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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

The "number one rated" plant, Bird's Nest Fern, will consume CO2 at the rate of approximately 2ppm per hour per pot.

So, if you've accidentally spiked your CO2 levels up to 2000ppm, one of these bad boys should get you back down to a mere 1000ppm in a tidy 1000 hours or so.... assuming you've evacuated all humans and animals from the house and nullified all other sources of CO2 emission.

There are a lot of great reasons to have indoor plants; just be realistic about their ability to meaningfully impact indoor CO2 levels.

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Okay so 4 ferns would do it in 250 +- 100 hours then. I'm not saying one home garden will solve global co2 buildup I'm saying its significantly cheaper and potentially more rewarding as a hobby than trying to play god with air quality and a 1k budget. You're also not accounting for gaseous exchange rates related as a function to current air quality. Yes a terrible PPM is 2000 but your body produces less co2 as a result of reduced function in such an environment, therefore increasing the effect of any filtration.

The bottom line is that you need thousands of plants to offset the CO2 exhaled by a single person. From what I can tell the ppm estimates on that page you linked are pretty generous -- they seem to be talking about the plants affecting the CO2 ppm in a very very small environment.

     I'm saying its significantly cheaper and potentially more 
     rewarding as a hobby than trying to play god with air quality 
     and a 1k budget

I don't think I agree with this dichotomy. It's like saying reading books is more fun than playing the guitar. You can do both! They're not really in conflict!

And anyway, you can do a lot with indoor air quality for 1K.

> approximately 2ppm per hour per pot

In what environment? 2ppm in a small enclosed room and 2ppm in a large warehouse are very different quantities of CO2.

Good point. Not sure what area they're talking about. I didn't get into the exact math because no matter how you slice it it's kind of absurd. Here are some more objective numbers I found. I don't know how reliable the sources are.

One common estimate for humans seems to be 1kg of CO2 exhaled per day.

A single bird's nest fern is estimated to absorb about 0.0002677kg of CO2 per day.

So about 3,700 bird's next ferns in your house for each human being should even things out. Regardless of exact numbers this seems consistent with everything I've ever read over the years, that indoor plants are nice but the amount needed to really reduce CO2 is impractical.

say you cover 1/3 with ventilation and 1/3 by not being home for 1/3 of the day. It still wont be a small greenhouse with [say] 1200 plants but say 3 floors of 25x16 definitely seems doable. How much artificial light to keep them going?

I'm not sure how practical that is, but I'd certainly love to live in such a place. =)

I visited a guy one time who decorated his 5 room flat with the biggest possible plants one could fit in each room (with a few spots to keep them alive). The 14x4.5 meter living room was a 2 seat sofa, a small table with drawers, a tv attached to the wall, very thick wooden floor with big cracks all over and 5 enormous plants in pots the size of bath tubs. No amount of money could have improved it.

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