Thank you for sharing! Skimmed for now, but saving this to read later.
I've had a history as well of never getting good sleep so I'm curious to see what your experience was and the steps you've taken. A few things I've done that have helped a bunch:
- Using BreatheRight nasal strips every night
- Latex earplugs ("Mack's Pillow Soft Silicone Earplugs"). I could never sleep with foam earplugs in my ears but these are great
- Sleeping with a noise machine
- Getting a basic alarm clock so I can leave my phone outside the room
- Getting a c02 monitor
A ctrl+f on the page didn't show any c02 mentions, so I'll just say it's something I think is worth looking into for anyone having sleep trouble. My understanding from when I was looking at one to buy was there were different kind of sensors and the ones in the cheaper monitors were unreliable. I ended up getting this one [1] for $250 with the intention of returning it after getting a sense of where the levels would get to but ended up keeping it. For anyone who thinks it's at all possible to be a factor for them, I recommend getting that monitor with the plan being to just return it if you don't see anything surprising.
Great tips. But it seems like maybe you should remove the part where you suggest people intentionally buy, use, then return an air monitor.
It's one thing to buy something and return it because you are genuinely dissatisfied, but what you are suggesting is called wardrobing and is pretty unethical, and it incurs costs for retailers and manufacturers.
Also, it can be damaging to the environment if products are needlessly manufactured and disposed of. I don't think it's a good idea to suggest this kind of behavior.
Thanks for the earplug recommendation. I don't have sleep apnea but I'm a very light sleeper so the slightest step or a car going by makes me wake up. I assume this was very beneficial when my ancestors would be attacked by a neighboring tribe or a mountain lion but it's not so great now. lol.
I usually just use CSV earplugs but my hears wake up hurting almost every morning. I considered using the Bose sleep ear buds but they're a bit expensive so I'm going to try these out first!
I bought an Aranet recently and at night, it can go as high as 1600. I figured not wasn't as important at night but this article has me wondering. I will say that I've been going to the office 2-3 days a week and I've been sleeping a whole lot better lately. I don't recall when horrific sleep started but I'm fairly certain it was pre pandemic.
> “Objectively measured sleep quality and the perceived freshness of bedroom air improved significantly when the CO2 level was [below 900ppm], as did next-day reported sleepiness and ability to concentrate and the subjects' performance of a test of logical thinking.“
1600ppm is definitely impacting your cognitive abilities and it's something you need to fix ASAP.
That sounds pretty high! Have you made any changes or do you still have it hit 1600 while you're sleeping? I was never able to find a good source for what levels to target, but I did come across this study [1] which claims to have measured a difference in cognitive function the next day for people who slept with avg c02 levels at 835 ppm vs the group at 660 ppm. I don't have the background to judge the legitimacy of the study, so it could be bogus for all I know. But keeping the window has been enough for me to keep the levels below 800 so I've tried kept that as the limit
I did replace my water heater with an electric one. I got this after that so who knows that the baseline used to be but I do have some ideas for more improvements. I may open the window a smidge to see if it makes a difference. A little hesitant since I have a newborn and it being winter and all. I'm trying to get Home Assistant to work with Bluetooth so I can link the two and turn on the bathroom fan.
One thing I came across while looking into c02 and ventilation was the recommendation to sleep with the door closed but window open for fire safety concerns: https://fsri.org/programs/close-before-you-doze. Something else to consider when settling on a setup
Man, last night my levels jumped to 2,200. A major source looks to be the stove top as we made lentil soup. I also heard about windows: opening up the top and bottom to let hot air out and cold air in. Will try it out once we have 60º nights.
Good ideas. Also review your diet. For me I found out I am slightly allergic to HFCS. Which was causing mild acid reflux and making me sleep very poorly. Easy test is if you take a tums before sleep and you sleep good you are good candidate for something like that.
>Never knew about these. I'm guessing you can't re-use the same strip each night?
I've been wearing the strips both day and night. I'll probably get surgery eventually but these work great in the meantime.
There's a bunch of much cheaper generic-brands on Amazon that work just as well too. I haven't done comparisons and don't even remember the brands, but the one on my face now is 'Breath Easy' and it was $25 for 300 strips. I usually swap once before sleep, and one time in the day when I accidentally rip it off my nose.
Getting a CO2 monitor was eye opening. We had very bad ventilation in our rental bed room and we invested considerably to get a very good ventilation solution when we got our house.
Installed an fairly overprovisioned heat recovery ventilation system. What effectively means a lot of pipes to move the air in and out of the rooms. Nothing fancy: supply in the bedrooms, exhaust in the bathroom, etc, just a little more air volume moving. Heat recovery system (a fancy word for a aluminum heat exchange) recovers the heat going out of the house by warming the incoming air. Keeps mostly the CO2 levels way below 800 ppm, normally around 600 ppm.
I've had a history as well of never getting good sleep so I'm curious to see what your experience was and the steps you've taken. A few things I've done that have helped a bunch:
- Using BreatheRight nasal strips every night
- Latex earplugs ("Mack's Pillow Soft Silicone Earplugs"). I could never sleep with foam earplugs in my ears but these are great
- Sleeping with a noise machine
- Getting a basic alarm clock so I can leave my phone outside the room
- Getting a c02 monitor
A ctrl+f on the page didn't show any c02 mentions, so I'll just say it's something I think is worth looking into for anyone having sleep trouble. My understanding from when I was looking at one to buy was there were different kind of sensors and the ones in the cheaper monitors were unreliable. I ended up getting this one [1] for $250 with the intention of returning it after getting a sense of where the levels would get to but ended up keeping it. For anyone who thinks it's at all possible to be a factor for them, I recommend getting that monitor with the plan being to just return it if you don't see anything surprising.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Aranet4-Home-Temperature-Ink-Configur...