
Literally Suffocating in Meeting Rooms, A Little - curuinor
https://howonlee.github.io/2019/10/12/Literallt-20Suffocating-20In-20Meetings-20A-20Little.html
======
Animats
I got a CO2 meter out of curiosity. They are, indeed, about US$150. I get a
little under 500ppm indoors.

Incidentally, humans can tolerate much higher CO2 levels with accommodation,
but, as with altitude, it takes days. The US Navy submarine people have done
considerable work on this. So this is not a global warming issue.

Real CO2 sensors are still about US$60 as a part. The standard sensor has a
heating element, and uses about 75mA, so this isn't suitable for battery
operation. 1mA sensors are now available, but for US$160 or so. This cost
problem is holding back widespread use in HVAC systems. HVAC systems for rooms
where the people load varies widely (classrooms, offices, hotel function
rooms, restaurants) should have a CO2 sensor to tell how much outside air you
should be pulling in. But outside of hotels, they're rare.

Cheap "air quality sensors" measure volatile organics, which is something else
entirely.

~~~
joecool1029
FWIW I have had this cheap CO2meter for a few years and it seems to work just
fine. [https://www.co2meter.com/products/co2mini-co2-indoor-air-
qua...](https://www.co2meter.com/products/co2mini-co2-indoor-air-quality-
monitor)

Windows open? Drops into 600ppm range. GF and I at home with closed windows
and HVAC off, usually climbs into 1200pm range. Gas oven on? Easy to get over
3000ppm if there's no ventilation on.

> But outside of hotels, they're rare.

I haven't made it a point to look in all of them, but I've seen quite a few in
microbreweries in the room they do their brewing. Not sure if required by law,
but it's generally a good idea.

~~~
thoughtstheseus
Large industrial facilities often track air quality, usually in certain areas,
to prevent accidents.

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frutiger
Every meeting room in our office building has a little meter in it which
rotates through displaying three different measurements: temperature, relative
humidity and CO2 ppm. Most of my colleagues are surprised when I point this
out to them.

The floors of our office that I sit in has two sizes of meeting rooms: one for
eight/nine people and one for three people. Free meeting rooms are scarce
during regular hours, so sometimes we cram in to three-person room.

It's fun watching the CO2 measurement climb from 800 to 1400. Supposedly 400
ppm is outdoors, 800 ppm is indoors and anything higher is a little unusual. I
have fun pointing out the reason why we are all feeling sleepy and docile
towards the end of a meeting is because of the CO2!

See also: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/health/conference-room-
ai...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/health/conference-room-air.html)

~~~
EGreg
I think by 2050 it might be 800+ outdoors

That’s what scares me

~~~
mxfh
The trajectory the _Keeling Curve_ (+3ppm/year) is on, the dumbing down of
(human) cognitive abilities seems to be challenging climate change sooner than
I thought on what is the more immediate problem to civilization.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve)

~~~
Arete314159
Soon the wealthy will have C02 scrubbers in their homes and cars, and hoi
polloi will have to live in a cognitive stupor.

------
Booktrope
The effect mentioned in this article is certainly not suffocation. 2000 ppm of
CO2 is about 0.2% of the air, and doesn't signficantly reduce oxygen levels.
It's a real problem, but calling it suffocation is pretty dumb.

This is possibly even a more serious problem in tightly weatherized bedrooms.
I was in a rehabbed house tightly weatherized by the contractor (to meet a
typical building code). It had radiant heat. When my wife and I sat in the
bedroom for 1 hour, a calibrated CO2 sensor showed levels rising to 1600 ppm.
(Humans put out lots of CO2). Sleeping 6 - 8 hours in that environment is very
likely to cause cognitive impairment the next day. So if you're in a "tight"
house, make sure to sleep with the windows open!

Raising the question of course, of why then tightly weatherize the house?
Well, so we can say, we're being environmentally responsible, of course!

~~~
orthoxerox
> So if you're in a "tight" house, make sure to sleep with the windows open!

