Why Air Quality Matters

[Music] okay so I'm going to talk about air quality why it matters how to find out what it is and what to do about it if you find out it isn't where it needs to be but first I want to tell you about how I came to care about air quality so in September of last year our family moved into a new construction house and we were really excited it was awesome it was finally done after spending a long time building it and after about three weeks living in the house Jamie got sick she got sick in a really weird way I started having these chest pains and getting dizzy and then things got even worse than that she started having blurred vision partial loss of sight on one eye and we were like what the hell is going on and we thought like oh maybe like no she was exposed to something and of course Jamie my wife when went on the internet and started searching on her symptoms and like usually that's the worst thing in the world you always come and find oh my god I have the plague but what she found was that a bunch of her system or symptoms were very compatible with formaldehyde poisoning what the hell and then we started realizing that okay we're in this new house and she could actually smell like the house smelled like new car like it smelt like new paint it smells like new materials it smelled like all this thing and somebody said the that's not a like a bad smell per se which is why we didn't really think that that was a problem well well turns out that that new car smell that new material smell it's basically just you breathing chemicals that's where the smell comes from and the primary chemical the shoes getting exposed to was formaldehyde so we started trying to figure out what to what to do about this because clearly there was some link here her symptoms matched up quite well with formaldehyde poisoning and at first we were a bit confused because she was the only one having symptoms until we realized she was the only one sleeping in the bedroom right next to the closet so we got this air quality expert out who came out with this fancy equipment to measure the quality of the air and they measured in the closet and you see that it's low that's good moderate elevated high pretty bad and so there was a lot of food maldehyde in the air and at first we thought how could this be this is a brand new closet we bought it from a reputable installer this is supposed to be good stuff so we thought maybe there was a problem in the construction of the closet we contacted the closet maker and there's something that went wrong maybe in shipping it was exposed to something no it wasn't everything was fine with the closet or well it wasn't fine it was clearly poisoning us but it wasn't the closets fault when we found out was after going through all this accusing the closet maker said it was a poisonous closet dealing with all this stuff and getting all these reports the conclusion was much simpler the closet was giving off formaldehyde so all modern closets are made by pressed particle board where they take wood and with a bunch of glue and that's how they make a perfectly straight board and that glue overtime off gases as its called it releases from the particle board now that doesn't have to be a huge problem if you get rid of the stuff that off gases our problem was we weren't getting rid of the air we learned after we'd built this whole house and went through all this this this whole process that we had no ventilation in our house not only did we have no ventilation lots of houses don't have any ventilation we had what's called an extremely tight envelope which is basically that it's a box where nothing goes in and nothing comes out because that's how modern buildings are built you do that for energy efficiency such that you keep the heat in and you don't spend a lot of energy heating or cooling your house in some ways it's a really good thing when it comes to air quality it's a really really bad thing if you don't take precautions to to get ventilation in instead so this whole thing then boiled down to us finding out we need ventilation in fact our house is could possibly actually kill us or at least mix it's very sick if we don't get ventilation so we started down the rabbit hole of figuring out how to get ventilation in the house and as part of that rabbit hole I started looking at a bunch of papers around in air quality because the thing that was just stumping me was how did this happen I built a new house we didn't really cut corners on the construction of the house how did I end up with a house that was making us sick it was a brand new house why didn't the engineers why didn't the general contractor why did no one seem to catch this how did we get all the way to a finished house that was going to make us sick and no warning we had to find all this stuff out on their own so I felt like I had to kind of go back to first principles and just figure all of it out first of all figure out what is in air quality how do you define it how you measure it what are the targets you're supposed to hit and then how do you do it so that led me down finding a bunch of very interesting studies that are fairly recent it's not like it a new idea that you need fresh air what is relatively new is the consequences of not having fresh air there's the consequences that are as severe as what we experience we full-on get poisoned that's pretty rare first of all most houses are not as tight as the new house we built although much new construction will be so if you move into a brand new house there's good chance you'll have similar similar issues but houses that are built to even just 10 15 20 years ago weren't using as efficient sealing materials and so forth so there was a lot more natural ventilation where it's basically just leaking in and out and that's a good thing and that's how you prevent it anyway went down through this rabbit hole of finding a bunch of studies on on the effects of poor ventilation and it's really is divided into two groups there's the chemicals which is often referred to as BOC volatile organic compounds which is a grab back for a bunch of different things formaldehyde being one of those things but there's all sorts of other chemicals in that big bag and that usually comes from off gassing materials such as the particle board that's off gassing formaldehyde all particle board all closet systems pull off gas formaldehyde but this kind of particle board used for classes for example using a bunch of different things beds tables a bunch of different sort of products have the same process of producing them and it's not just that paints a bunch of paints off gas other forms of benzene I think it is and other chemicals and even the so-called no chemical paints off get this bunch of chemicals a bunch of that process happens right after your purchases right after you you get this stuff into your house you get a new couch for example and it smells it has a new couch smell that new couch is all the chemicals that are off gassing it is not a good thing yeah so I learned this too that one of the bad thing actually with new stuff is if it's come sealed especially if it comes seal straight from the factory or something else like that it basically has the maximum doses of everything that's bad for you so a good general principle is if you get a new couch you get a new bed you get a new cloth did you get any of these new things you have to be quite diligent about airing them out and that's very literal as in get air moving in through that or even better I've seen a bunch of recommendations you buy a new couch if you have the option of living in a mild climate you should actually leave it outside that having all that accumulation of chemicals in your houses is really bad so that's the chemical part there's the other part of this which I kind of found by by accident both because it was mentioned in all these studies but also because it's a really good and reliable indicator of ventilation problems which is co2 carbon dioxide and the accumulation of that and that's a natural process you breathe out we're breathing out co2 so right now as we're sitting here we're breathing out a bunch of co2 totally natural process that doesn't mean it's good for you and it means that if the co2 accumulates in a room because you don't