buildings have an outsized impact on our health

September 7, 2024 11:12 AM

The Pivotal Importance of Air Quality and Ventilation (podcast with transcript). See also environmental engineering professor Linsey Marr's work, who was inspired to focus on bioaerosols after their kid came home with an awful cold. Joseph G Allen's paper Recommitting to Ventilation Standards for Healthy Indoor Air Quality
posted by spamandkimchi (6 comments total)

Ah forgot to include environmental engineering professor Shelly Miller, who co-authored a study on ventilation in schools with Allen. Here's a related post:

Air cleaners* are helpful as an added supplement in buildings that are unable to provide high enough clean (virus-free) air to maintain low aerosol concentrations, which is typically accomplished by supplying some combination of outside air and high-efficiency-particle filtered air. It is best to learn a little about air cleaners before you go out and purchase one (you could but you might be wasting your money). You could end up spending hundreds of dollars on an air cleaner that moves little or no air and generates ozone. Like what happened here with the Sharper Image’s Ionic Breeze (we also tested this air cleaner in this paper and found it did nothing really).

*Miller writes: Air cleaners (please don’t call them air purifiers, we can’t ever purify the air – what does that even mean…?)
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:28 PM on September 7 [1 favorite]

I recommend the Aranet4 for measuring air quality!
posted by ellieBOA at 1:06 PM on September 7 [1 favorite]

Although double the price of the aranet4 and many other solutions (around 350 USD), and a ridiculous name, the uHoo sensor and app have been rare examples of working as advertised and maintaining consistent readings (at least between two units I've used in two rooms).

Why did I go through several different indoor and outdoor air quality sensing options? Well reader it began a year ago when the skies of New York City turned orange for a few days and ended with me picking up every respiratory infection it's possible to get in the following months.

Before that actually I have lived in a renovated home where we worked with HVAC trades who knew enough to install a ductless mini split heat pump but not enough to suggest we might need to ventilate the highly airtight construction to prevent build up of CO2 (among other things like TVOCs) indoors. I noticed this when I started having to take naps between meetings - the uHoo helped identify the volume of CO2 hitting 2k+. It also helped identify when things like ozone and nitrogen dioxide spiked from traffic or local fires (and totally coincidentally I noticed my eyes watering and sinuses exploding).

Point is: there's a lot to learn about air quality and how it correlates with some things we've long considered "allergies" or "just a headache".
posted by Lenie Clarke at 1:52 PM on September 7

Great follow-up to the "don't inhale oxalate" themes of previous post.
posted by BigBrooklyn at 1:56 PM on September 7

For what it’s worth the $10 CO2 monitors from AliExpress are ballpark accurate with the much more expensive ones. All you really need to know is whether it’s under 600 (no worries), under 1200 (open a window), or higher (force ventilate and/or leave the room). Don’t break the bank on this.

I have a cheapie and an expensive one next to each other and for general green yellow red assessment the cheap one is fine.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:32 PM on September 7 [1 favorite]

Professionally and personally, this is relevant to my interests.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:39 PM on September 7