This article appeared in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter where editors recommend one article to read. AtlanticMonday through Friday. Sign up here.
A few weeks ago, a three-inch square of plastic and metal slowly and steadily began to change my life.
The culprit was my new portable carbon dioxide monitor. This is a device that has been sitting in an Amazon cart for months. I first turned my attention to this product at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. We thought this product would help identify unventilated public spaces where exhaled air remains and the risk of viral transmission is high. But I didn’t pay him $250 until January 2023. Another concern then arose about the health risks of gas stoves. indoor Air pollution, reached the boiling point. It was the best time of my life to get acquainted with the air in my home.
I knew from the start that the small, stuffy apartment I work in remotely was going to be an air quality disaster. with the help of seems to swear, I have indeed corrected the location. High levels of carbon dioxide will break your windows. When I cooked on the gas stove, I used the range fan. What could be easier? It’s basically like living outside with better Wi-Fi. Spring cleaning is literally a breeze this year!
After a few minutes of putting batteries in my new device, my illusions were shattered. At baseline, my apartment’s levels were already fluctuating around 1,200 ppm (parts per million).This concentration is my of the brain cognitive function 15 percent. Surprised, I opened the window and let in the frigid New England air. Two hours later, shivering in my coat, ski pants, and woolen socks in my 48-degree Fahrenheit apartment, typing numbly on a frozen keyboard, Alanette still wasn’t below the typical 1,000 ppm. bottom. safety threshold for many expertsBy evening, I had given up trying to hypothermia to clear the air. Next to the fetid sack of breathing meat she called, Alanette let out an ominous beep: the ppm climbed again, this time over 1,400.cognitive decline 50 Percent due to self-poisoning by stagnant air, according to the user manual.
By the next morning, I was in despair. This was not the reality I envisioned when I decided to invite Aranet4 into my home. I envisioned this device and myself as a team with a common goal of bringing clean air to everyone. But it was becoming clear that I didn’t have the power to make the device happy.And it was making me miserable.
[Read: Kill your gas stove]
CO2 monitors are not designed to direct behavior. The information they provide is not a complete readout of indoor or outdoor air quality.carbon dioxide is poses some health risks at high levelswhich is just one of many pollutants in the air, and by no means the worst. Others such as nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and ozone can cause more direct harm.Some of his CO2 tracking devices, including the Aranet 4, do not account for particulate matter. . This means that you will never know when the air has been cleaned by something like a HEPA filter. “It gives you a metric, and that’s not all,” says Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech.
Still, CO2 accumulates along with other pollutants, so its levels are “a pretty good indicator of how fresh or stale the air is,” says a biochemist and indoor air expert. Paula Orszwski says. Quality expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Aranet4 isn’t as accurate as, say, his $20,000 research-grade carbon dioxide sensor in Marr’s lab, but it can come surprisingly close. When his Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, first picked it up three years before him, he was shocked that he could compete with the machines he used professionally. received. And in his private life, “you can find terrible places and avoid them,” he told me.
But that rule of thumb starts to fall apart when the terrible place turns out to be your home, or at least mine. Gas stoves without an external ventilation hood. The kitchen window that opens directly above the parking lot. Still, I was stunned by how difficult it was to lower his CO2 levels around him.Over the course of several weeks, after leaving the windows open for six hours, refraining from cooking, and running the range fan non-stop, the best indoor reading I maintained was 800’s. I thought the neighborhood was terrible outdoors air quality, or if your device is broken.within minutes of getting the meter outsidebut it showed a chill 480.
[Read: The plan to stop every respiratory virus at once]
A cruel reading of the meter began to haunt me. My anxiety increased with each upward tick. I started dreading what I would learn when I woke up each morning. When he lit the gas stove a little, he was in the high 2,000s. rice field. At least once, I told my husband to cool it down throughout the “need oxygen” thing not to upgrade to a more climate-friendly plant spouse. (I must have been joking, but I didn’t have the cognitive ability to tell it.) In a moment of greater clarity, I understood the monitor’s deeper meaning: it was my helplessness. I knew I couldn’t personally clean the air at my favorite restaurant, post office, or local Trader Joe’s. Now I realize my home problem is not so fixable.The device provided evidence of the problem, but no means to solve it.
Hearing my predicament, Sally Ng, an aerosol chemist at Georgia Tech, suggested sharing my concerns with the building management. Marr recommended building a Corsi-Rosenthal box. DIY contraption consists of fan I hit the filter to suck the Schmutz out of my moody air. But they and other experts acknowledged that the most sustainable and efficient solutions to my carbon conundrum were largely out of reach. If you don’t have the means to equip your home with smart appliances, there’s only so much you can do. “Yeah, that’s a problem,” he says, currently renovating his home with a new energy-efficient ventilator, makeup air systemand multiple heat pumps.
Many Americans face far greater challenges than I do.i am not in it millions live in a city with dangerous level Airborne particulate matter spewed by industrial plants, gasoline vehicles, and wildfires. No need to be in a crowded office or poorly ventilated school. From the first years of the pandemic, and even before, experts have called for policy changes and infrastructure overhauls to reduce indoor air pollution for a large portion of the population once and for all. But as concerns about COVID fade, “people are moving on,” he said, Marr. Individuals are left alone in an almost futile battle against the corrupt air.
[Read: Put your face in airplane mode]
A CO2 monitor alone won’t win anyone, but it can still be useful information. An infectious disease specialist at Stanford University, he plans to use his Aranet4 in future studies on viral infections. But he told me he wouldn’t allow himself to be overly immersed in the readings from his monitor in his home, and even Olsiewski doesn’t allow himself to cook on the gas range in his Manhattan apartment. I’m putting away my things. She already knows the level will skyrocket. She already knows what needs to be done to mitigate the harm. “I use the tools I have and I don’t drive myself crazy,” she told me. lots of tools, especially in her second home in Texas, used induction stoves and HVAC with ultra-high quality filters and continuous running fans. Her Aranet4 was her 570 ppm when we spoke on the phone. 1,200 in my case)
I’m aiming for my middle ground now. Earlier this week, I woke up in a cold sweat from a dream in which I tried and failed to open a stuck window. I worked with a cracked window in the (real) kitchen that day, which I closed when the apartment got too cold. More importantly, I put his Aranet4 in a drawer and didn’t pull it out until after dawn. When my spouse came home, he was surprised that our apartment was warm again.