have enough insulation there's all sorts of cognitive effects of that too and what was interesting about that was that the sensors for co2 are they're very reliable and they're pretty cheap so it's a great way of gauging if you have other problems if you have co2 accumulation problems good chances you also have BOC accumulation problems anyway I found a handful of studies here here's one from Harvard in 2015 that focused both on the vo C problem and on the co2 problem and they didn't they subjected a bunch of people to these cognitive tests for basically activity level applied to the task orientation crisis response information seeking strategy and so forth and they saw what happens to these different forms of cognitive tests when you're exposed to either high levels of B or C or high levels of obscure tune and what was really interesting is that some of these tests there's virtually no impact you can sit in a pretty bad in air quality and your task orientation really doesn't change very much but the last column strategy it is absolutely atrocious how big of a hit you take on that and this particular test was done with the BOC it's preparing I think the the top is the green plus building which is basically less than a hundred of particles per billion the second one I think it's like maybe two hundred particles per building and the third one the gray which is like normal construction with normal materials is 400 to 500 particles per billion huge difference in strategy is the grab bag for higher cognitive functions that are also associated with creativity and initiative and and some of these other factors that are very applicable to the kind of creative work that we do why other than that in with holy like that is a huge factor difference and what I also saw when I looked at this is this is very reminiscent of the presentation that we saw from rise and the studies that have been done on the sleep then if you're exposed to a lot of BOC or co2 it's very similar to being sleep-deprived there are sort of similar high level cognitive functions that take a really big hit and just like sleep deformation the head is not apparent to yourself very well you might feel like oh I'm a little foggy or today isn't a good day or whatever other reason you might ascribe it to it's very easy to dismiss the problems of inner or bad indoor air quality with like oh I'm just off today just blaming yourself or thing like I didn't get enough sleep even if that might not have been the problem so this is from with VOCs pretty big material impact they summarized it here is basically saying that in a green building low VOCs low chemicals the cognitive scores were 61 percent higher that's 61% hi and that's just the difference between normal destruction green destruction and 110 percent higher in the two green plus buildings imagine if you could take a pill in the morning that gave you a hundred percent more creativity a hundred percent better reasoning like what would you pay for a pill like that I paid quite a lot to be able to basically double my creativity motivation intuition on a daily basis so if you think of it in those terms it's it's hard otherwise to just eat gout like a 5% improvement a 10% improvement in your mental capacity these numbers are just astounding to me so when I find these numbers and we like I want that here's another test not down on VOCs but down on co2 accumulation and it shows exactly the same thing essentially you see strategy the orange dots are high co2 of the Malaysian food out to the somewhere in the middle the conclusion for that is quite similar the difference between even just and accumulation of very good the baseline in outdoors is about 400 to 450 particles per million really good indoor is 600 particles per million but already at below a thousand particles per million there's a 15% hit on a bunch of these higher cognitive functions we had a co2 sense of running here in the office while we've all been in here and yesterday we hit 950 then Jason opened opened an window and we got down and opened again but just to show them this is a pretty big space we're not that many people in here that was all it took now right because there's three people here the more people you have the more co2 we exhaust and the more it fills up the space and higher the particles per million rating becomes and then you see if you get to 1,400 particles per million which is surprisingly easy and I will guarantee you in a lot of the home offices did you guys have that is true there's a 50% hit astounding numbers at least that's shocking if not more shocking to me than the numbers that come from severe sleep deprivation and again in some ways it's even more insidious than sleep deprivation because most people can feel if they have a sleep deficit of let's say 10 hours they've slept only six hours a night for what is that five nights in a row most people can there's a physical effect to it this much harder like the physical effect is a very is fussy thinking how do you quantify that how is that different from just all sorts of other factors right anyway I walked away from reading both of these actually that was one study here's another study from cardi in 2012 which basically first of all right is just a question so for a long time the study of co2 was basically saying this is a natural process we all exhaust co2 the brain will just cope like this is this it doesn't really matter and it's certainly not a pollutant then this study comes out in 12 the other study comes on 15 actually testing is that true are there any cognitive effect and the answer is just conclusively yes there are cognitive effect so the answer to the question here in the study is yes it is an indoor pollutant they ran a similar set of D standardized cognitive tests that people use to turn into stuff and again what are they fine red is it's a quite high accumulation is it's 2500 ppm certainly something that can happen if you're not paying attention and the effects are even more astounding look at basic strategy in the lower right corner atrocious like as in your your cognitive function is just getting destroyed at those levels here's a summary of it again one thing that's interesting is how uneven the distribution of this effect is unfocused at activity where you're focusing on one particular detail it has virtually no effect in fact there's a slight boost when you're being poisonous to your ability to focus on one individual detail which is thought what's really interesting and there's this quote here this weird thing that at higher concentration of co2 measures focused activity improved focused activity is important for volatility but bah-bah-bah you can over concentrate this is reminiscent of people under the influence of alcohol suffering from allergy or other having head injuries that under all these influence we actually get quite good at so nning in on just one detail and being able to deal with that but we fail to see the bigger picture and we fail to see the whole model really just fascinating again this is just summarizing that it doesn't take that much they're just getting to a thousand particles per million you already take a hit it's not a huge hit but again I mean what would you do to be able to have 15% better creativity 15% more motivation that to me sounds like such a power up and that's just the difference between those two if you look at the difference between 600 ppm and 2,500 it's a matter of a hundred percent or more okay so hopefully I've convinced you that air quality is something that's worth paying attention to and it's worth taking seriously and it's worth taking steps to to figure out so how do you measure it I've gone through a probably twelve different measuring tools and industrial sensors I mean we just we went crazy for a while I think that that's a good sense of it because I kind of felt like we built a brand new house we weren't trying to cut cost yet we were getting poisoned what the so for about three weeks after we moved in I was working about a half time at base camp and then I was working full-time I'm trying to figure out indoor air quality and trying to figure out how do we not poison ourselves living in this house and then led down a path of all sorts of exotic sensors and and in ways of measuring this stuff because we