You Almost Lost Me Last Night
Friday, November 3rd, 2006Although this post is a little dramatic, I mean it when I say you almost lost me last night - as in, my whole family and could have easily died.
Our whole house was filled with carbon monoxide at 2:00am.
Thankfully I was actually up and working on a deadline and didn’t sleep through the CO2 alarms going off - which we stupidly only had installed in the furthest-from-our-bedroom basement corner of our home.
PLEASE ensure you have CO Detectors (an affiliate link - but I would feel better if you got them now at a local store) installed and working in your homes today. According to our (wonderful!) local fire department:
If you start showing signs of Carbon Monoxide poisoning while you are sleeping, you can be guaranteed you won’t wake up.
The most important place to put a CO2 detector is near your bedrooms. We had dangerously high levels on the top floor of the house, but our CO2 detector that I placed on the middle floor never went off (because I didn’t trust the first reading from an older detector in the basement :: dumb).
Signs of Carbon Monoxide poisoning include nausea, headaches, vomiting and flu-like symptoms. The key difference between the flu and CO2 poisoning is that the whole family will come down with it at once - whereas the flu knocks over family members one at a time.
If your CO2 detectors go off, call 911 right away (though I have in the past turned them off and they didn’t go on again - I’m thinking that wasn’t the smartest move now…)
Here’s a link to the full Wikipedia article on Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
Please be safe and keep your families safe too. I was lazy and had 2 CO2 detectors sitting in the store bag for months. I assure you today they are working and in their proper places.
Do the same and make sure you have a CO2 detector for every level of your house. And SPREAD the word - having these detectors in your home is now a law in most states, anyway!
~
*Edit* For those of you who are curious, I am still sitting in a very cold house as I wait on the second professional to come out to our house and figure out what the problem is. The gas co. and fire department seemed pretty confident there was something blocking the flue. The hvac guy I just had out here wasn’t able to find anything in the flue, nor able to figure out a furnace problem without charging us a lot of $$. I’m now waiting for a chimney sweep to come out and check the flue more thoroughly…
The wonderful chimney sweeping company found two dead squirrels in the flue - we are all clean and finally safely warming up!
I am so happy and grateful, not much can bother me today