Something happened yesterday that really put a scare into the family. My cousin’s family have all been sick for the past week. Yesterday, both her and her daughter stayed home from work with headaches. Around 10:00 a.m., she called another daughter at work to complain about the carbon monoxide detector’s alarm ringing and making her head hurt even worse. Her speech was slurred and she wasn’t making a lot of sense. The daughter told her to grab the others and leave the house immediately, her response was that she couldn’t because she wasn’t dressed and didn’t know where to find her clothes she also didn’t want to wake up her daughter and grandbaby. She was really out of it.
Her daughter had a coworker call 911 while she stayed on the phone trying to make her mother understand that they had to get out of the house. Her mom’s speech slowed down and then she said she was going to lay down on the couch and dropped the phone.
The ambulance got there very quick and were able to pull them from the house. The levels of carbon monoxide in the house were very high. Had my cousin not have made the phone call to her daughter, they would have been dead within 30 minutes.
If you don’t have a detector in your house, get your ass to Home Depot and buy one. If you do, make sure it is powerful enough to detect levels before they become toxic (my cousin’s detector was a piece of crap).
This has been a public service announcement brought to you by Diane.
Diane, are they all okay now? My own family had a bad scare like this a couple of years ago. My mom came home from work to the sound of the carbon monoxide alarm going off. She immediately searched the house, saw that nobody else was home, and then left the house and called the gas company from a neighbor’s house. The gas company guy who came out told her later that the levels were so high in the house that if anybody had been in the house, they would have been dead. Fortunately, my mom, step-dad and brother were all at work when the heater decided to malfunction. I still shudder when I think of what could have happened, if the heater had malfunctioned in the middle of the night while they were all at home sleeping.
That’s it, I am not firing up the heater, I will just deal with the space heaters in my office and bedroom and screw the rest of the house. You just fed into one of the fears I really have. Oddly enough my main fears are; plane crashes, fire and forced air natural gas heaters.
IIRC, if your natural gas furnace is producing mostly blue flames, it’s venting properly. If the flames are blue/green/yellow, your unit may be leaking carbon monoxide. I don’t have a cite handy; maybe another doper can confirm this. I heard about this on the evening news a couple of years ago.
We have radiant gas heat in the victorian house we now own. I noticed colorful flames when we fired it up for the first time. We had it looked at immediately, and it was emitting unsafe levels of carbon monoxide in our basement. Our carbon monoxide detector didn’t catch it, because it had become clogged with dust from the basement. As soon as I vacuumed out the dust, and hung it back up, it went off.
After the furnace was thoroughly cleaned out, it worked fine. I vacuum out the detector monthly all winter now.
My friend’s father, who worked with HVAC said that while CM is odorless, the furnace would have to be really warm for it to give off carbon monoxide, so you’d notice that.
True?