had had the professional indoor quality person out about ten times to measure things and that was getting a little ridiculous not to mention ludicrously expensive so I went through all this and then after I'd gone through all this and I had like a closet full of sensors of clunky devices and most of them would software from like the mid-90s or so it felt like they still had serial ports on them several of them I was like I really hope that someone is going to focus on this and make it more accessible because that's not very accessible buying a ton of it's expensive hard to use industrial sensors and then thankfully for whatever reason there seems to be an up pic recently about around this internet of things and to focus on indoor quality so I tested a bunch of those there's something called Fupa there's something called I forget the hole puncher there's a a whole range of these and the vast majority of them they buy the same chip which is a I think like a twelve dollar chip that proposes to be able to measure all these things and then they stick it into a nice cylinder and then they write some shitty software for it and it doesn't work that chip is simply not good enough having one chip to be able to measure VOCs and co2 s and so on it's just and I think about a year ago I wrote about food bots in particular which is one of the major vendors of these things where they were off by like a factor of three hundred percent they would tell me that the co2 accumulation in my office was 2,000 and I was freaking out right like 2,000 holy and then I'd measure it with with an actually dedicated co2 sensor and it was like 600 so I kind of didn't have a lot of faith in in these consumer grade sensors but about maybe four months ago I think the people from a where had seen my post on foot BOTS and they said we think we have a better tool and I was like yeah and they're like no no really we'll send you a unit I'm like okay like getting ready for another takedown [Music] and I was like I put it through the paces and I compared it to all my industrial censoring it's like this is pretty good and not only is pretty good it's really nicely made so and it's it's not too expensive it's vastly more cheaper than all these industrial sensors okay it's not exactly as precise as good but it's in the ballpark it can actually be useful it's not gonna be off by 300 percent so this is a really great unit it's a really great way of measuring your indoor air quality the way it works since you basically place it in the room you want to measure and it presents its basic data in the form of these five dots and then an a total score and the score goes from zero to 100 zero I think you're already dead 100 you're in great shape and and every measurement that they're on are within sort of ideal values here's how the app looks it has a company in the app for it that also tracks over time which is really neat so you can see what it was yesterday you can see the spikes over time because indoor air quality is not a constant thing on one day you might have great indoor air quality and then on the second day you open your door and like there's a fire burning 300 kilometres from you and all that particle matters flows into your house and you have extremely terrible indoor air quality so that's the great thing about having an always-on sensor and the and we're also sends you push notifications basically alerting you to changes into your indoor quality so you can take precautions so it measures temperature humidity co2 chemicals which is VOCs and particle matter which I haven't talked so much about but it's also that's usually what people think of when they think of polluted air they think of this measure called p.m. to 5 which is particle matter 2.5 microns large or something like that which is the dangerous types of particles that travel in through your nose and mouth do not get caught by any of the filters and end up in your lungs and in your bloodstream these are the things that the w-h-o the World Health Organization says about 4.2 million people will die this year from exposure to high levels of PM 2 5 a bunch of that is in sort of low and middle countries in socially in income that do indoor cooking over open fires that's about the worst thing you can do or if you live in highly polluted cities like some stages in China and in particular in India or if you happen to live next to a wildfire in the United States in fact this year I believe Seattle at one point had was the most polluted city in the world for short ish period of time of about two or three weeks but that's to the point where on some of these levels this is measuring free is that micrograms or what is youichi whatever that measure is my number Michael good right per per square meter the score three is pretty good in Seattle for a while it was 450 and the wuh-oh limit or recommendation is it should be under tenth so they were over by a factor of 40 not great so anyway all these combined and they kind of go one dot is great and five dots is terrible and it kind of goes up you can don't barely see that there's like it'll go green yellow red red I don't know black and it combines it into sport and you get just this quick glance on the device all the time house here and then you can see Oh the third dot is co2 so if the third dot starts creeping up perhaps it's time to open a window perhaps it's time to do something else which is just a really good measure and then you also get to push notifications when these things really go out of out of whack so the air where is really great it's not 100% precise and ironically enough the two measures it's it's a little annoyingly off on are the two I would have thought were the easiest it's on temperature it can be off by about two degrees Fahrenheit on that measure compared to the other five hundred sensors I have for temperature and humidity it can be off about five to seven percentage point as well not a huge deal you just kind of account for that but what is temperature matter so temperature is anywhere it takes a whole view of in like comfort and health and temperature is actually quite important for a comfort as well the optimal range for most people to work in is between 72 and 76 degrees so if you're working in a room that's hotter than 76 degrees you might actually also have just feeling oh it's stuffy or it's other things that are affecting your comfort in a way that can affect your productivity and just wealthy humidity is a little worse actually so humidity you know when you go outside in Chicago and summer is like oh it's 80% humidity and it's like it really just feels very wet but that doesn't feel comfortable but worse than that as soon as you get above I think sixty-five percent relative humidity you start getting the conditions for mold to grow condensation that turns into mold and mold is almost right up there with formaldehyde in terms of the negative things that happens to your health when you're exposed to to mold a bunch of things that are really terrible if you breathe mold so making sure that your house isn't overly humid is incredibly important to making sure that you don't have mold growth I think it'll show I'm not actually sure no I think it might need its own sensor and if you suspect that you do have mold in your house I would highly recommend to get a specialist to come out and measure it because that is actually the most common so when I was dealing with this indoor air quality person throughout the high poisoning is is not super common it's pretty rare it's surprisingly common to have mold poisoning essential to have mold in your house and breathing mold and that's bad like sometimes you can see the mold it is this little fuzzy stuff that you can get into bathrooms in particular if you don't have bathrooms that aren't exhausted will have high community because that's your shower or you take a bath you've released all the water vapors in the air and if that doesn't have anywhere to go it'll go on the walls and it'll it can turn a little black especially around the caulking so if you see sort of black marks on your caulking that's a signal that that mold could be growing or if you actually see the before mold but sometimes you can't even see it yes oh so it's called heywhere and the cool thing is it's about this large and