Comment by xnx
Comment by xnx 2 days ago
On average, we inhale 20 lbs of air per day. This is greater by weight than the food or water we consume in a day. We should be paying a lot more attention to air quality.
Comment by xnx 2 days ago
On average, we inhale 20 lbs of air per day. This is greater by weight than the food or water we consume in a day. We should be paying a lot more attention to air quality.
Well it was great for hundreds of thousands of years, then it was really bad for a couple generations, now it is just less bad for potentially forever. Hardly an improvement when you look at things in scales of our species time on this planet vs since grandad's day.
Yeah, that's easy to underestimate. Where I live they've even declared a ban on open fires; a number of people have a fireplace / pit / thing in their back yard which is used for social events, but during certain weather conditions that smoke lingers. And because firewood is expensive people will use whatever they get their hands on. Also, people don't have proper stoves, and people don't know how to make a proper fire, so the result is... a lot of noxious smoke and poor air quality.
My house in the UK is 300 years old. It is built of stone with proper ventilation built in everywhere. It never gets damp, never too cold or hot. Air circulates enough to constantly be fresh yet not quick enough to create a draft.
Its a shame homes arent built like that anymore. Looking at how houses like this work really shows how we have created solutions to our own problems in modern home building.
What are average high and low temperatures where you live in the UK? I looked up the averages for the UK as a whole (which I’m sure can vary quite a bit once you get more local) but I found between 20C and 2C.
Where I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan average temperatures average between 32C and -6C. As for extremes, I have personally experienced there highs around 37C and lows down to -28C (still went to work in 3ft of snow).
So I will take my modern home with its ability to be well insulated and heated and cooled.
Yes, people lived there long before those modern conveniences, and they were cold and hot. They kept warm in the winter by keeping fires going inside their dwellings at all times. I even spent a week in autumn living in a recreation of one as a kid. Unsutprisingly, it was cold and everything smelled of smoke by the end of the week. Think of how much smoke and particulate we breathed in to stay warm (and there wasn’t even snow on the ground yet). I didn’t even mind it.
I’ll give the final word though to those living in even colder and more extreme climates, and any intrepid people living above the Arctic Circle.
Even then you don't get that sort of quality outside certain economic situations. The proverbial "old house" in california is a stick frame dwelling on a post and pier foundation over a crawlspace.
This is because it seldom rains. So when it does rain the soil is very hard and doesn't absorb much of it. So it comes down the hills and causes landslides and shifting soils in the alluvial valleys that much of californian civilization is built into (since channelized due to said wandering waters destroying early californian civilization multiple times until this was learned and tamed by the u.s. army). And then, of course the earth quakes, which destroyed an early brick structured version of san fransisco almost in its entirety in 1906.
Not to mention available american and canadian lumber connected by railhead to the entire continent. most of such reserves in europe were claimed for sunken ships over the previous centuries. So now you live in a 300 year old stone house probably with a basement instead of a timber building on post and piers because you have no cheap timber to this degree here and you have no earthquake risks or much shifting soil. Could you build a house like yours in the U.S.? Of course, if you pay a premium for it.
Look at passive houses, almost fully airtight, 70%+ reduction in heating requirements, fresh air all day long thanks to hrv
The problem is that people want "cheap" houses, cheap houses coupled with modern regulations = sealed boxes. The average joe doesn't give a shit about building quality, it's all about getting something big and as cheap as possible.
> fresh air all day long thanks to hrv
This costs power and materials. Old houses dont require that. On a global scale, that increases power and manufacturing on a huge scale. Why are we throwing power and more modern materials at a problem that was solved in Roman times?
This would also reduce cost, helping the 'cheap' houses issue.
Competently built modern houses are well sealed, so not much air filters in through leaked walls, doors, etc. Instead, outside air is actively introduced through a filtered intake, by a fan (or by deliberate negative pressure, but that’s riskier, as air will come in through other paths too, bypassing the filter and potentially introducing contaminants from the structure and/or soil into the building).
There are plenty of systems to do this. My favorite is an ERV, with an aftermarket, oversized, upgraded supply filter.
While it's totally possible to build competently, my impression is that, in the US at least, there are tons of existing houses—built roughly between the 70s (energy crisis) and the mid-2000s when ventilation requirements became more common in building codes—that are fairly tightly sealed but lack any sort of real ventilation systems beyond like, kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans.
Having grown up and lived primarily in (uncomfortably!) drafty old houses, I've noticed the phenomenon ever since I was little kid because they have a distinctive stuffiness and smell of furniture/carpet/plywood even if nothing inside is actually new. I think many people are just used to it/consider it a normal smell of a house because so much of the housing stock is in this category.
Sealed modern houses usually come with an HRV or ERV so that your air is regularly replaced filtered fresh air.
Really depends where you live and who built the home. Most contractors in the Midwest still aren't sure about putting network cabling in and haven't heard of air exchangers. Seems like the drive is to save 50 cents wherever possible per PVC toilet flanges vs at least PVC and metal ones
Tight homes dont happen by accident. If the contractor is just getting by, they likely arent building a home that needs passive ventilation.
Finding out that the reason my toilet was wobbling was because multiple people thought PVC was okay to use structurally was infuriating.
Sealed houses in favor of climate control / energy usage has a big impact on people I'm sure. I'm lucky ish in that my house is well insulated but has central ventilation, but only 'suck' so it draws in fresh air from outside. In the same neighbourhood, they built houses with recirculation systems with a heat exchanger so that outside air was pulled in through that. But because the system was noisy (constant fan noises), people would turn the system on low or completely off, causing health issues due to buildup of CO2 and the like. That was uh, a bit of a problem for them and the builders.
