Why Air Quality Matters

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Ruby on Rails fame) gave a great talk recently on air quality: ▶ this video Apparently his wife was showing signs of Formaldehyde poisoning after they moved into a newly constructed home. This motivated him to investigate the air quality in their house and he bought industrial-level air testing equipment to figure out what was going on (since many of the consumer-grade devices were wildly inaccurate). He also did a deep dive into the research on how air quality impacts cognitive and creative performance. Fascinating talk, worth watching.

DHH gave a talk about this a while ago with good citations to studies about CO2 concentration and other VOCs. ▶ this video

David Heinemeier Hansson gave a great talk on air quality and touched upon various HVAC systems. One thing that really stuck out, was his claim that you need 80 CFM per person per room. ▶ this video

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Rails fame) gave a great talk on this recently, though he focused more on indoor air quality and its cognitive impact: ▶ this video

Reminds me of this talk by DHH: ▶ this video His wife was literally being poisoned by the off-gassing in their new home. A relatively inexpensive air quality detector (Awair) now helps them keep tabs on things. I've got an Awair in my office, and love it. When CO2 gets too high, I step out and work from my porch. For those asking about house plants, the answer in my experience is that they don't make a difference. You have to have a lot of plants to offset the CO2 that you produce.

Dhh recommends awair highly. Convinced me to get one, he tested a lot. Hasn't arrived yet so I can't comment directly ▶ this video

If you're interested in purchasing an air quality monitor, Awair is nice: link I learned about it from DHH's talk on air quality: ▶ this video

I'm eager to hear the results. I recently got an Awair 2.0 after seeing this talk by DHH: ▶ this video It quickly confirmed that, without turning my thermostat fan to "ON", my bedroom CO2 jumps from about 1000 ppm to 2000 ppm within a couple hours of us going to sleep. In the fall, my wife and I started waking up in the middle of the night feeling like we couldn't breathe. What I figured out is that the neither the heat nor cooling was running because the weather was pretty much perfect. We have to keep the door closed because our cat will swat at us in the middle of the night otherwise. I figured there would naturally be enough of a draft to not make this a concern and it's a fairly large connected master bedroom/bathroom with high ceilings to hold a lot of air, but I guess that isn't enough. So that's when I learned about the "fan" function on my thermostat.... never had a need for it in my life. Now I just need to figure out how to get lower than 1000 ppm, which is already a hit against cognitive function. Our house has no screens currently and even if we install some, it's not like I want to have windows open in the middle of winter. I've heard house plants don't have a huge effect, but I'm willing to try.

Hi, this is an interesting project. It seems to be targeted for outdoor measurements. Do you know if this also suitable for indoor measurements (meaning if you want something for indoor air quality, would you measure the same things?) I recently watched a video from dhh ( ▶ this video ) about air quality at home and was thinking if there was a nice diy solution for measuring it.