we've bought one for everyone so [Applause] it's really great I recommend you pubes you're moving around the house a little bit because it'll just measure that one room I have one in my office right on my desk that is I need my desk and that is my a work but I also have one in the bedroom actually in all the bedrooms that we have and we kind of keep a pretty close eye on on that just given what we have I would recommend having it in the room that you use the most so your if you use your home office as an office put it there but moving around the house too and see what what it looks like but yeah it's really great it's really easy to set up the APIs is awesome and if you get too inclined you can even link multiple on them on the same account and we have about six of them in the house yes extremely in fact in my house in in my office which is not a terribly large space if I close the door and I don't have ventilation turned on my co2 accumulation will go from 450 to 800 in 45 minutes that's a very tight envelope as the technical turn on if there's not it's glass and concrete so there's not a lot of places for the air to escape but it goes really quickly in fact before we started figuring this out I would be in the room for three hours and I would hit 1,800 that sounds like wow that's really high and that's really incoming not that in common the smaller your space the less mass of air you have to fill with with exhaust when we found out to in our bedrooms sleeping overnight for eight hours we hit a 2700 ppm when we woke up in the morning did 27 when you get about 2,000 you start having physical effects as in like you can get a headache or dizzy or whatever so there you get a bit of feedback mmm I was more alarmed to see what happens below the physical effect like before you start getting a take that how big the hits are anyway hey guys I just saw a study on what the accumulation effects are on the plane do you know why are you sometimes get drowsy on the plane co2 accumulation 4,200 particles per million our particle yeah particles per million accumulation in a bunch of planes it is airplane airplane air is seriously terrible abso-fucking-lutely let's bring back smoking on airplanes yeah it's really bad on airplanes yep houseplants certain kinds of houseplants actually do make a difference there's a NASA study idea about house plants the FCR teams now highly recommend that if you have room for houseplants make sure you get the right time it can if you can't help someone I mean it's not going to it's a component that helps it's not a substitution for ventilation I've not looked at their washer but my specific recommendations on what to do about this in one second action I just wanted to show really quick so a aware who makes this thing also makes a bunch of commercial solutions for for offices and so forth and they've done some very interesting studies so some people here work from coffee shops and you think like Oh coffee shops have this stuff figure it out that no they compared to different coffee shops coffee shop a is the blue line coffee shop be is the green line and then over time they charted it basically put an air where in there and recorded the data and you see a coffee shop a at noon it's 1500 particles per million which already there you're probably at a 30 to 40 percent loss if you were going to run this standardized strategy test that's not good I think that is not a good place to to work it's not a good place to work at 1500 yeah you see poppy has much better circulation a peak at thousand sometimes they're dirty hundred seven hundred that's not bad that that's reasonable but there's a really distinct difference between those two things and I put up a link to this study because they go into why the difference is and it all comes down to the layout off the coffee shop some coffee shops are very long and they have one door at the at the entry if you're sitting in the back very little air makes it all the way down there and back out versus this other coffee shop coffee shop B has two entrance sort of one on the side and one at the end so there's circulation from people simply just opening and closing doors and that works pretty pretty well VOCs also quite interesting coffee shop B which had actually decent co2 accumulation it's a newer coffee shop that was sort of renovated really recently new paint new furniture new all sorts of stuff accumulation levels of 400 ppb which on these cognitive effects was just as bad as the co2 so they're both fun actually one is screwed because of high VOCs and one is screwed because of high co2 just to say that this isn't just a problem that in your house it's it's very much a problem in all sorts of places as well is it way worse in the winter when we hold ourselves up at home and don't open any of doors or windows yes way worse okay that's kind of like and then what can you do about it how can you improve air quality now the the basic answer for co2 and also for views sees is you need fresh air it's really that simple so the question becomes how do you get fresh air and fresh air is a sort of statement with some qualifiers just opening the window if you live in a polluted city that doesn't mean you get fresh air you might actually get dirty air right in a lot of places opening the window will actually bring you fresher air and for most houses the quality of the air inside is about five to ten times worse than the quality of the air outside the house I'm starting at the top here because I was talking with Jeff yesterday was building a new house the the way that all new houses should be built is through something called an HRV a heat recovery ventilation system where what you want you want fresh air to come into your house but you want that fresh air to arrive in your house at the right temperature at the right community for example in Chicago not that uncommon that it's 80% humidity in the summer if you just open the window in the summer with 80% humidity you're gonna get 80% humidity in your house you don't want any humidity the house it's not comfortable to work in it's good doctors mold all these other things same thing with temperature if it's in the winter you can't just easily open the window because it's minus 30 outside and you don't want it - 30 in your house HR bees allow you to get fresh air into your house by conditioning the air in a energy efficient way of using the existing air that's in the house to sort of mix it together and warm it up and that's the chart that shows that the interesting thing with HIV is they're not a new invention but it's a very poorly distributed area of knowledge for home building most homes for residential are not built with this in mind even though it should be absolutely an essential component of any new built up house this becomes more and more important the newer the house is because the new of the house is the better insulated it is the better insulated it is the less ventilation you have naturally most older homes don't have anywhere near the same number of problems because there's their drafty they just there's all sorts of leakage in between the the components of the house and that's actually a good thing at draught is a great thing for indoor air quality maybe not so good a thing for your heating bill which was what led to this idea that we should make our homes tighter and tighter so that the hot air does not escape and so we don't have to spend as much money and energy on heating and so forth but the consequence of that we're now sort of paying for a bunch of houses built very tight who did not address ventilation and/or poisoning people here's a sort of retrofit product that's kind of interesting I looked at it for a little while it didn't end up working for our situation but it came out of Germany where there's a bunch of older construction that did not have ventilation considered at all and this basically you you punch a hole in your wall somewhere and it puts in a fan that blows air in it doesn't get ventilated for humidity and heat but it also doesn't blow that much air and there is a filter there to take out some of the stuff that comes in so that that's something else to to look into finally there's a lot of homes in the u.s. in particular they have air conditioning I thought air conditioning means fresh