Whenever I travel, I bring a CO2 meter with me. It’s amazing how often the air is bad. Often in unexpected places. My meter hit 3100 in an uber once. I didn’t even notice until I got to my hotel room and looked at the data log. It was a fresh, hot day outside. The uber had windows closed and AC on. I bet he had no idea - but he was driving with significant cognitive impairment. Takeoff and landing in planes are always the worst. If you get sleepy as the plane is taking off, it’s not you. The plane’s ventilation doesn’t work properly when the plane is stationary. So before a plane is in the air, they often hit 2500.
Metrology calibration is necessary if you want accuracy better than 10%, but most of us don't care at all about that, instead we care about increments of 200ppm or more.
It’s like if someone said ‘you can check if your chatbot’s news feed is complete and up to date by asking it for ‘recent mass shootings’. There should be two or three in the past seven days’. It’s true and a valid methodology but holy crap does it say something dark about where we are.
- Plenty of people live or work in older buildings, where are not up to standard. For example: my office probably violates the air quality sensibilities of the Victorian era, which is when it was originally built.
- Equipment breaks down, isn't operated properly, or wasn't installed correctly. Having monitors that measure air quality is an extra check. While you may not be able to get direct action upon a consumer sensor, it can help you push for action.
I've been in buildings of varying quality over the years. I've seen how it takes time to get people in to do air quality testing. Heck, I saw the government claim that the air quality was acceptable in schools during the pandemic because the schools had passive ventilation systems. That meant they could open windows. (To be fair, the air quality in most of those buildings was probably fine since that was how the buildings were designed. That said, such standards make it easy for some buildings to slip through the cracks.)
So yeah, sensors to the people!
I've been involved with the build out of several office spaces in new and old buildings. We always took this sort of thing seriously and measured each room independently for a week (many at a time) ensuring we accounted for periods of high occupancy.
This let us tune the HVAC systems to operate more efficiently, ensuring comfortable temperatures and air circulation. Every time I've seen this done there were structural deficiencies that required remediation, some times it meant adjusting duct work.
Most modern office buildings are designed to be a platform for constructing spaces, as spaces usually evolve and change between leases and tenants. They're designed to accommodate this sort of thing.
However I've found that no build out nails this the first time. It's very hard! Often times things look fine but once you get people in the space things change drastically. It requires time and effort to address.
Several of my offices had such good air that I'd prefer being there over pretty much anywhere else -- even outside on poor AQI days.
I've also found that a lot of offices don't do any of this and their air quality is noticeably poor. And lastly I've found that the oldest buildings, including schools -- and I'm talking really old -- have very good air because they are so incredibly leaky. They're usually harder to cool and heat, though.
I agree with OP. I don't always carry it along, but it has been a massive boost to my productivity.
The only issue this house had was it overheated. We had glass facing south. Even in winter it instantly became too hot.
The link I pointed to is all about ventilation, so just because people ignored an important component of building science, and focused on one aspect, does not invalidate it.
And while climate change is important and using efficiency to deal with it is useful, the thermal control layer is actually the least important of the four:
* https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-the-p...
'Bulk' water (precipitation) and moisture can cause deterioration of the building materials (rot, crumbling), and also mold, which has its own health effects. Leaky houses can often blow conditioned air at much faster rates than thermal leakage.
HRVs only deal with temperature, but then you have humidity that is non-controlled: moisture coming in during the summer, and getting vented out in the winter (too-dry air coming in).
ERVs handle both.