. I never thought I'd be saying this, but I truly appreciate AI and am frankly astounded by the depth and accuracy of my conversations with it.
I may have mentioned that in my quest to get to the bottom of why I have slightly elevated tVOC readings on my new air quality monitor, I contacted Qingping customer service, who were less than helpful. I would describe what was going in detail and they would reply back with a sentence or two, not really attempting to figure out the why.
So I began conversing with Claude AI. It's been a time-consuming process (most of the past 2 days) but I don't think I would have gotten nearly as far as I have without them because while it's ot yet definitive, there are several things that could be causing it, and I wouldn't have connected those dots. Claude suggested that because of the variation in readings from one room to the next, and also because of variations throughout the day, that I do room by room readings. Each reading takes about 30 minutes.
So yesterday I did every room in the house including my bathrooms and the basement. Surprisingly, VOC readings were lowest in the basement closest to the furnace and higher elsewhere except for my family room, which is not serviced by the oil burning furnace. (It uses electric baseboard.) Big clue. This led "us" (me and AI) to speculate that the higher readings were caused by my furnace, which carries cool air from the basement and redistributes it throughout the house (except family room) and then sucks in air from the main living area to complete the cycle.
It was either that or the possibility that the higher VOC readings could be caused by the many paints, glues, solvents, etc sitting on or near a workbench in the basement since the readings were somewhat higher on the workbench than on the floor next to the furnace.
I also mentioned to AI that I have a roughly 5 x 5" opening at the bottom of the door leading to the basement. It used to be a cat door but the little door broke off so while the door leading to the basement is closed, the little cat door opening is always open. AI first suggested I take a tissue and hold it in front of the cat door opening when the furnace was on to see if the air was being pulled into the basement. It was. AI then suggested I close that up, which I did with a styrofoam sheet I happened to have from some packaging.
The next thing "we" were going to do was have me move all the paints, etc to the garage to see if that improved the readings. But before doing that, I suggested just turning my heat off and doing more readings, and AI agreed that would be a good idea. So as instructed, I'm giving the house about an hour and then will do more readings in my main living area, the basement workbench and in front of a floor return air register.
Along the way, Claude was asking many relevant questions, like when was the last time you had the furnace serviced, do you have a humidifier attached to the furnace, when was the last time you changed the filter and many other things. I also told him/it about the paneling I had done on most of my first floor. It's not wood and I know it outgasses, mostly in the 1st year, though I'd read that once it's painted, it outgasses less. It was done in 2022.
I hope we get to the bottom of it. Certainly, I would never have guessed that paints in the basement could be contributing to the VOC problem. If the next readings with the heat turned off are lower than those taken with the heat turned on, that will confirm it's not the furnace and more likely all those paints, etc.
I am really eager to rule certain things out.
Update: Got my latest readings and they are a little confounding.
Here are the key conclusions since AI offered to summarize:
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Now Claude has suggested doing 3 more readings first thing tomorrow morning before anything else becus it's possible any chemical outgassing in the basement has not completely cleared out yet.
I'm getting a little fatigued with all the readings and haven't gotten much else done but hopefully we're close to some sort of conclusions.
March 24th, 2026 at 11:04 pm 1774393488
First and foremost, if anyone wants to try any AI models, I too recommend Claude. If nothing else, I personally believe it is the most ethical of them all. However, if anyone has even an Android phone, Gemini (or Gemma as some would affectionately call the model) are also available, and should be free to try. Likewise, I believe a Gemini might also just be available via Google search.... For better and for worse, companies are certainly trying very hard to get on the AI train.
I have also enjoyed tinkering with it, mostly asking harmless questions that are not going to incite the rise of the Robot Apocalypse, turning us humans into batteries to power their new sentient war machines. Questions like, "Hey recommend me a new crockpot or instant pot recipe for beef and cabbage."
By the way, are you paying for a subscription, or are you somehow downloading and running it locally? Just curious.
March 24th, 2026 at 11:07 pm 1774393669
https://suno.com/s/UI6XvzK9X0IyOH3K
March 24th, 2026 at 11:21 pm 1774394506
I thought it was free but discovered they limit the number of questions you can ask in a given time period. It told me at one point yesterday that I could not post again til 1 pm (which conveniently was about 15 minutes away). I don't really want a subscription since ordinarily I wouldn't be asking so many questions.
I liked Midnight Serenade...very different from the other links you posted! Wait, what? What do you mean you generated it?
March 25th, 2026 at 02:49 am 1774406983
Suno.com is a website that specializes in AI-generated music. It can create the tune for you, add lyrics, and even sing the song if you tell it to. The results are based on just inputting a few specific tags from the user, and Suno does the rest. It's one of the more benign uses of AI, though as you can imagine, the AI voice technology is getting good enough to start faking the voices of celebrities and politicians to say things they have never said before. Dangers of the technology aside, Suno will let you create a couple of trial tunes for free, but the rest will cost a subscription beyond that as well. AI tunes are a promising trend for content creators who want background music in their videos, but don't want to go the usual human routes, such as Epidemic Sounds.