air it doesn't mean fresh air at all the vast majority of air conditioning systems are recirculated systems they take the existing air that's already in the house then they blow it through some coils that cool or heat that air and then they blow the air back at you so it's kind of like if you that recirculating simple in a car that's what's going on it takes that existing air which means there's nothing fresh about that air there's no it doesn't get rid of the co2 it doesn't do any of these other things it just cools it maybe it does something to its humidity with a humidifier or dehumidifier in case what it does do when where it really can help is on particle matter so there's this Merv rating system that basically tells you how good is your filter most residential filters are at like five or six and those filters are pretty cheap and you can get them in Home Depot for like I don't know fifteen dollars but they're not very good and they don't take out a lot of the the bad stuff that's in the air and particularly if you live in in a city that has high pollution levels you really want some of that stuff taken out so you want the fresh air but you also want the clean air and those two things are a little bit confusing actually different things fresh air and clean air or separately anyway Merv rating I just putting this chart up here because it's a good thing to just be aware of when you look at things like oh I'm trying to deal with my air conditioning system or I want to make it better at the easiest fix you can do is buy a better filter and 3m makes some great filters and I would recommend if you're able to do it get Merv twelve or thirteen filters they're a bunch more expensive but for me it's been hugely worth it and one of the we talk about cleanliness it's not just about pollutants in the air in terms of gas pollutants or whatever from cars it's also things like pollen so I'm allergic and when I was living in California for the past nine years I'd always have these terrible allergies I'd always be stuffed up and I thought like oh I'll just open a window well where's where all the pollen coming from it's coming from the outside it's coming from the flowers it's coming from trees it's coming from all these other things and I'm blowing it right into into my face I don't wonder I was always stuffed up after we started cleaning the air I stopped being stuffed up I stopped having allergy symptoms I stopped taking allergy medication I basically been on flonase for the past like ten years or something like that I haven't been on that for a year and I haven't had any allergy attacks after that I have been pretty bad to the point where I couldn't work like I just want to lay down because my whole face exploded my eye started just watering and so forth so that's a material improvement in quality of life that that came from cleaning deer and that is mostly affected about how you clean deer and a lot of that is about how you have the filters and then finally an even more forceful way of cleaning your air is using an air purifier and I think I was skeptical about the idea of air purifiers it sounds weird like the air washer I haven't actually specifically looked at the air washer but air purifiers is basically just a fan that blows the air you have in your house through a filter and it really works I just say recommending this company called Alen I tested about four different brands of air purifiers with all my fancy equipment and Allen was the best where best is quantified as the lowest noise for the best cleaning because there's actually a bunch of air purifiers that are reasonably cleaning their air they just run at 80 DB and it sounds like you live in a train station that's not very helpful the Allen units get down to like 25 DB on the lowest setting which is just above whisper level you basically you can't can't hear it and it's a very soothing white noise kind of sound so they're really good they run filters of merv 17 to merv 18 this is how I ended up with a p.m. to five of three I basically have one of those right in my office and it cleans they're really good and it does not take very long it's a great solution for getting rid of pollens and they also deal with VOCs if you get the carbon infused filter for it it takes VOCs out of the out of the year as well they have two different models they have one for 800 square foot rooms and one for 1,300 square foot rooms and when you get your air where and you do your measurement and if your if your scores on either BOC chemicals or PM 2 are really high we'll help you get one of these filters because it's absolutely just essential for your indoor air quality to to not sit in highly polluted air yeah it's a little confusing they have four different kinds and yeah there's one that's that's like a carp insulting and it says good for VOCs that for me VOCs is one of those funny things so if you live in an older house and you don't have new furniture you might have very low levels of chemicals because they've all off gassed if you live in New York construction or you just painted or you have new furniture or something else you might have a lot higher chemicals which is why the first thing you have you should do is you should measure where are you what's the problem that you have because they're different solutions if you have high co2 accumulation the allenburys Mars is going to do nothing for you it's not like you can't take co2 out of the air by pushing it through a filter you simply need to have fresh air and fresh air it comes from the outside so you need to have a way of getting that it which I didn't also talk about in some case this is not practical or whatever to install equipment but you can open your window and the good thing about da where is it gives you this feedback so for example in my office before we we had filters and other ways of getting fresh air in I would just slide open my door for about 10 minutes that would take the accumulation down from from 800,000 to 400 in about 10 minutes close my door again and I watch it go back up but you just have to do that then you open your window a couple times a day and that makes a huge difference now when you open your window you might be letting in other things as we said like it's fresh air but it's not necessarily clean air but that's where something like the alum brings birth or other of these filters really can help but finally this is just a summary of what is the ideal missions this is basically what gets you to a hundred percent on the a where and is this sort of fun game where it always becomes gamified that you really want to be there because you really want to see them 100 score I've seen the 100 score in my units a handful of time and is always like yes but most of the times that is probably an unrealistic goal and it's not a fad like you have to have a hundred percent all the time it's just about you being aware of what you have and if the owner tells you you're sitting in in in co2 accumulation of 1500 you should probably do something about that no not probably you should do something about that it's it's not good so anyway I think the summary is Jason said the temperature in particular is one of the things that is different actually for sleeping and in a way and I found some studies on this to the quality of your sleep is it's highly dependent on the temperature you sleep in and if you sleep in a room that's usually usually the problem is if it's too hot like you can deal with too cold with a cover or whatever but if the room is too hot it has also some facts on your sleep and you get significantly worse sleep these are the ranges for most people but they're sort of individual I'd say like in my office for example I need 74 and it's quite exactly 74 I don't need 74 point five and I don't need seventy three point five and it's one of those things when you start measuring you start noticing that you're probably more sensitive than you thought I had no idea that I was sensitive to temperature within half a degree Fahrenheit which 25 note was one of the reasons I started preferring Fahrenheit as a scale over Celsius because Celsius is kind of imprecise one degree of Celsius is two degrees of Fahrenheit two degrees of Fahrenheit is a huge swing like a difference between 72 and 74 in a room where you're