1000 ppm in less than an hour with both of us in there.

Opening the windows to ventillate doesn't really solve this, as you'd need to keep opening and closing them every hour. I'm thinking about installing a HRV system, but struggling to find a model that could be integrated into Home Assistant. (ERV not necessary as I live in a european country with temperate climate, the humidity is mostly OK)

In the meantime I have two windows tilted open permanently in another room with the doors open. This keeps CO2 under 1000 ppm, but pretty bad for energy efficiency.

Overall pretty happy with the product, definitely made me much more aware of the air quality. I want to build a portable one with a display and logging to check out the car, the office, maybe the hotel rooms on a trip, the plane, etc.

[infecto]

I don’t believe co2 is as statistically significant of a problem as you are making it out to be. I believe some of the originally literature around this really made it overblown.

[sooheon]

There's good evidence to think complex cognitive tasks (like strategizing, coding...) suffer with CO2 > 1000 ppm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...

[infecto]

I do believe the science is out in areas like the described, it could very well impact high cognitive tasks and can easily imagine that being true. I still don't believe it is suffocating the brain like described by the poster.

[gureddio]

It really does feel like this is the current worry in the tech sphere, and somewhat unnecessarily

[thaumasiotes]

> I immediately said "We're basically suffocating". Maybe it was a little bit too dramatic sure, but kind of true.

Carbon dioxide is one of just a very few air quality problems for which you have strong inborn biological detection systems. If you don't feel like it's suffocating you, it isn't.

[flacebo]

Of course, these CO2 levels are smaller by at least one order of magnitude than what could cause suffocation. I overdramatized the fact that the air quality was really, really bad.

Based on every article I found, above 1000 ppm clearly affects sleep quality, cognitive performance, it causes headaches, etc. so 3600ppm is generally considered really bad.

Even if CO2 would be harmless in itself, it is a good indicator for bad ventillation.

[thaumasiotes]

> Based on every article I found, above 1000 ppm clearly affects sleep quality, cognitive performance, it causes headaches, etc.

Sleep quality and cognitive performance are often difficult to perceive in yourself.

Headaches aren't like that at all. If every article you found states that CO2 above 1000 ppm causes headaches, that should reflect poorly on everything else in all of those articles.

> Even if CO2 would be harmless in itself, it is a good indicator for bad ventilation.

This is perfectly true.