This is not an overblown urban legend like you get in emails from your friends. And it didn’t happen to a FOAF. It happened to me last Friday evening.
I was planning to have dinner at my place with my brother, who is currently living with our parents. Right before he was due to come over he called me on the phone and said that the CO detector was going off. This didn’t make any sense because it’s summer so the gas heater isn’t on. The gas stove was also not on and neither it nor the heater have a pilot light. When I arrived it was still beeping but it was acting differently. The instructions said that 4 beeps meant that it had detected CO but three beeps meant that it was malfunctioning and had to be replaced. It had been beeping 4 times but, because there was no obvious source for CO he had decided that it must be malfunctioning and replaced the battery. It was now beeping 3 times as if it were malfunctioning. We (stupidly) decided that it was malfunctioning and needed to be replaced.
We then went to my house and he hung around for several hours after dinner. Eventually my mother, who was visiting my father in the hospital, called and asked if my brother could pick her up and take her home. He left and a little while later, he called and said that the alarm was beeping 4 times again and that they had left the house and called 911.
By the time I got there the block was full of police and fire trucks. A number of houses in the row (they live in a row home) had their windows open with fans in them. According to the fire department, a number of the homes had levels of CO in them. In my parents house it had reached nearly lethal levels. If they, and their neighbors, had slept in those houses that night they may have died in their sleep.
What happened was that some neighbors a few houses down, who had neglected to pay their utility bill, were running their lights off of a generator in their backyard. Because of heavy rain, rather than blowing away, the CO from the generator had seeped into the houses.
I see 2 important lessons here. First, don’t necessarily assume that you don’t need a CO detector simply because you don’t have gas appliances. Problems can occur because of a neighbors carelessness, and careless neighbors are probably not the type who would buy their own detector. Secondly, DON’T TRY TO SECOND GUESS THE DETECTOR. Believe what it’s telling you the first time, even if it makes no sense, and dial 911.
Count me (and my family) as another saved by CO detector. Details too long to type here but ours went off and the fireman who did follow-up monitoring said we would have been dead in less than 2 hrs and would have never woken up (cracked heat exchange).
DO NOT buy the battery operated First Alert kind, they give false alarms and sometimes NO alarms. Buy the ‘plug-in’ kind. This is word-for-word from both the local fire department and gas company.
A friend of mine had CO (carbon monoxide) problems in her condo, and it hospitalized herself and her young adult children. She had no CO detector, and was very lucky that no one died.
Her adult daughter lived with her yet, and her adult son came home from college for winter break. He was home the whole day, while those two worked. He came down with flu-like symptoms (headache, tired, etc.), and she and her daughter were feeling tired and headachy too. Her doctor assured her it wasn’t anything to worry about. Her daughter came home from work and was going to take a nap before dinner, so she laid down in her bedroom and shut the door to block out the noise/light from the rest of the place. Well, they found out later that a vent in her room was where the CO was coming from - I don’t recall the source, a blocked vent somewhere else perhaps, that backed up into the garage? - and her daughter staggered out a while later, said she didn’t feel well, and collapsed. The woman called 911, and the fire department told her to open all of her windows immediately and get a fan going in a doorway or window. When they arrived, some windows weren’t open so they broke the ones that couldn’t be opened, and put a huge fan or two in the place to get the air circulated. Meanwhile all 3 of them were taken to area hospitals and treated for carbon monoxide poisoning. Her son had more severe symptoms initially because he was home all day, but her daughter got really ill because she shut herself in a room with the gas for an hour or so. The natural circulation of the place kept them from getting more severely ill before that point, and they were extremely lucky that it wasn’t worse than that.
I went out and bought a plug-in model of a CO detector within a week. This isn’t something to mess around with.
You have to get a really good quality CO detector. After a big public service campaign promoting CO detectors, the fire department in my home town got so many false alarms that they no longer responded – instead asked questions like “what kind of detector do you have?”
They were getting dozens of calls a week about CO alarms going off.
IIRC, the problem was that, to go along with the PSA campaing, the local hardware companies had stocked up on the cheap, battery-operated ones as mentioned in the above posts. They kept going off for Og knows what reasons! So the FD put together sort of their own blacklist of CO detectors that were going off and wasting their time.
