Fresh Air Headboard

Running out of fresh air when sleeping? My wife and I felt like we were, and here is how we solved the problem.

Note that there are some medical reasons why you might feel like running out of air when sleeping, you should probably consider them first before attempting to create a ventilated headboard.

Our house has a mechanical ventilation system, so the first thing I checked was that the air supply in the room was up to our needs. Yes, it was, about 15 liters / second. The second thing I tried was building a roof vent that allowed directing the air straight to our sleeping faces. If one would only consider the amount of air we had around our heads, it was a clear improvement, but it resulted in a dry nose, dry lips and dry eyes every morning. Not working: The air was just blowing in our faces way too fast.

I researched that the type of ventilation houses normally use is mixing ventilation: The vents try to mix the fresh air with the bad air, and on average you get ok air in the room. But you never get to breathe the really fresh air that is coming in. And since we're a couple and sleeping close to each other every night for several hours, we both suffered from CO2 levels rising in the middle of the night. Basically, we couldn't sleep comfortably facing each other for more than a few minutes, so the mixing ventilation clearly wasn't cutting it.

Another type of ventilation system is laminar air flow, air comes out evenly from every part of the floor or wall, and goes out the other side. This results in the good air not mixing as much with the bad air, and the air quality is better. It's normally used in operating rooms, spray shops, all the places where you can get really nasty pollutants in the room. Since we're just sleeping in one place all night, we didn't really need to convert a whole wall into a vent. We figured the bed headboard just might be the perfect place instead. By venting the air from a larger area, the flow (or windy feeling) of the air is slowed down considerably. That means we can be provided with a nice amount of pleasantly delivered air while sleeping, rather than having the narrow, windy air flow of my first fix turning us into dry mummies during the night.

• About 30mm thick wood for the frame (I used clean left over pieces from previous projects)
• OSB, plywood or similar (also left over material) for the back and the front of the headboard
• Padding for softening the headboard: You can select the thickness according to your preference (left-overs used here again)
• Fabric for the cover. NOTE: It's important that the fabric doesn't block the air flow. You can test this by blowing through it. The fabric turned out to be a slightly harder material for us to locate. After checking through a couple of different stores, we found a duvet cover, which was not only the color we were aiming for, but also sparse enough to let the air through nicely.

Figure out the dimensions for your headboard. We used the width of our bed and since we wanted to place the bed under our bedroom window, we designed the measurements of the headboard accordingly.

When you've cut our the correct pieces, screw the frame together.

Attach the back. To minimize air leaks, you might want to use glue in addition to screws to attach the back to the frame, since the back side of your headboard probably doesn't need ventilation. Plus it means there's more air left for the sleeper(s).

Since our headboard unfortunately couldn't magically produce air on its own, we also had to make some adjustments to the ventilation ducts of our bedroom: After some adjustments, the air duct now provides us with an air inlet under the bed. The air duct attaches onto the lowest part of our bed frame, which is built to provide as smooth and wide a curve as possible for the air to flow through and reach its destination.

For best results, the channel needs to have smooth edges that direct the air where we want, because with sharp angles or rough materials in the channel, the air will just bounce around and lose too much speed along the way.

Our house has both ducts for air in and out, but this of course is not always the case. In case your house only has a powered exhaust fan, with free flowing air inlets on the outer walls, you could direct the air from one of those inlets straight into your headboard. (Update: we now recommend that the headboard sucks air out, instead of blowing air in)

I added small "fins" inside the headboard to direct the incoming air evenly all around the bed frame. I tested the layout of the small wood pieces first with blu tack, each time positioning the fins and adding the cover and air supply, then testing how much air was coming out from different areas of the headboard.

Without the fins the air would mainly come out of the middle of the headboard.

I screwed on some leftover MDF laminate to cover the front of the frame, and routed it (=cut around the edges to remove the excess parts) to fit the frame.

If you have clean left over material waiting at home, this might be a good opportunity to choose ecologically and upcycle it for your headboard. Just make sure it's something that's safe for keeping right next to your head all night, so it might not be the best place for pressure treated wood, or anything that smells funny. 😀

Unless you're using a material that already has holes all over, you'll need to cut out holes on the front of the headboard for the air to pass through. I created a template using a drill bit, and using the template, routed holes into the covering material. The holes need to be placed where you want the air to come out, that is, above the bed.

Add a connector for the air supply. I added some extra wood (the white painted part) to create a smoother way for the air. Tight bends mean more noise and less air, so we want bigger curves in the ducts.

For the padding I used some clean flooring foam I had lying around, you can make it thicker if you like a well padded headboard. Unless your padding is very thin and sparse, you'll need to add some holes to the padding to let the air through. I made my holes with a utility knife.

I didn't want to screw the headboard to the wall, so I added a pair of legs, then attached the air inlet.

A few commenters asked about where the fresh air is coming from. In Finland, we usually have ducts that pipe in fresh air from the outside to the bedrooms, and ducts that suck out old air from bathrooms, kitchens, and so on. The fans for both ducts are in a device called "air supply unit", and the unit also has a heat exchanger that transfers heat from the outgoing warm air to the incoming cold air. In our bedroom we happen to have a fresh air duct inside a built-in wardrobe (it goes downstairs from here), so all I did was splice into that duct, and route it under our bed. I've yet to camouflage the half a meter of duct that's visible between the wardrobe and the bed.

If you want to tweak things up as nicely as you can, this step might also be useful.

The laminar air flow ventilation that I talked about in the introduction works best if the air has a clear way to exit on the wall opposite the inlet. I added a vent on the wall opposite our bed, near the ceiling (CO2 rises up slightly). This is not strictly necessary if your bed is opposite a door where the air exits your bedroom.

Measuring with a portable CO2 detector, the sensor shows clearly improved CO2 readings near the sleeper. Measurements show that the headboard gives about the same 15 liters of air that the room got before, but the air feels much fresher, especially near the bed. And with no more dry eyes or mouths like we had with my first quick fix.

Best of all: This has had a positive effect on our quality of sleep, and made it possible again for us to sleep facing each other - once in a while I might even open my eyes in between dreams, and take a happy peek at my love, sleeping and breathing cozily right next to me. 💖

And as a bonus, if you happen to let out some "air" yourself, you or your partner never have to suffer the consequences! 😀

We've been using the headboard for about two years now. It has worked fine, but the incoming air during winter months may be a bit cold, it certainly feels so when it comes in next to our heads. As for making it easier to breathe, it worked very well, but the overall CO2 amount of the room didn't change much according to my readings. So we took the next step: the headboard is now sucking bad air out of the room, instead of blowing clean air in. This seems to work much better, it can no longer blow cold air to our heads during winter, and it sucks away the polluted air directly from the source: our sleeping heads. This has resulted in the CO2 levels of the room being much better, so I can fully recommend the change.