The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I recently bought an indoor air quality monitor after seeing some posts on Twitter about drowsiness and such being caused by high CO2 levels in living spaces.
I've discovered a few things:
I think one "fun" idea to check if CO2 levels actually harm me is taking random, blinded samples of my drowsiness/mood/etc levels and overlaying them on the CO2-time plot.
Years ago, I bought a CO2 monitor after reading something about indoor air quality (maybe gwern? I don't remember). Even just cracking the window makes a huge difference in the CO2 level. Sometimes I notice a difference in my drowsiness/motivation, sometimes I don't.
What I really need is some kind of magic vent over the window that lets the air freely circulate but keeps the warmth inside.
Slate Star Codex articles: 1 2 (archives: 1 2)
Yeah, that would have been it! Though I was not one of the 129 in the survey.
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Heat recovery ventilation, baby. Being able to do it easily is the biggest advantage of a ducted air conditioning system imo.
TL;Dr the incoming and outgoing air passes through a crossflow heat exchanger that cools down the hot air and warms up the cold air (it works both ways, naturally).
The good size ones can recover/reject 80% of the heat.
Downsides: grease and moisture suspended in warm air will condense inside the core as the air cools. Smog and such from outside will do the same in summer when the heat flow swaps. Good pre-filtering is essential, which means high capacity ducting and fans correctly specced for the load. A surprisingly complicated design challenge for a custom job.
Ducting is needed to get the intake and exhaust airflow to come together at the heat exchanger. This can be simple if you get creative (aka use an attic or crawlspace).
They're not very good for small heat gradients, obviously. If it's usually 45 outside and 65 inside, the system cost will be higher than just heating cold fresh air with a gas boiler or heat pump.
Worse, if your house has a lot of solar heat gain in summer, and your inside air is hotter than outside, the heat exchanger will actively make your AC's job harder by keeping the heat in! This can be a big deal in sunny but mild coastal climates, where even hot days cool down in the evenings.
You can probably tell I've been designing a diy one for a cabin build lol. But I'm probably better off with vented air and a radiant heating system instead.
As I typed that, I wondered if someone here would have a solution I'd never heard of, and you came through almost immediately!
It's temperate enough here that I'm probably usually in too small of a heat gradient, but I appreciate the new rabbit hole to go down.
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