Comment by WorldMaker

2 days ago

I have friends that fell down air monitoring rabbit holes in the situation of the early 2020s and one of the things they have remained obsessed about is home CO2 levels and have active monitoring equipment and "pager alerts" and other things setup.

Home carbon capture is sort of a thing already: buy more houseplants, keep them alive and healthy.

Though the most common home interventions for now are still "open a window" and/or "run a fan to circulate the air better". I suppose it's neat that we can home automate that, if you are willing to invest in that.

3 comments

WorldMaker

gcanyon 1 day ago

I can't find it now, but I saw a video where a guy was trying to offset just the CO2 he produced himself with plants.

   1. He gave up on "plants" because they were nowhere close to offsetting him.
   2. Switching to algae, he used a 55 gallon drum of it because the numbers said that would work. He gave up when the CO2 level reached something like 2000 ppm
   3. He ended up with something like 3 drums, as well as special mixers to make sure the algae got access to as much CO2 as possible, and he had lights focused on the algae drums to make them as efficient as possible, and he still ended up barely keeping the CO2 at the "dangerous but not completely toxic" level, and it wasn't stable either.

Plants are a terrible way to try to manage CO2.

squeegmeister 2 days ago

House plants make too minor a difference to be worthwhile.

Opening windows is better but if you want a more energy efficient solution you should invest in a HRV/ERV

WorldMaker 2 days ago

To my understanding, as with most carbon sequestration efforts, house plants are a long-term planning horizon solution. Filling your house with plants won't fix your biggest spikes in the CO2 in your home, but they'll lower the overall floor/median/average over a large enough span of time (months to years).
Relates to the long running "joke" that the best way to sequester CO2 today is to plant new growth forests 50 years ago.