There is a closely parallel discussion on another list about
garage planning. The question of health/death vs exhausting
kerosene etc heaters came up. Here is my short epistle on carbon
monoxide,
For carbon monoxide you need 2 things. Incomplete combustion and a
method for spreading the products of incomplete combustion. With
UL approved portable combustion type heaters spreading is of
course
automatic, but incomplete combustion can only occur with a
defective unit and or with wrong useage/placement resulting in
oxygen starvation to the flame.
It's economically counter productive to be ventilating warm air to
the cold outside. Instead buy a carbon monoxide detector. The plug
in types are best. The cheapest models have the same tin dioxide
semi-conductor sensors (which last many years) as the models with
all the bells and whistles like LED readout. For my money I would
buy two cheaper models for the price of one deluxe. Unlike a smoke
detector, when one of these CO babies goes off, since you can't
see or smell CO, it helps to have a backup unit to confirm. This
is
really important inside your home when you get an alarm at 3 AM,
because the instructions say call the emerg service and or
evacuate
your family into the cold nite.
The best killer in 5 minutes example - using a charcoal BBQ to
heat a garage - even with the garage door open (to BBQ out of the
rain)
it's still bad - charcoal briquettes are by definition
incomplete combustion. Starting up and warming a car in an
attached garage, depending on sealing, may set off the CO
detectors inside the house. Even had a girl sunbathing in the
transom area of a stinkpot where the motor exhaust formed a
permanent swirling pattern over her while the stinkpot was at
cruise speed - she died while everybody on board thought she was
sleeping.
And smoking puts CO into your blood to about 60% of the levels
that give you initial symptoms.
100 parts per million (ppm) over hours will give you a headache
etc. 500 ppm within hours will kill you. If you are awake you will
notice the symptoms, if you are asleep you will not.
10 years ago the natural gas lobby did everything to kill the CO
detector business. It was a learning curve and they have since
come around, but back then the First Alert, battery operated,
short
sensor life, highly sensitive detector was causing many
accusations of false alarms (7000 in two nites in Chicago in Dec
23,1994).
My two favorite remaining beefs -
1) Natural gas simulated firelog devices are (or were in the past)
adjusted to produce a yellow flame. A yellow gas flame is yellow
because it is incomplete combustion. Everything is OK as long as
the combustion products go up the chimney and not into your home.
2) I see natural gas furnaces in older homes vented to a brick
chimney without a liner. The combustion products condense on the
way up and the acid condensate eats the mortar joints, allowing
gases to escape and possibly enter the old home. Everything is OK
as long as the gas flame is not also oxygen starved. The reason
there aren't an epidemic of deaths is that older homes are
generally leaky and take in a good amount of outside air diluting
the effect. Newer 'tight' homes are susceptible to
accumulating and holding longer higher concentration levels
(ppms).
People with continuous flu like symptoms have occasionally been
diagnosed with chronic low level CO poisoning
- the give away was they always felt a little better at work
towards the end of the work day.
Mike L
60A,67E,59Bug
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