DUMB AIR is simple. Bad air makes people tired, foggy, and slower. It's mostly CO2, it's everywhere we gather indoors, and almost nobody measures it. So we do. We measure it, we help you understand what the number means, and we give you what you need to act on it — at work, at home, at school.
This is open and free. No product to sell you. The scale, the guides, the templates, all of it stays free. If a monitor link ever earns us a few cents, we'll say so, and it goes toward keeping this running. That's it. This isn't a startup chasing your money. It's a cause.
I spent years living in China, obsessed with air quality. Both kinds. The PM2.5 kind -- the thick, grey, stay-inside-today kind. And the CO2 kind. I couldn't find an air purifier that addressed both properly, so I built one. Founded Nyluft, got acquired by Rehau in 2017, spent three years in Shanghai building and shipping award-winning hardware.
But here's what I kept noticing. Everyone fighting PM2.5 was making the CO2 problem worse. Seal the room. Close the windows. Run the purifier. Great PM2.5 numbers. Terrible CO2. The room gets cleaner and dumber at the same time. I was always the person cracking the window while the purifier ran. Necessary to me. Annoying to others.
When I moved back to Sweden, the outdoor air was clean. But the indoor air was worse than anything I had measured in Asia. Not because of pollution. Because of ventilation. Nobody seals rooms to block PM2.5 here. They just never open them. The problem shifted from outside to inside, and almost nobody noticed.
The Uber thing finished it. In Asia, drivers run internal circulation to block the PM2.5 outside. Passengers sit in recycled air getting tired and foggy and blame the traffic. I am always the one asking them to switch to fresh air and crack a window. In Europe it's different -- nobody's actively recirculating, but the ventilation still isn't built for a car full of people. So I open the window myself. It irritates the driver. I need the air.
It's the same story everywhere. Cars are built for efficiency, not air quality. Buildings are managed to lower the electricity bill, so ventilation gets cut. Some building managers don't even know how to dimension airflow for a small meeting room. The result is the same: rooms full of people getting quietly dumber, and nobody measuring it.
I am an extreme person about this. I open windows in meeting rooms. I carry a monitor. I know what bad air does because I spent years building the devices that are supposed to fix it -- and I know which part they usually skip.
This is worth being loud about. That's why DUMB AIR exists.
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Open a window. Don't breathe dumb. — Gustav