How Toxic is the Air in Your Home?
Unhealthy indoor air is surprisingly common and shockingly insidious, causing asthma, heart disease, cancer, and millions of deaths a year. This DIY fix-it guide is for anyone who breathes.
“We’ve spent decades clearing our air outdoors across the United States… and made little or no progress cleaning our air indoors.”
—Rob Jackson, Stanford professor
On a recent spring evening, carbon dioxide in our house spiked to levels that can reduce brain function, hamper sleep, induce stress, and raise the risk of respiratory illnesses and chronic diseases. This was not some unusual event. There were no alarms, no 9–1–1 call. It was just a regular day and evening in which my wife and I (and our dog) did some breathing and eating and other normal life stuff.
When we went to bed, we slept with a window open, and CO2 levels fell suddenly back to a safe zone and stayed there through the night.
I didn’t realize any of this had happened until the next day, when I looked at data downloaded from my favorite new tech toy: a carbon dioxide (CO2) monitor. The episode became an experiment, albeit a…
