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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Shoot1st who wrote (2853)	10/18/2002 10:59:48 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Respond to of 7689

Thanks Shootie. With the home heating season now upon us, I wanted to take a moment to alert everyone to the dangers of CO poisoning. I urge everyone to read through what Shootie has posted. In addition, please do the following: 1. Have your furnace checked at least annually by a reputable service firm. We just had ours checked and it is starting to develop some rust, which suggests some improper operation. We are just going to replace it rather than mess around with it. 2. Have other appliances checked regularly too. This includes the air conditioner and the hot water heater definitely, and perhaps others too depending on how your house is laid out. 3. Don't buy into the "save money by hermetically sealing your house in the winter" advice. Sure, it will save you a dollar or three in fuel costs. But it will also trap in low level amounts of CO (which are a lot more common than you think). My advice is, ventilate the house by opening the windows periodically in the winter. What we do is crack open a window here and there for an hour or so every few days, and during a "January thaw" sort of day when it is sunny and maybe 45 to 50 degrees with a breeze, we open all of our windows, all the way, and let that breeze waft through the house for a couple of hours. Does it make our furnace run a little more often? Sure. But it doesn't make our heating bill dramatically higher, and it clears the air of potential CO buildup as well as all sorts of other stuff that builds up in the air when your house is sealed from outside air circulation. 4. Install CO monitors throughout the house and garage. Shootie and I have talked about this by PM, and he recommends the older ones (the ones that the WSJ article referenced as frustrating to consumers because they went off so often). The new ones are better than nothing. As I understand it, the difference is that the older models (which are no longer available new as far as I know) were ultrasensitive to low levels of CO. The problem is that even low levels of CO over time can cause problems. The newer models "tolerate" lower levels of CO but are designed to go off when the level grows to a more imminently dangerous level. This is fine for sudden introduction of CO to the home environment, but still leaves you open to the slow buildup of low levels, which are also unsafe. (That's one reason to ventilate the house periodically even if you have CO detectors.) 5. If your furnace is rusty or really old, think twice about squeezing a couple of extra years out of it. And unless you are really, really knowledgeable about home issues, don't be your own furnace maintenance person. Hire it done by someone who knows what they are doing. Ask questions when they are there (is it properly ventilated? what should I be watching for?). 6. If you are chronically ill or run down and there is no apparent explanation for it, have the air in your house checked. My House has taken all of these precautions. Please make sure yours does as well. And thanks to Mr. Shootie for raising awareness regarding this issue throughout the SI community. FACT: In the past decade there have been an estimated 400,000 emergency room visits due to CO poisoning, and an estimated 4,500 deaths due to unintentional CO poisoning. This is more deaths and far more ER visits than the U.S. has suffered due to terrorism, yet the average person has no idea this is going on. Tell a friend. Thanks.