The right answer is to switch on your heat-recuperating ventilation.

~~~
TheRealBill
Or get yourself some sansevieria trifasciata plants. Depending on the size of
your bedroom, 3-4 should so it (about 1 per 100 square feet of room). They'll
convert CO2 to O2 all night - and clean the air a bit as well. They are also
easy to maintain.

~~~
orthoxerox
How exactly do they do that without sunlight?

Also, just how big are American bedrooms? Mine is 172 sqf and I consider it a
big one.

~~~
TheRealBill
They use of a different mechanism to power it by delay. They use a second CO2
fixation pathway known as Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM). Basically they
"store" the energy by day, then open up at night and to their thing. Only 5-6%
of plants do it this way and, IIRC, almost all of those are succulents or
desert plants. This pathway helps preserve water.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism)
is a decent introduction to it.

Also, most "kid" bedrooms are around 10x10 or so, but some master bedrooms can
be rather ... large. I said 3-4 to cover both not being the only one in there
and the size of the plants. The tests are done on or projected to full-size
mature plants, but if you go to the store and buy them they are rarely full
size. They'll range from 6-8" babies to about 1/3-1/2 in size (1-2'). For the
"full effect" from the reports they size based on a 4' tall plant.

------
CaliforniaKarl
RevK (who runs a UK ISP) has been looking at this since March:

[https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/air-quality-and-co-
levels.html](https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/air-quality-and-co-levels.html)

[https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/understanding-co2-air-quality-
be...](https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/understanding-co2-air-quality-better.html)

He’s very much an old-school Hacker; it’s worth reading the posts he’s made
since those two.

~~~
nothrabannosir
The ISP appears to be “AAISP”, at
[https://www.aa.net.uk/](https://www.aa.net.uk/) , for anyone else in the
market for a UK ISP soon.

~~~
ahbyb
The amount of CO2 in their offices is the first thing I look at when I'm
picking a new ISP.

~~~
nothrabannosir
Absolutely, the last thing you want is your technogamekeeper suffering a
suffocating malaise. :)

That, and perhaps their street cred as O.G. Hacker. A distant second.

------
rcthompson
In high school I remember being consistently very tired in certain classes.
One of them was health class, which replaced phys. ed. for one quarter,
meaning that an entire gymnasium worth of students was crammed into a
classroom. Others such classes were internal classrooms with no outside walls,
and hence no windows. I suspected CO2 was an issue at the time but obviously
had no way to prove it.

~~~
alexis_fr
Reversely, I was surprised at how healthy (tall, notably, and a healthy skin)
Australians are compared to France. I highly suspect that Australia has proper
air ventilation in classrooms and we don’t in France. In France it is common,
for a class, a meeting, and and even in a theater or music show, to cram
people in a room, and not worry about ventilation. People complaining will be
seen as weak.

I wonder whether proper air venting through school increases the global IQ and
total skills of students.

~~~
paggle
It’s also that Australians are the descendants of criminals who were shipped
to a hostile land at minimal expense and managed to survive.

------
croisillon
But if the air is so much charged with CO2 we feel it and we end up opening
the windows it seems? At least at my job meeting rooms windows are
systematically opened between meetings.

~~~
breakintheweb
A lot of office buildings in the us have the windows permanently closed so you
can't open them.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
A lot of office buildings in the US have no windows at all.

~~~
matttproud
This has been why I have enjoyed living and working in Europe (DE and CH):
high-quality windows to be opened at a moment's notice at home or in the
office.

~~~
dangus
I agree, the small “people” in other continents don’t truly enjoy the
atmosphere in the same way that we do, with the highest quality windows
demonstrating the apex of European craftsmanship. Air just doesn’t feel the
same when it’s being wafted through a lesser window in an inferior continent.

I heard that other places don’t have toilets, opening windows, or even the
opera!

