[Request] Do house plants produce a worthwhile amount of oxygen?

Thanks, they don't sound that inconceivable to me. 12000grams isn't that much, only 12kg. So that's 12 bags of sugar worth of plants to compensate for the oxygen used by a human. It's a lot, but if I had to guess I'd have thought it was a lot.

Your post inspired me to try some more googling myself (I'd tried before and hadn't found anything, must've been typing the wrong thing!), and found this, which roughly agrees with your figures:

http://io9.com/5955071/how-many-plants-would-you-need-to-generate-oxygen-for-yourself-in-an-airlock

According to that it'd take 300-500 plants to compensate for the amount of oxygen used by one human.

Expanding that math, say I leave for work about 8am and get back about 6pm, and go out on average 1.5 hours in an evening, that means I'm only in the house for 12.5 hours a day, whereas the plant is there for 24 hours. Call it half, that still means I'd need 150-250 plants to compensate for my own oxygen usage.

That means buying 2 plants (which is all I've got room for in my little house) would only compensate for 0.8 to 1.2% of the oxygen consumed by me. I live on my own at the moment, for a couple or family, especially if some of them are in the house for longer hours (eg school not work), you could easily be talking right down to 0.2%. And this is assuming the article is referring to plant output AVERAGED over 24 hours, it doesn't make it clear, so if their oxygen production drops during the night or day the figures could be much worse.

Taking into account the amount of air that is naturally exchanged with the outdoors (no houses are perfectly sealed!) you probably wouldn't see any measureable difference.

So in summary, yes it's bollocks. Plants do not make a significant contribution to the oxygen levels in your home.

(Apparently they do contribute to removing pollutants, I'm not convinced by that either but that's an entirely different discussion!)

/r/theydidthemath Thread Parent