Extremely high CO2 readings in my tent

Hadez411 said:

Soil capping is a process that can happen to houses built on old farm sites, where damp weather causes the soil to expand and releases gases, including natural amounts of CO2 into the home. Malfunctioning air conditioning systems can also lead to elevated CO2 levels. The combustion of fossil fuels in the home is another source of increased CO2.

If you can't figure it out, vent your basement really hard until the levels come down then seal off each room and chase down the source with your detector. Do this low to the ground, as that's where you'll find the concentration first after venting the room. Also make sure to check if it's coming from upstairs and leaking down the stairs or something. Imagine like a smoke machine rolling across the floor and it just keeps settling lower and building up. I'm a general contractor, so I've had to do that before. Co2 is heavy though so you'll need to suck/blow it out, not just open the above-head windows in a basement. Also, a lot of the current building codes demand that newly renovated homes be made super air-tight. They'll force you to add new materials and vapor barriers to the wall but won't tell you you to improve your ventilation when you do that.

This is just a stab in the dark, but I used to work for Radiation Protection in nuclear power plants. Typical CO2 fire alarms etc work by using an Alpha radiation source and a detector. Alpha radiation is radioactive because it has an off-balance of protons to neutrons and it shoots neutrons away from itself to stabilize, this knocks away electrons and off-balances elements, causing the element to have an unstable balance of electrons to protons and it then it tries to get back to a proper balance, emitting Beta&Gamma radiation in the process.
For example, Cobalt-59 is put into the reactor, neutrons/protons are disrupted and Cobalt-60 is what comes out and used for medical isotopes. It only has a half life of about a week or two so it quickly turns back to non-radioactive cobalt and is highly radioactive. The iron that they built the rod holders with becomes ionized and needs to sit deep in the rod bays for a while to die down before it can be handled safely by the rod crew, using tools on the end of super long poles at the bottom of what looks like an olympic swimming pool. The alpha in a smoke detector does the same things to dust/smoke/etc that's passing between the alpha plates and reads the increase in Beta/Gamma radiation.

Anyhow, alpha radiation works well for a smoke detector because the gasses traveling through the two plates become ionized, emit energy and affect the readings enough to trigger an alarm. The detector works by reading the radiation constantly and if there's Radon (a naturally occurring Alpha radiation gas that is heavy and likes to pool in basements) you could potentially be getting false readings. Pls don't quote me on this though, it's just a guess. We used to have issues with fire alarms etc in the nuclear plant when there were alpha radiation air rises. Either the ionized particles surrounding the Radon gas, or the gas itself, read the same as particles being ionized by the system in the fire alarm.

If you can't get anywhere with the co2 detector maybe try an alpha detector... they aren't cheap though. If you can borrow one or call in a Radon expert it'd probably be cheaper. The "long term radon detectors" are like 30$ and the active radon detectors are like 200$. Alpha radiation, especially radon I find, has a super weak signal and is quite hard to read and must be done slowly to get a proper reading.

This is what i used to look at every day (Cobalt-60 rods emitting light explained by the Cerenkov effect [water slows the radiation energy so fast it makes light, blue for cobalt, green, purple and red for other elements that I forget])

Click to expand...