I was curious about the levels of CO2 in my room so I went and bought a sensor for my bedroom. I was somewhat appalled when I woke up this morning with heavy eyelids to see the concentration at 1700 ppm.
Guess I have to leave my door open now.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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I'd be curious to see how adding a few plants affects that.
When there is no light, the plants also breathe like humans, so it could be even worse.
At night they burn sugars and emit CO2, during the day they make sugars and remove CO2
I reached out to Amazon and they told me the best solution would be permanent daylight. Just set up growlights, let the plants remove c02 24hrs a day and never sleep. I can work 18 hours a day and I'm thinking I may be able to just remove the bed and convert it to a home office so I can work my side hustle through the night. This gives me plenty of time to use the bathroom and eat 3 times a day. A simple brain implant to allow my body to switch over to AI mode for 8 hours a day allows my brain to rest and productivity to never drop. I'm planning a vacation so I can take a weekend trip in 2029. Maybe I'll go to the beach, I don't want to do something to expensive.
I did a quick search and a paper + some articles say that you need a lot of plants (10-15). Just a few only make a negligible difference.
There's a guy on YouTube who tested this. Ended up switching to 10 gallon barrels of algae just to make a difference in his little 5x5 sealed test chamber.
From what i saw you breathe out something like 7-8kg of CO2 during a night. So in a sealed box you would need an amount of plants plants that are capable of absorbing that much CO2 in a single night. Basically 1kg of new plant material per hour, not counting the water ofc.
What you need is something like a whole greenhouse. Like a mini version of this kind of facility.
This is basically a sealed box that was designed to sustain life for 8 people and a bunch of animals for two years with nothing (except electricity) going in or out. It was filled to the brim with plants and algae. And even then they had to eventually activate CO2 scrubbers because the plants couldnt keep up. They also ran out of oxygen and had to inject more to not cancel the project.
Even if you completely fill your room with plants it would probably barely register the difference on the sensor. Plants also only absorb a lot while doing photosynthesis so during the night the whole idea wouldnt work very well. House plants also dont grow very fast (cuz that would be annoying af) so you would need even more. In the biosphere they used specially picked plants that grow and absorb very fast.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
This also gives you a scale for how many trees and algae we need in order to absorb global CO2 emissions. If you need a small greenhouse for just a single human, imagine how much you need for our global yearly 35 trillion kgs of CO2 emissions.
There was an infamous documentary about that.
Looks more like a comedy lol also:
Thats nuts, i might have to watch it.
It was among the finest of terrible 90's movies. 10/10 recommend!
To offset one human, you need about 10,000 leaves. Plants do have other benefits, and they are worth having indoors!