David Heinemeier Hansson
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2018–2024
1:18:57 · 40K views · Oct 30, 2018
David Heinemeier Hansson explains what he learned about indoor air quality after his new house made his family sick. He covers CO2, VOCs, off-gassing, HVAC and ventilation, and cognitive effects, presented at a Basecamp meetup.
HN points to it as a fascinating talk that convinced many to buy air quality monitors, with citations to studies.
9 comments from Hacker News
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Ruby on Rails fame) gave a great talk recently on air quality: this video Apparently his wife was showing signs of Formaldehyde poisoning after they moved into a newly constructed home. This motivated him to investigate the air quality in their house and he bought industrial-level air testing equipment to figure out what was going on (since many of the consumer-grade devices were wildly inaccurate). He also did a deep dive into the research on how air quality impacts cognitive and creative performance. Fascinating talk, worth watching.
David Heinemeier Hansson gave a great talk on air quality and touched upon various HVAC systems. One thing that really stuck out, was his claim that you need 80 CFM per person per room. this video
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Rails fame) gave a great talk on this recently, though he focused more on indoor air quality and its cognitive impact: this video
DHH gave a talk about this a while ago with good citations to studies about CO2 concentration and other VOCs. this video
I'm eager to hear the results. I recently got an Awair 2.0 after seeing this talk by DHH: this video It quickly confirmed that, without turning my thermostat fan to "ON", my bedroom CO2 jumps from about 1000 ppm to 2000 ppm within a couple hours of us going to sleep. In the fall, my wife and I started waking up in the middle of the night feeling like we couldn't breathe. What I figured out is that the neither the heat nor cooling was running because the weather was pretty much perfect. We have to keep the door closed because our cat will swat at us in the middle of the night otherwise. I figured there would naturally be enough of a draft to not make this a concern and it's a fairly large connected master bedroom/bathroom with high ceilings to hold a lot of air, but I guess that isn't enough. So that's when I learned about the "fan" function on my thermostat.... never had a need for it in my life. Now I just need to figure out how to get lower than 1000 ppm, which is already a hit against cognitive function. Our house has no screens currently and even if we install some, it's not like I want to have windows open in the middle of winter. I've heard house plants don't have a huge effect, but I'm willing to try.