A short episode of the Derek Cole Podcast (ep. 260) about carbon monoxide (CO) safety and furnace hazards. Host Derek Cole introduces the show; a guest explains that homes with any gas appliances should have CO detectors placed low on walls near floor-level and on every living level/near sleeping areas, and warns that a cracked furnace heat exchanger can allow CO into living spaces—technicians will shut off units with cracked exchangers for safety. The episode closes with the host's sign-off and listener engagement requests.
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Foreign. Hey, this is Derek Cole and welcome to the Derek Cole Podcast. This podcast is all about home comfort and energy savings. The majority is really comprised of short audio clips of a device and answers to questions that we've been asked over the years. We also kind of sprinkle in the Ask Derek Cole show audio, which is a much longer Q and A kind of program. If you like this episode, and I hope you do, I would love for you to share it on social with others. Just take a screenshot of the program and hashtag it Derek Cole so I can see you. But let's get in to today's episode.
If you have a gas appliance in the home at all, stove, furnace, anything in the home running off of gas, you should have a carbon monoxide detector in the home. So the best thing to do is put it on floor level with the outlets on the floor on the wall. That is where it needs to go. If it's up up there, high in the ceiling, on top of the wall, it's good for a smoke alarm, but it's not good for a CO alarm. So if you don't have one, you need one. It's recommended you have one in all living spaces. If you have multiple levels to the house, you have one on each level. Even if you have a single story house but multi, or you have a bedroom on one side, bedrooms on the other side, then you should have one on that side and this side, basically. So it can go off. If you have any kind of carbon dioxide which is odorless, you can't smell it, you can't feel it, you can't sense it. So the alarm sets it off. And most cases, people get in trouble because it's usually at nighttime when they're asleep, when it starts to bother them, it's something you can't feel going on. So you need that alarm in the living space or in the sleeping space to alarm you when that hazard there. And as soon as you have a CO alarm go off, you need to have it checked out. And if you have the biggest thing with a gas furnace is when you have a cracked heat exchanger. When you have a cracked heat exchanger, that co, it's possible that CO can now come into the home, come into the living space. And that is very, very dangerous. So whenever we see a cracked heat exchanger, we turn it off for that reason. It's a safety hazard. Not saying it's 100% chance they're going to come in, but you don't even want the possibility of it coming in, so we're going to shut it off and kill it so it doesn't affect you and your family.
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