Month: March 2016

The Air Quality in my Gym #1

Sotirios PapathanasiouLeave a comment

Many people visit the gym everyday because they want to be healthy, but is the air inside the gym healthy?

My gym for instance doesn’t have any kind of window in the fitness room and depends on air ventilators to re-new the air. It can increase the cost of maintaining so do they change filters regularly or do they turn it on? Well, In my opinion it depends the season. I will talk more about it in my next post in which I am going to include some PM measurements.

Mold inside locker rooms is an other issue. You can see it inside the shower stalls, my gym has it. Black mold that grows between tiles. Very bad for your lungs among other issues that it can create like asthma, obesity, autoimmunity, allergies, brain fog and the list goes on. There is only one solution for that to send a complaint letter to the manager of the gym and ask him to clean the showers more often.

Unsafe VOCs from carpeting, glues, furniture, cleaners, paint, among others. In my gym they changed the carpeting last week and I can insure you without using any kind of equipment that VOCs are in so high levels right now. Smells so corrosive. Personally I avoid been close to these areas. Not all people are expert in air quality or even have the minimum concern about it, this is the reason we have to remind them that air is there and we breathe it all the time.

All in all, go and workout but also make it clear to your gym manager that you demand a clean healthy workout environment because at the end of the day you pay them.

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Thank you Visitors

Sotirios PapathanasiouLeave a comment

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I would like to thank you all, for visiting my blog in daily basis. I am very happy knowing that my blog raises the awareness about air quality and the issues we are facing nowadays.

USA, India, Denmark, UK, France, South Korea and Germany among others are the main daily visitors from.

More cool experiments and informations are about to come. As always stay tuned.

Month of CO2 experiment Results

Sotirios PapathanasiouLeave a comment

The indoor CO2 experiment has ended and the results are quite interesting. Let’s recall what was the experiment about for those that don’t remember. During February I took CO2 measurements for 24 nights (12 nights without plants and 12 nights with plants) by recording the highest CO2 values during night time.

The main questions were:

  1. Is the atmosphere inside the house getting worse during night?
  2. Can specific plants help the air quality during night?

Answers:

  1. Yes, The atmosphere is getting x3 times worse, at least the CO2 levels are increasing x3 times each night. It’s winter and the house stays closed during all that time, so CO2 builds up during night.
  2. Yes, there are some plants such as the Snake Plant that can help us. In my experiment I used 2 Snake plants one small and one medium size. The CO2 didn’t decrease dramatically, but there was a significant difference.

There was a difference of ∼170ppm less CO2 when I placed the plants near the CO2 Sensor. In the measurements that I took, I decided to add some notes because during windy nights I noticed that CO2 levels were lower than during normal nights, I guess because of the air pressure and the lack of isolation in some windows.

Conclusion:

The right plants are helpful and if you think that we are growing up and we are developing during our night sleep then it worths the effort to re-evaluate the air quality during night.

CO2 levels experiment