I bugged and bugged and bugged my parents into getting one a few months ago, and they finally did. Yesterday it went off. It was something with the furnace, and if they hadn’t had a detector or if it didn’t have batteries in it they might not have woken up this morning. (If there is a “known issue” with a kind of furnace, and the “known issue” is “sometimes it blows death”, isn’t that cause for a recall?)
According to Wikipedia, carbon monoxide poisoning is the most common type of fatal poisoning in the US. In many industrialized countries, CO may be the cause of more than half of fatal poisonings.
If you don’t have a detector, get one. If you do have one, check the batteries. If you need it, you won’t see it coming.
I have one, but I always wonder (since it has never gone off) if there is a way to test it? You would think someone would market a little can of compressed CO to test CO detectors.
ETA: hey, Zsofia, your parents are lucky to have you!
Evidently there should be SOME CO around a properly working gas stove, according to Wikipedia - 5 to 15 parts per million. Wonder if that would set it off? Or 7,000 in undiluted car exhaust. That sounds like your best bet.
I had a problem a couple of years ago where I just felt tired all the time. I went to the doc, who wanted to send me for a sleep study. I told the doc if you do a sleep study, you’re going to find that I don’t sleep well, and I haven’t slept well for 40 years. That’s not the problem. There’s something else going on here. The doc told me there’s a set of procedures they have to go through, and sleep study was first on the list. So, not happy about it, I scheduled it anyway.
A few days later, the furnace guys come in for their yearly maintenance, and they tell me that the furnace exhaust vent has a hole in it, and asked if they should fix it. I was like well duh, yeah. Fix it.
Within 24 hours, all of my fatigue problems went away. I called up two days later and canceled the sleep study and told the doc what happened.
A leaky furnace isn’t necessarily a death sentence. Still, I went out that day and bought a CO sensor. It’s electric, so I don’t need to worry about whether or not the batteries are good in it.
Most CO detectors have a test button which you can press to test it.
AFAIK, yes. It’s like a smoke detector, which you should test with a recently snuffed match. But like others have said, there isn’t an easy accessible source of CO.
Interestingly, Wikipedia says “Common modern (2007) battery-powered models have a limited life (of about seven years), and are designed to signal a need to be replaced after that timespan.” Has yours been beeping lately?
ETA - never mind, yours is AC. Nothing about that on Wiki, but I’m leaving this so others notice.
What PPM the detectors detect:
The alarm points on carbon monoxide detectors are not a simple alarm level as in smoke detectors but are a concentration-time function. At lower concentrations (eg 100 parts per million) the detector will not sound an alarm for many tens of minutes. At 400 parts per million (PPM), the alarm will sound within a few minutes.