sitting working with a t-shirt is the difference between kind of feeling cold and feeling totally fine it's just one of those funny things you figure out when you're still in measuring for community it's a very tight range it pretty much is between 40 and 50 percent below 40 percent the only sort of effect is you just feel dry you might get dry eyes or try nostrils or whatever but above 50 percent is where you get all this other going on with the mold co2 below 600 is great ice in my office sometimes I get 650 but if I get to about 700 I'm like alright I let's open the door or do something else for VOCs below 300 is good this is one it's kind of tricky our chemicals in our house still brand new house it's only was finished about a year ago there's just limits to how good we can get it I guess you saw in the other score one that they were doing the tests on the green plus houses and they got down to below a hundred there were positive effects there's just only so much we could do at our house to do it and that's all so some of it is like there might just be some environmental constraints where you can't really do a lot so trying to get a hundred on something that's impossible is understood it basically yes but that most of the cleaning that happens for example you have a spike but then it goes down quite quickly what what is is bad is has sustained exposure to something over time but that's the thing like a lot of things that are natural they're not good for you like co2 is a very natural process but it's not good for you and it's all about the poison being in the dose yep yeah it's actually is it's fascinating so the biggest off gassing is in the beginning that's when they have the most concentration that beginning phases usually three to four weeks so for example when I talked to a bunch of commercial people or doing commercial construction and they said when they build a new hotel the rule is usually you have a finished hotel no one can live in it for the first month like you've done like everything's painted well the furnitures in doubt of that no occupancy for the first month because they allow all that stuff to off gas because that's where you get the most intense dose but still up to six months after you can have quite high off gassing and off gassing continue for up to five years now it happens it's sort of like a power curve right but it's still something for you to consider but and and the other thing is it's a factor between two things you have the off gassing which is what's producing the bad stuff and then you have the ventilation which is taking the bad stuff off if you have basically no ventilation which is what we had you don't need very much off gassing for that to eventually accumulate it might take three days it might take five days but eventually you're gonna get to a high concentration simply because you didn't remove any of it even if it was at a snow right and conversely if you have very good ventilation you can have a relatively high off gassing because you keep taking it out we added a fresh air intake to our heating cooling just like to our furnace basically yeah because it's it's just a hose from the intake vent to event that's a great solution - it was like $200 installed you know it's just it's very low-tech and they made a big difference it just mixes fresh air in instead of circulating yes air in your house that's a great point that it's like you can do it I think even if you have an old furnace absolutely if you have that option and it doesn't happen isn't there already I would extremely highly recommend it because there really is no substitution for fresh air when it comes to co2 accumulation you have to get it some way so either it's opening windows or it's adding a fresh air intake or it's having HIV Zoar it's adding something else there's not like you can't buy like a device that does it the only fresh air comes from the outside absolutely I would absolutely I would not move into the house right away and if you are in a house where weird smells like that's a warning sign like your nose is telling you that this is not a good place to be what's really interesting is I learned this just recently actually that that women have a on average a much higher developed sense of smell it's something about the olive Vettori sensing glands something like men have like 20,000 and most women have 40,000 that most women have literally like twice as good of smell and that that was exactly what happened at our house like Jamie would smell things I'm like to me but she could touch me and what's even more interesting is actually a pregnant women have an extra spike during pregnancy where they get extra amazing sense of smell right and it totally is and and it totally is and it's totally your body telling you this is dangerous that's what that smell is the unfortunate thing is that VOCs don't necessarily smell bad like most people talk is sort of like Oh new car smell as that's a good thing nope like anything when you get that strong odor it's it's a warning sign yeah right yep yeah you could bind to it very quickly which is by having the tools to measure it and keep one on top of it it's really good things yes if it smells like something there's something in it I mean it may be that it's just pollen and you're not allergic to that and that smells good like flowers or whatever for me if I'm just going like this and the flower yeah anyway we had filters that are for AC and everybody know when the AC tech would come out cuz they re C's would break would always tell us to replace them was low Merv that they're up the AC and they are that's so that's the other sad thing is a lot of air-conditioning units are not made for himer filters because what a high premiere filter is is a tighter knit and what a tighten it does is it creates back pressure and most residential units are not made for high back pressure we actually have to change our systems quite a lot of Nats and this separate pumps and so on to deal with it because otherwise you can really screw the systems so in some cases there's simply just a limit for what your air conditioning system can do and you should probably heat that limit even if that means you're going down a Merv rating you're getting slightly worse air but you can otherwise blow the system but of course I mean if you have the option and the luxury of doing it you can also upgrade your system to something that can deal with higher rated filters no that's that's another one of those constraint but you can't just make holes in the wall in a rented house but at least just being aware of it and how bad it is and doesn't mean it has to be perfect then you got to hit a hundred on the where or whatever just I mean if you're living is something that constantly 1,500 2,000 ppm okay that's just one signal of maybe something move if you can't if you can't remedy that somehow or at least then you just know hey I'm walking in here I'm taking a 50% hit on my higher cognitive functions trade-off yeah so long term is effective even more scary for VOCs in particular they're highly linked with cancer so formaldehyde poisoning a bunch of these things you don't actually need to be exposed for that long to increase your risk of cancer in particular it's kind of like I used if you've read about asbestos it's asbestos on a smaller scale like asbestos has all these negative effects for your lungs immediately that it decreases your lung capacity and so forth but over the long term a lot of people who've had asbestos exposure even if they just have asbestos exposure for like three weeks on some attention sensible cleanup job they're much higher likelihood of getting cancer twenty thirty years later so you can buy great on and that's also pressure that's not something that we take you know a filter so if you have high concentrations you there specialist and install superfans in your house but mostly smokers but in the basement don't pamper nails that's a good point to it sound better it's really not that expensive to mitigate radon right either yeah it was like we had it done in our house I think it's like a thousand dollars to have someone come in and put it in the pump to get rid of I think radon is even worse than that I don't think the odors are strong right there's no order right another thing to