The constant fan noise issue always seems a bit absurd to me. There’s an excellent mitigation available that also happens to be to extremely cheap: insulated flexible duct. The cheap mylar-fiberglass-mylar sandwich stuff that’s reinforced with a steel spiral, is sold in big boxes, and is favored by cheap contractors because it’s easy to transport and install.
This stuff is amazing: not only is it safe (no airflow in contact with fiberglass) and fairly well insulated, but it has excellent acoustic insertion loss. If you take 100 feet of rigid galvanized steel duct and talk into one end, someone at the other end will hear you loud and clear. If you take that same duct and install duct liner (and incredibly annoying process) like a fancy commercial installer, you won’t hear much at the other end. If you use 100' of flex duct, you will hear basically nothing. This stuff mostly outperforms even the most expensive commercial acoustic solutions!
Here’s a spec sheet from a random brand:
https://www.flexmasterusa.com/Portals/2/Downloads/Flex/6B.pd...
Wow, 12 feet of 6" duct attenuates 250Hz sound by 43dB! That will make that frequency close to inaudible even if the equipment end of the duct is quite loud as HVAC gear goes. Use wider duct or a longer run (or both) to get it even quieter and to make a bigger dent in the lowest frequencies.
So you stick you fancy fan somewhere that you won’t directly hear it (in mechanical space with a fiber-insulated wall between you and it) and you connect it to the living space with ducting that contains at least a decent length of insulated flexible duct. And you keep the grilles and ducts large enough to keep face velocities low so that the ducts and grilles themselves don’t make much noise, and you have a fantastic system.
Or you use extremely expensive specialized semi-rigid ventilation duct or rigid galvanized steel or uninsulated flexible aluminum, and you’re sad because your duct is a speaking tube.
Air tightness is fine, because when it's done anywhere close to the right way it comes with filtered heat recovery ventilation.
You're right about building materials, but that's true regardless of the air tightness: engineered woods, all kind of glues, all kind of foams, paints, sealants, hard to tell how nasty they are but they for sure aren't beneficial.
> all kind of glues
Glues are getting better over time. Slightly nasty polyurethanes [0] and quite nasty solvent- and bitumen-based products are gradually being replaced with STPE, and STPE seems to be considered quite safe. It doesn’t even have a prop 65 warning!
[0] Polyurethane may well be harmless when fully cured, but the uncured isocyanates are most definitely nasty. Fortunately, they’re so reactive that they will aggressively react with water (even just moisture in the air) or almost any alcohol and produce much safer products.
It can be disheartening. I don't know that there's much strong evidence yet that air polluted with synthetic particles leads to bad health effects, but I do know that are lungs have been subjected to things in the last 100 years that they hadn't encountered in the previous 300 million.
Modern homes have to have HRV systems for removing indoor air and replacing it.
I uploaded you for nosedive and didn't read anything after that. Figured it couldn't get any better!
Not an easy silver bullet. They'll filter out pm2.5 but most don't touch VOCs. Most that claim to remove VOCs don't have enough volume of activated carbon to justify that. And even if you buy one of the ultra expensive machines that do filter VOCs, you're still left with rapid carbon dioxide accumulation which probably acutely harms cognition even at sub 1000 ppm levels, forcing you to open the windows which is self defeating.
You're really left with two good solutions, one is centralized airflow with appropriate HEPA filtering which many can't afford, or to move to a location with default clean air, again a difficult proposition depending on work etc.
Not to forget also that inhaled micro/nano particles get into the bloodstream more easily than ingested particles.
It's probably way more than that, IMO. Like 10x more.
Edit: Back of the envelope math puts it around 60-70kg per day, conservatively.
Can I just stop being right?
Where does our math differ?
2,000 gallons/day * 4.6 grams/gallon = 20.3 lbs.
A person breathes 20-22k times a day (although I agree that number will vary greatly among people).
2,000 gallons/day is about 300ml in/out per breathing cycle. My estimate is that you breathe in/out at least one liter, recall that total lung capacity is about 6 liters so about 20% of that seems like a reasonable estimate.
I chose to do 2-3 liters * 1.225 grams/liter * 22k times = ~50-80kg. That's a bit high now that I think about it, but no way is as low as 9kg.
Edit: Chat says a healthy adult averages 500ml per breathing cycle (honestly surprised is that low), so, final estimate ~13-14kg if that is true.
(I like metric units but you can do the conversion to burgers per squared eagle and compare)
I think as an American, "food" should be in quotation marks
A rule of thumb is that if you paid sales tax for it, it's probably not food.
Of course "not food" is mostly fine.
Not a great rule of thumb as every state and municipality is different in this regard.
Many places will have different rates for raw food, prepared to go / delivery, and prepared for on-site consumption.
https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2024/08/26/109453/109453/
I can't help but feel like it has taken a nosedive as well. Modern homes are sealed and don't recirculate much outdoor air. As a result you have all this modern american living plastic material constantly offgassing. your fleece shedding microplastic particulate into the air that you then breath, eat, burn over the stove and inhale the fumes. You can't even do anything about it. Get rid of all the plastic you want in your life and the water supply is what is contaminated next. Your neighbors dryer exhaust and their fleece polluting your air. Restaurants. The food suppliers. Move a thousand miles away to the tip of the mountaintop upstream of everything conceivable, and you are liable to be bombarded with it carried via updrafts from around the world along with the rest of the usual pollution.
We can't even slow down the consumerism. Everyone's job around the world is someway tied into this rampant production of cheap plastic goods to replace cheap plastic goods from yesterweek. You try and nip it in the bud everyone is liable to lose their job and everything might very well collapse because of how we chose to stack this deck of cards on this planet.