~~~
khrbrt
They may have been referring to "tilt and turn" style windows
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT8eBjlcT8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT8eBjlcT8s))
which I saw everywhere in Germany but I've never seen in the US.

Too bad, they're pretty great.

------
Sujan
Ok, so which ones should I get? (Amazon.de preferred, but please throw in all
links)

~~~
flgr
This one has worked really well for me and friends who are also using it:
[https://www.amazon.de/TFA-Dostmann-AirCO2ntrol-
CO2-Monitor-K...](https://www.amazon.de/TFA-Dostmann-AirCO2ntrol-CO2-Monitor-
Kunststoff/dp/B00TH3OW4Q/)

~~~
flgr
There's also software to read the measurements it makesover USB, but I haven't
personally used that: [https://github.com/huhamhire/co2-monitor-
exporter](https://github.com/huhamhire/co2-monitor-exporter)

~~~
flgr
Looks like the underlying logic came from this blog series, which made me
originally buy that particular device:
[https://hackaday.io/project/5301-reverse-engineering-a-
low-c...](https://hackaday.io/project/5301-reverse-engineering-a-low-cost-usb-
co-monitor) :)

------
slavik81
I suspect this may be why I'm so tired after meetings, but I'm not sure. It
would be nice to test the air in the meeting room. There are dozens of
different sensors on sale on Amazon, but if I buy one, how do I know if it's
correct?

~~~
t34543
You could be tired after meetings just because they require a significant
cognitive load.

~~~
slavik81
That was my initial assumption, but the air quality seems both plausible and
fixable. Worth investigating.

~~~
TheRealBill
Talk to remote people. ;) We get tired after/during the meetings, too, and we
often have better air quality than those cramped meeting rooms.

------
_def
I hope we'll have those kind of sensors in our phones someday. Also you have
to be lucky enough to be working with people who care about this stuff

------
11235813213455
Air-conditioning, CO2 monitoring, etc.. Vs opening a window and have a few
trees and plants around

Isn't the latter (when possible) better for cognitive capacities and well-
being? and most importantly for the global environment

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
AIUI plants don't consume nearly enough CO2 to compensate significantly for
even one person's output.

~~~
TheRealBill
You need about 1 sansiveria per hundred square feet or so. NASA has spent
quite a bit investigating the efficiency and effectiveness of a wide array of
plants for CO2 -> exchange. In an office you'll want plants such as bamboo
palm, english ivy, peace lily, boston fern and a few others as they do their
work presdominantly by day and sequester oxins such as formaldehyde and
benzene.

They don't have to fully supply everyone's oxygen to be effective, nor do they
have to fully consume your CO2. That said, you'd be surprised at how well some
of these will do just that. As a rule of thumb, about four mature sansevieria
trificiata will convert as much CO2 to O2 as a single human does on a daily
basis. But with those they are storing the CO2 by day and releasing O2 by
night so while they will sck up the CO2 in your office by day, you won't see
the O2 "come back" in that same time - at least not significantly so.

Others such as some of the palms and lillies, and a few ferns, would do that
same "effort" but in the daytime. Even then, in the context of offices and
other rooms in this discussion the part to look at is their CO2 consumption,
not the production of O2.

Some plants, such as Ficus benjamina are very effective. One (or more) of
those with a total leaf surface area of 1 square meter can take a closed room
from 2,000ppm CO2 down to 400-500ppm in one hour (variance based on
temperature and light levels).

------
lordnacho
I always suspected this. I recall several times in crowded lecture halls
feeling drowsy and uncomfortable. My theory was co2 but I didn't know enough
about how it works.

Interesting to think though about the whole co2 thing, if we keep burning
fossil fuels we won't be able to think properly anymore?

~~~
rcthompson
I'm pretty sure we will notice the destructive effects of global warming long
before we notice any cognitive decline from atmospheric CO2 levels.

------
strstr
This reminded me of [https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-
open...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-open-door-
policy/).

After reading it I started leaving either a window or a door cracked, but
honestly did not notice a difference.

