Outdoor air quality in Ottawa isn’t the greatest but it’s not bad either. At least not in the part of town I’m living in.

With the occasional wildfires it would definitely get pretty bad, so about a year ago we got a medium-sized air purifier to improve the indoor air quality, as particles from the smoke would make their way in and linger. It also helped improve the air much faster after cooking, which unbeknownst to us got pretty bad even with the range hood fan at full throttle.

Air quality is often overlooked as one of the reasons why our sleep isn’t good. Waking up groggy, upset, with headaches, or feeling of unrest could be attributed to the air quality in your bedroom.

But what is air quality? It’s the result of combining various metrics to yield a qualitative (good, fair, poor) or quantitative (1-10) value: temperature, humidity, pressure, particulate matter in various microscopic sizes, air mixture, concentration of harmful gases, etc. The more metrics you capture the more spot on your air quality will be, but knowing the value of those individual metrics is also pretty important if you want to have any hope of addressing any issues.

Recently I got an Airlytix sensor that captures a ton of these metrics, and after running it for a bit I noticed that the CO2 levels were too high (> 1300 ppm). After spending 20 minutes in bed, I noticed it had climbed above 1600 ppm 😨. Normal concentrations are usually in the 500-1000 range. I switched on the HVAC fan and it slowly dropped to under 800 ppm over a matter of hours and has remained there since.

We rarely open windows at home, as we heavily relied on the HVAC system do its job for us. However that system is focused on temperature and humidity, completely ignoring everything else. The HVAC fan had been set to auto for as long as I can remember so as soon as the desired temperature was reached it turned off, regardless of CO2 levels or anything else I’ve mentioned.

I’ve considered getting a smart controller for the HVAC but the last thing I want is Google’s Nest or any device that requires to be online, or from some random company that can go bankrupt. For now I’ll manually toggle the fan I guess now that I am more aware of what is happening, that’s of course until I find a way to automate the process.