a lot of like local health departments will give you a radon detector to try they can put in your basement for a week and see if you have an issue so you can even test it for free and that's a good point too about like the basement for example there's other rooms if you have a closet that it's like a walk-in closet or whatever bunch of those have the worst ventilation and they have the highest rates of aquifer gassing both from new clothes or from the closet system themselves in fact if you google like closet headache there's million threads on the internet about like oh I get a headache when I walk into my closet it's because you're getting poisoned [Music] that's a great topic for us to think about I mean I mean that doesn't mean it's a reason for complacency but one of the Rays we're really ahead is that we don't commute so the fact that remote work is I think a huge benefactor for global warming combatting basically not sitting in idling a car for an hour each way it's a huge step up but then on the other hand air travel is not great either so yeah I think we should look into that I like the idea of that I like the idea of generally one of the ideas we had with when we build our house was we wanted to just be net neutral so we ended up in California very fortunate but a lot of Sun so we ended up with a bunch of solar panels and we have Net Zero usage of energy and I like that that's the general concept you'd probably use a lot of data center electricity that's funny like why they active in the court we actually are almost completely green because Google uses clean energy sources for everything and what they can't they offset that's a bundled into what that's cool special stuff I don't know about Amazon they also use clean energy sources and they do carbon offsets but that's cool not to the extent that Google does and a bunch of that comes from the fact that a lot of data centers get placed right next to a renewable she soars like a hydro plant or something else I got damn yep yeah I like that too I think it's a great argument for remote work in general even if it doesn't solve all the cases it solves very large slice of it and I think that's never been a better time to make that argument in fact we didn't make that argument in remote should have made that argument that like commuting is not just bad for you it's bad for the planet is also covered monoxide mostly pretty common issue if you have an indoor water heater like if it can get yes exhausting just get a little bit and then it's just dumping carbon monoxide in your house and you can't smell it you can feel it because you'll get lethargic but you won't notice that that is I mean it's not even indoor air quality as much as like that will kill you and that's like relatively quickly this is and you won't know that won't pick up that but most modern smoke detectors well like the nest smoke detector has a CO detector built-in as well but otherwise it's a great idea to have a dedicated CO detector I'm pretty sure actually in Europe you're mandated to have yeah that's pretty true right really yeah well yeah I just realized that I have one that's combined and like not totally yeah that's a great point yeah and there's a bunch of them you can get they just plug into your outlet by the floor I think Jason is the more Jason what what unit did you have for radon testing if they whatever I find in Amazon or is it going to be a gotcha like yeah I think those things are a little more that is actually a good point so when you unwrap this and plug it in some of the sensors take about 48 hours to warm up and some of them take about a week so you can't necessarily trust the reading you get like right when you plug it in I found that like that was pretty conservative and the readings were pretty good pretty quick but that's what they say up to 48 hours for a bunch of the sensors and I think one of them maybe maybe it's actually the co2 one takes about a week to fully stabilize the co2 sensor in the a where is self calibrating but it just takes a while to to find it's levels no just a very first time it's not about like it's resetting its it's actually about burnin on the sensor it's kind of a funny so we shouldn't run them all tonight in the ACE we should let it like if you'd want it to burn in in your environment no no don't need to it's just the sensor itself just needs to burn in okay I guess in yeah it's like an engine like running in a new car and red line it would be interesting if you run into the hotel I'd be quite curious usually what I found is that on commercial construction they totally know this because you will kill people if you design a theater for a thousand people that doesn't have proper ventilation and like they'll die quick so it's like that is simply such a necessity versus you you're building a house that has what four people in it six people in it eight people in it like you can sort of poison them to a fair degree and like they're not gonna die and they're unlikely to sue you but on the commercial side absolutely they just they know this time most of this stuff like them this chart was from a 2000 article in Popular Mechanics this is not new information but it has not spread to the residential construction industry so even if you make a brand new house today with people who know what they're doing I almost guarantee you that they don't know what they're doing when it comes to this stuff yeah I could imagine that there's just some local awareness that then just filled us around in circles but it doesn't spread very well HRV the only issue with HIV is it's really easy to install when you're making a new house and you're at the Bart wireframe level it's very hard to install after the fact because you need to run ducting and that's what we need to do we opened up our walls we opened up our ceiling we opened up our roof to get these things it's a mess and it's no good no the year is not huge it all depends on how much you have to which actually I should have put this onto so sometimes people will know oh you need fresh air you need ventilation but they use way too low levels so there's this main measure which is called CFM which is something changes it's a measure of air flow and a lot of people say oh you just need 20 CFM you need 40 CFM when we found to keep the co2 levels at those ideal levels you need about 80 CFM per person so for a bedroom that sleeps two people you need at least 160 CFM which if you say that to a normal a vac person they like oh that's way too high and that's because they don't know and they haven't measured and if you measure you'll find out that because a lot of these there are some housing building codes but a lot of them have very high levels they're like very tolerant of I think up to 1500 ppm on the co2 and on vo C there's usually very little if any regulation at all so you can't rely on the building code to to get this yep absolutely and I actually put LinkedIn on all these slides to the source articles thank you what's up with architects nuts putting ventilation into their buildings that seems crazy it seems crazy but I can totally see how we got there because architects was been in the business for a while 20 years ago 30 years ago you didn't need this you'd build a house and it would just be drafty and you'd get your ventilation automatically from the fact that the materials just didn't seal that tight and then there was this huge push from the late 80s to mid 90s in particular where everyone went we need energy efficiency because we're wasting energy basically heating a house that's been leaking all that heat out so here's all these materials and then there was a huge step forward in insulation we're like oh man we won we kept all the heat in but we also kept in all the chemicals from kept in on the co2 so I could see how a lot of people just got caught off guard what I'm kind of annoyed about or what I was really annoyed about on my project was that the knowledge is totally out there this is not esoteric like weird stuff you have to dig for you just have to look at the commercial side anyone who's building a high-rise or a theatre or anything for commercial use they totally know this it's just that there's this wall between the people who work on commercial projects and the people work on residential projects