I am learning this firsthand unfortunately. Christmas eve an unexplained failure of the natural gas-fired boiler in our house somehow began an acute Carbon Monoxide event that culminated around 6am. We thought it was food poisoning for TWO DAYS while it abated. This made 5 adult family members, my baby and my unborn baby, very very sick -- for days now. We could end up regretting this the rest of our lives. Skipping the ugly and sad personal details, I want to emphasize how important it is to have a properly designed heat and gas appliance system. It seems stupid now, but we did not have a Carbon Monoxide detector in the house despite having a monitored security and smoke detection system. While that is the life or death difference, there is more to consider for indoor health here. I will suggest:
1. First -- make sure you install a CO Detector.
2. If you have natural or propane gas systems and wake up in the night or the morning with a headache or dizziness -- open a window first and ask questions later. Especially if more than one person in the house has symptoms. It sounds so logical now, but when you aren't sure what the affliction is, time is wasting.
All gas appliances are far from equal when it comes to safety, not just efficiency. We had a boiler that used inside house air and exhausted through a chimney, relying on heat stacking just like a fireplace does. Without explaining all the details I'll say that there are several ways this system can fail, and the consequences are huge if it is located in a room of your house. High efficiency units are available that bring outside air in for combustion, and expel clean air directly to the outdoors -- even a failure can't release CO into the house. With today's "tight house" construction techniques and materials there is great risk in relying on traditional indirect ventilation to ensure that a traditional gas appliance burns efficiently. Also, the indoor pollutants these "loose" systems can generate are bad for you even when they are not killing you on Christmas morning.
I wouldn't share this sort of thing on this blog if it was strictly a personal tragedy. It bears on design and construction in Davis. There is no code in our area, and no code enforcement that I know of. That means no inspection of systems by a qualified engineer. I have learned the hard way not to be AT ALL casual about systems involving energy. It is easy to get excited about good location, a good price, good design and energy cost savings, and sometimes a bit boring to consider the technical details of safety. Until you have a tragedy. And then it gets extremely "interesting." My commitment is that we will build extremely safe and well-engineered homes in Davis Riverwalk, per national building code and with well-reviewed systems and installation.
Have a great and safe New Year.
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2 comments:
Sorry to hear about your issue - I hope all are well and you are all good to go. So my question is - if you know - if you had the detector would it have alarmed you to the issue?? We have CO detectors at our place but all of our heat is either gas type fireplace and gas room heaters. We had a issue awhile back and the fire dept came by and we found out a old gas heater was causing the CO problem - we replaced it with something newer and never had another alarm . Let me know what info you have or any sources to check on - Thanks Keith
Keith the answer is 'yes' a CO detector would have let us know for sure. In our case the air handler distributed the problem evenly throughout the house. I had an ADT security system with integrated smoke detectors but no CO detector had been installed in the house. I never paid much attention until now! The Kidde units I now have are plugged into an outlet but have 9v backup, and they measure accurately above 30, and will alarm after hitting 80ish PPM for some period of time. OSHA standards say 50 PPM is acceptable (but of course it isn't healthy).
Some of our new units also detect CH4, which is Natural Gas. CH4 I believe is 40% lighter than air, and is often discharged at the same time as CO when there is a problem. (Propane, on the other hand, is heavier than air.) CH4 is scented by the gas company for safety reasons. It takes 1000's of PPMs of CH4 to be a potential explosion threat.
From what I have learned, CH4 is the less concerning of the two. Gas room heaters are notorious. I highly recommend more than one detector for redundancy, and they must be located where audible and between you and the threat.
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