If the whole reason you didn’t want to open the window was the energy put in to heating/ cooling the air, why not use a heat exchanger? I reackon it cold be done using a desktop fan, a stack of thin aluminium plates, and a few pieces of cardboard or plastic to block air flow.
Yup, this turned out to be a crucial consideration that makes the whole project look a lot less worthwhile. If ventilation at a bad temperature is available, it’s cheaper to just get a heat exchanger and ventilate away and eat the increased heating costs during winter than to do a CO2 stripper.
There’s still a remaining use case for rooms without windows that aren’t amenable to just feeding an air duct outside, but that’s a lot more niche than my original expectations. Gonna edit the original post now.
I was very confused about your proposed setup after reading the wikipedia article on heat exchangers, since I couldn’t figure out what thermal masses you proposed exchanging heat between. But I found this article which resolved my confusion.
Your statement that “the premise that CO2 affects cognition is false” seems not obviously correct. Is this the current expert consensus? How can the rest of us evaluate it?
Well, who are the experts? Submarines routinely have CO2 levels much higher than even Berkeley group homes. Naval researchers do experiments with higher levels still, showing little effect. There seems to be an illegible LW consensus to the opposite, probably from people pretending to read this post. People praise Gwern for his quantity, but they don’t actually read him.
Again, most research is about ventilation and is thus confounded by other pollutants. I don’t usually speak up about this because most discussion of this doesn’t depend on the CO2 hypothesis.
I’m afraid I still don’t understand what the basis is for your claim that “the premise that CO2 affects cognition is false”.
I understand why you consider it not clear that CO2 does affect cognition: experiments yield results in different directions, and people survive on submarines. But that, at least so far as you’ve described it, seems to fall far short of justifying the flat statement that “the premise is false”. What am I missing?
You asked for an expert consensus and I gave it to you. Naval researchers are the experts.
No, “experiments yield results in different directions” is not an accurate summary. Experiments with large interventions trump experiments with small interventions.
But, it’s true, I left out the most convincing evidence, which is back of the envelope calculations with gross anatomy.
Note that there could be significant variation among humans on this axis and submariners are selected on ‘low response to CO2’. I think the illegible LW consensus is mostly people who are on the other end of this axis.
When people say that ventilation helps them, I believe them. They might even be far on an axis of response to pollution. But how would they know that the particular pollutant they respond to is CO2? They should be cautious in assigning blame and trying specific interventions. Gwern points out that one of the studies that most impressed Paul about CO2 actually found larger effects from mold, which is a big problem in the foggy slums of Berkeley. In theory there are ways to isolate human pollution from house pollution, such as varying the number of roommates, but I doubt people are careful enough to disentangle that and CO2 isn’t even the only human pollutant. [Added: but submarines are equally subject to all human pollutants, so that should limit the possibilities to the short list of what they scrub.]
Are submariners selected on that axis? I’m skeptical. In any event, the naval studies don’t restrict to submariners.
If the whole reason you didn’t want to open the window was the energy put in to heating/ cooling the air, why not use a heat exchanger? I reackon it cold be done using a desktop fan, a stack of thin aluminium plates, and a few pieces of cardboard or plastic to block air flow.
Yup, this turned out to be a crucial consideration that makes the whole project look a lot less worthwhile. If ventilation at a bad temperature is available, it’s cheaper to just get a heat exchanger and ventilate away and eat the increased heating costs during winter than to do a CO2 stripper.
There’s still a remaining use case for rooms without windows that aren’t amenable to just feeding an air duct outside, but that’s a lot more niche than my original expectations. Gonna edit the original post now.
I was very confused about your proposed setup after reading the wikipedia article on heat exchangers, since I couldn’t figure out what thermal masses you proposed exchanging heat between. But I found this article which resolved my confusion.
Ventilation has the advantage that it dumps all pollutants, not just CO2. In fact, the premise that CO2 affects cognition is false.
Your statement that “the premise that CO2 affects cognition is false” seems not obviously correct. Is this the current expert consensus? How can the rest of us evaluate it?
Well, who are the experts? Submarines routinely have CO2 levels much higher than even Berkeley group homes. Naval researchers do experiments with higher levels still, showing little effect. There seems to be an illegible LW consensus to the opposite, probably from people pretending to read this post. People praise Gwern for his quantity, but they don’t actually read him.
Again, most research is about ventilation and is thus confounded by other pollutants. I don’t usually speak up about this because most discussion of this doesn’t depend on the CO2 hypothesis.
I’m afraid I still don’t understand what the basis is for your claim that “the premise that CO2 affects cognition is false”.
I understand why you consider it not clear that CO2 does affect cognition: experiments yield results in different directions, and people survive on submarines. But that, at least so far as you’ve described it, seems to fall far short of justifying the flat statement that “the premise is false”. What am I missing?
You asked for an expert consensus and I gave it to you. Naval researchers are the experts.
No, “experiments yield results in different directions” is not an accurate summary. Experiments with large interventions trump experiments with small interventions.
But, it’s true, I left out the most convincing evidence, which is back of the envelope calculations with gross anatomy.
Note that there could be significant variation among humans on this axis and submariners are selected on ‘low response to CO2’. I think the illegible LW consensus is mostly people who are on the other end of this axis.
When people say that ventilation helps them, I believe them. They might even be far on an axis of response to pollution. But how would they know that the particular pollutant they respond to is CO2? They should be cautious in assigning blame and trying specific interventions. Gwern points out that one of the studies that most impressed Paul about CO2 actually found larger effects from mold, which is a big problem in the foggy slums of Berkeley. In theory there are ways to isolate human pollution from house pollution, such as varying the number of roommates, but I doubt people are careful enough to disentangle that and CO2 isn’t even the only human pollutant. [Added: but submarines are equally subject to all human pollutants, so that should limit the possibilities to the short list of what they scrub.]
Are submariners selected on that axis? I’m skeptical. In any event, the naval studies don’t restrict to submariners.