I was curious about the levels of CO2 in my room so I went and bought a sensor for my bedroom. I was somewhat appalled when I woke up this morning with heavy eyelids to see the concentration at 1700 ppm.

Guess I have to leave my door open now.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
    18·
    2 days ago

    From what i saw you breathe out something like 7-8kg of CO2 during a night. So in a sealed box you would need an amount of plants plants that are capable of absorbing that much CO2 in a single night. Basically 1kg of new plant material per hour, not counting the water ofc.

    What you need is something like a whole greenhouse. Like a mini version of this kind of facility.

    This is basically a sealed box that was designed to sustain life for 8 people and a bunch of animals for two years with nothing (except electricity) going in or out. It was filled to the brim with plants and algae. And even then they had to eventually activate CO2 scrubbers because the plants couldnt keep up. They also ran out of oxygen and had to inject more to not cancel the project.

    Even if you completely fill your room with plants it would probably barely register the difference on the sensor. Plants also only absorb a lot while doing photosynthesis so during the night the whole idea wouldnt work very well. House plants also dont grow very fast (cuz that would be annoying af) so you would need even more. In the biosphere they used specially picked plants that grow and absorb very fast.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

    This also gives you a scale for how many trees and algae we need in order to absorb global CO2 emissions. If you need a small greenhouse for just a single human, imagine how much you need for our global yearly 35 trillion kgs of CO2 emissions.