![]() And in his personal life, “it allows you to find the terrible places and avoid them,” he told me, or to mask up when you can’t. When Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, first picked one up three years ago, he was shocked that it could hold its own against the machines he used professionally. The Aranet4 isn’t as accurate as, say, the $20,000 research-grade carbon-dioxide sensor in Marr’s lab, but it can get surprisingly close. Still, because CO2 builds up alongside other pollutants, the levels are “a pretty good proxy for how fresh or stale your air is,” and how badly it needs to be turned over, says Paula Olsiewski, a biochemist and an indoor-air-quality expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It gives you an indicator it’s not the whole story,” says Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech. Some CO2-tracking devices, including the Aranet4, don’t account for particulate matter-which means that they can’t tell when air’s been cleaned up by, say, a HEPA filter. Others, such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and ozone, can cause more direct harm. And although carbon dioxide can pose some health risks at high levels, it’s just one of many pollutants in the air, and by no means the worst. And that was making me miserable.ĬO2 monitors are not designed to dictate behavior the information they dole out is not a perfect read on air quality, indoors or out. I had envisioned the device and myself as a team with a shared goal: clean, clean air for all! But it was becoming clear that I didn’t have the power to make the device happy. This was not the reality I had imagined when I decided to invite the Aranet4 into my home. ![]() My cognitive capacity was now down 50 percent, per the user manual, on account of self-poisoning with stagnant air.īy the next morning, I was in despair. But as I tried to sleep in the suffocating trap of noxious gas that I had once called my home, next to the reeking sack of respiring flesh I had once called my spouse, the Aranet let loose an ominous beep: The ppm had climbed back up, this time to above 1,400. By the evening, I’d given up on trying to hypothermia my way to clean air. Two hours later, as I shivered in my 48-degree-Fahrenheit apartment in a coat, ski pants, and wool socks, typing numbly on my icy keyboard, the Aranet still hadn’t budged below 1,000 ppm, a common safety threshold for many experts. Aghast, I flung open a window, letting in a blast of frigid New England air. At baseline, the levels in my apartment were already dancing around 1,200 parts per million (ppm)-a concentration that, as the device’s user manual informed me, was cutting my brain’s cognitive function by 15 percent. The illusion was shattered minutes after I popped the batteries into my new device. This year, spring cleaning would be a literal breeze! What could be easier? It would basically be like living outside, with better Wi-Fi. ![]() When carbon-dioxide levels increased, I’d crack a window when I cooked on my gas stove, I’d run the range fan. But with the help of my shiny Aranet4, the brand most indoor-air experts seem to swear by, I was sure to fix the place up. I knew from the get-go that the small, stuffy apartment in which I work remotely was bound to be an air-quality disaster. It was as good a time as any to get savvy to the air in my home. ![]() But I didn’t shell out the $250 until January 2023, when a different set of worries, over the health risks of gas stoves and indoor air pollution, reached a boiling point. I’d first eyed the product around the height of the coronavirus pandemic, figuring it could help me identify unventilated public spaces where exhaled breath was left to linger and the risk for virus transmission was high. The culprit was my new portable carbon-dioxide monitor, a device that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for months. ![]() Sign up for it here.Ī few weeks ago, a three-inch square of plastic and metal began, slowly and steadily, to upend my life. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. To hear more audio stories, download the Hark app. ![]()
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