and the knowledge gap between us is staggering and I mean I had to basically become an expert in this for us to fix our system in our house and I thought we used good people who knew what they're doing and they kind of did within the scope of they didn't know what they didn't know and it took basically and I can if Jamie hadn't gotten sick we probably we still would be living in that house with shitty ventilation and we just have a 50% hit on our cognitive abilities and we wouldn't know that's what's really so insidious about this unless you get seriously ill it's very hard to detect that you're in trouble all right last question do you have any recommendation on like with a normal HVAC system like if you it's nice outside and you're not running heat or like air conditioning like just running the fans like circulating air throughout the house yeah you can you can do that I mean but that will just distribute the air do you already have which that's inside the house right so sometimes that is good that's what a fan sometimes does too right like you have a fan it doesn't give you fresh air it doesn't even give you a cleaner it just takes the air you already have and distributes it better and that can help and especially with the running of it if it runs it through the filter you're continuously that's basically what that what the breeze smart does it's it's basically a running thing that just pushes air through a filter so if you have filters on your AWAC that that's gonna help for that too so that's not a bad idea to do i'll see you like while you're sleeping at night it's circulating you know co2 from your bedroom if you have a air yeah yeah I couldn't see that in areas of the house yeah we measure and find out I think that that's an interesting point where actually talks the nest so you can turn the fan and the other thing with the ventilation is I've seen some of that integration and that's neat but the baseline is you need fresh air all the time there's not like a time we don't need fresh air or you don't need clean air so you kind of our ventilation system we run 24/7 yeah it helps us because we have like our kids room builds up co2 but the rest the house right then then you can totally get away with it yes around yeah did you try I'm just curious if bathroom fans with like a window if it somewhere else helps you're like could you observe a change and you tried that yes it's really interesting is in California these are building codes are different different places but in California it's mandated do you have to have bathroom exhaust fans they don't do for co2 that's what they do is they take some stuff out but they don't bring anything in but if you pair it with opening a window you could yeah we don't have any windows at our house so that's a little difficult and that's the other thing that's a little difficult sometimes with opening a window it's depending on the airspeed if it if it's not windy you don't get any circulation if it's windy you get a lot of circulation so that's a little bit of the thing to have in mind too sometimes it's not just enough to crack a window because there's no air movement yes like to rapidly exchange air crack some windows but then turn on like yep yep you're basically creating like a floor that gets fresh air in and takes stuff out which which is great it was the one consideration with the intake of fresh air is it's not necessarily clean air and I mean Colorado probably is if I'd like downtown LA probably not or if you have fires expires another one that's if you live anywhere near wildfires these breathe smart units or I mean in in some sense a literal lifesaver as in if you get exposed to 400 micrograms per square meter concentration of particle 25 it can be really bad I read one study on India the India I think it was Mumbai when by is one of the most polluted cities in the world like a lot of people think Oh China and that's bad I've been to Shanghai a few times where I learned new graphics were available on the Apple weather app I haven't seen before but Mumbai's even worse where they had one study that measured in just weeks you could measure how much your life expectancy with decrease in years on the other end so pretty really pretty bad yes I've seen some of that and it's really interesting like because a bunch of these things the brief smart 45 is $399 the the 75 I think is like seven hundred ninety nine dollars pretty expensive units right and I've seen some of the DUI where the basic you just take a filter and put on like a painting fan or something behind it to blow air through it and that's pretty neat yeah we did that in our apartment st. Louis because we got a new rugs and the smell was awful and so we found like reddit or something and yeah he's found a box fan I just text I was like what's the Merv rating on that things like the thing is 13 yep and I definitely notice a difference because my home office there was totally totally know its it that's a great way of you I mean that's the thing is it's not that complicated really you put a filter and you blow the air through it and the gets trapped in the filter so how every way you can breathe smile this one way of doing it having it in your airway just one way of doing it just blowing air out of filters another way of doing it just getting that out of it and then measuring whether it's working or not working well not only are they're not very good there's a bunch of studies actually showing that they're actually bad well they get the ozone they producing the breeze Smart's have an ionic button and you should not push it if you get I don't know why they still do that because all the signs I've seen on it is it that it's definitely never negative yeah I didn't use the ionic button on it I would say it's not neat from all my testing the brief smart units are extremely efficient and very quick operating you can get down to very little so the anywhere as a reasonable p.m. to five sensor but it's not like fantastic in that like it's margin of error it's actually 10 which I found that it's not as bad as that because the margin like the waho organization limit is 10 so if your margin of error is 10 that's not that great but I'd say most of the time it's it's fine but if you do end up getting really excited about measuring your air quality there's another unit called the die loss which is about I think 200 bucks maybe which is a big honking unit that has the serial port that's dedicated just to measuring particle matter and does it far more precisely but anyway I've used that unit to test all the different air purifiers I had and the Allen is really good and really quick and relatively quiet which is a huge factor to like I got a the best looking air purifier is something called a molecule it also sounds like the most futuristic and it's really cool as this sphere and it just doesn't work at the low levels of flow so when it if you want something on all the time I'd say most people would get really annoyed if their air purifier makes more than 45 DB of noise that's kind of the limit that thing when it blows at full full chad is like 75 is extremely loud and that's the love you have to run to that for it to be efficient so sometimes you see these markings for like oh how efficiently we can clean the air yeah yeah that's if you turn it up to a hundred and it's so loud you can't actually be in the room at the same time so a lot of it with air purifier is how efficient are you for a unit of sound and the Allens are extremely good they all use for some reason it's like the Germans that make the motors so they all use these German bearing that our DC motors that don't have the oscillation sound from voltage whatever it is and they're great but also expensive so cool alright well we have all the airs over here in the in the corner really curious actually get to get some readings that I've been keeping like a studies log out of my own house about reading so really curious to see how it plays out around you guys test

Our brand new house was making us sick. That lead me to study indoor air quality, and the findings were stunning. Besides the risk of making you physically sick, your mental capacity can take a serious hit. Here's what I learned. (This presentation was delivered at the Basecamp company meetup in October 2018).