So if you called them to say “my CO detector keeps beeping!!!” they’d ask for the make/model. If it was one of the cheapies on “the List” they’d tell you to have everyone leave the house while you went and bought a really good quality one. If the good one continued to go off, then they’d rush over.
It cut down on false alarms trendously. A few thousand people had bought the cheap crappy ones that were going off all the time.
FWIW, this was one of the cheap, battery powered detectors and it may have saved about a dozen lives. I’m sure as hell glad that the FD didn’t just shrug it off.
Here in Charlotte, just the other day about 20 people were hospitalized when a tenant in an apartment complex started up a gas generator in his storage closet (he neglected to pay his utility bill). He damned near killed them all- it was a good thing they got out when they did.
In high school, my best friend was the daughter of an HVAC repairman. He told us that even though you can’t smell the fumes, it would have to be incredibly hot to start giving them off, and you would notice that. True?
Maybe. But why take chances? Never, ever assume that you’ll be able to tell if something is wrong. CO is incredibly insidious and dangerous precisely because you can’t detect it with your senses. Fire is bloody obvious, and yet we have smoke detectors; so it’s definitely worth getting a CO detector on the off chance of there being a build-up, even if it’s phenomonally unlikely.
Guin, if that were true there wouldn’t be so many deaths.
It was one of the first things we bought after my son was born. Ours plugs in, with a battery backup. I think it was around $40. Pretty cheap for peace of mind.
At the apartments my husband lived in just before we got married, a guy died from CO poisoning. His neighbor had stacked something against a vent or air intake, and, well, disaster.
What would have to be incredibly hot? I’m not even sure what you mean. CO is given off by burning fuel which is, almost by definition, incredibly hot.
In the incident I described we were not even aware of, nor had access to, the source of the gas. There was no way we would have known if it was “incredibly hot”. We didn’t even know that it existed!
If the alarm goes off, don’t play guessing games or try to remember what the father of your best friend in highschool told you. Call 911!
I used to take a former student to church with me. He knew one of the kids from a family in L.A. who had about four people die because the father let the van run in the garage, and the exhaust got sucked into the furnace system and spread through the house while others slept.
Thanks for the info. Can you (or anyone) provide some examples of high quality detectors (and, if possible, point out some brands to avoid)? About how much do they cost?
You might be able to find a consumer guide on-line or even call the general info line for the Fire Department – a lot of FDs have some kind of non-emergency community outreach kind of info lines that help answer those kind of questions, or they have websites that have all sort of great info on what you should look for in smoke and CO detectors.
I don’t remember the actual model of ones that were causing so many headaches in my home town. Our house (at the time) had the smoke detector/CO detector combo unit, so it wasn’t all that relevent to us. IIRC, the problem that plagued our FD was one part cheap gizmo, and one part dumb consumers. The “problem model” drained the batteries really fast (like you’d have to replace them once a month of some similarly ridiculous short time). The gizmo would then beep a “warning, low battery beep”. Right before the batteries died for good, some of them would just go insane with loooong sustained beeps, chirps, whines, blood-curdling screams and would chant “Exterminate! Exterminate!” (well, okay, not that last part.).
Of course, lots of people had rushed out and bought the things. They’d slapped them on the wall, but without ever reading the instructions. So most of the time the calls were due to “warning low battery” beeps. Meanwhile, the gizmos gobbled up batteries so quickly that people were sure it couldn’t possibly be a battery problem (“can’t be, I just changed them three weeks ago!”) and some of the gizmos were just going insane because they were poorly made and had bad sensors.
We had a pay-duty firefighter on set once who said, with a tone of dismay, that after all the efforts of the public service announcements, most of the people who ran out and got the crappy ones probably just disabled the squawking things rather than replace them with something that worked properly.
And Guin the fuel source doesn’t need to be nearby. A friend of mine woke up in a pool over her own vomit once because her neighbour had forgotten that he’d left his car running in his garage. They lived in a duplex and the two garages shared a wall. The CO fumes had seeped into her room. She’d puked in her sleep (luckily didn’t choke on it) and had to be taken to hospital for CO poisoning.
Same thing happened here in Ky. a few years ago. Someone in the house, during cold weather, started a minivan in the closed garage. Fumes killed both parents and their two kids as they were getting dressed to go to church apparently.