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Comment by kuhewa | Hacker News Reader

A greater partial pressure of oxygen != lesser partial pressure of CO2.

Can you elaborate? I'm unfamiliar with the science here. To use an extreme example, if an oxygen concentrator was blowing out 98% oxygen, wouldn't that necessarily mean there was less CO2 than otherwise?

Depends what the volume of the room is and turnover with normal air. If your room is 98% oxygen then yes, probably. But if that concentrator is bumping the typical 21% up to 30% or so, vast majority of the difference is going to be made up from a decrease in the 78% of air that is N2 with a pretty small dent in CO2 (which at en elevated 1000 ppm is still only 0.1%).

You wouldn't want the room to be 98% O2 though, that's just asking for oxygen toxicity. You wouldn't want CO2 really low either, that's just asking for hypocapnia. So unless you have specialised equipment to control the gas mixture you are breathing, why not just increase ventilation a bit if you'd like to decrease CO2 levels?

Yeah, the more I look into this, the more complicated it seems. I didn't realize the balance of the gases was so important, I thought I just needed more oxygen. A CO2 scrubber would seem to have the same issue, right?

I agree I could just increase ventilation, and that's what I'm doing now. But I recently realized that many extremely-productive people are getting their productivity from using stimulants like caffeine, and so now I'm wondering what other things I could modify in my life to be more productive. I'm just trying to optimize everything.

The CO2 scrubber, would do the trick, I was thinking about hypocapnia but that probably isn't affected by inhaled CO2 but the rate at which you purge metabolic CO2. So not sure there is a downside to pushing it too far the other direction the way there is with O2. But I think a real scrubber based solution would be cost prohibitive and perhaps finicky and noisy compared to a ventilation based solution that would do 95% of the job.

Got it, thank you for your opinion.

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