Derek Cole explains when you need a CO alarm: any home with gas appliances like water heaters, stoves, or gas heat pumps requires one, but all-electric homes don't. Mount alarms low on walls near bedrooms on each floor, not on ceilings, since carbon monoxide sinks.
Hey, on this episode we talk about do I have a heat pump in my house and do I need a CO alarm? You ask your comfort and energy questions and they get answered. This is the Ask Derrick Cole Show. Hey, this is Derrick Cole. Welcome to episode 68 of the Ask Derrick Cole Show, answering our home and energy questions. So with the ice storm, again, we have a lot of questions flooding in Facebook, so we're going to hit those right now. How do I know I have a heat pump? That is a good question, and actually we get that quite a few times. If you have no gas at your house and you have heating and air, then you have a heat pump. Chances are you have a heat pump. Now, in this area we have a lot of mobile homes and they have an AC outside and and inside for heating, they have an electric furnace with the coal on top. Now that is an AC and a furnace, AC and an electric furnace. That's not a heat pump. What we do in those situations is we go back with a heat pump outside and then we turn that electric furnace as the backup heat source and as the blower for the house. So, but if you're in a regular home with no gas, then you probably have a heat pump. And you have backup heat strips as well. So if you're all electricity and that's all you have, chances are you have a heat pump unless you have that older mobile home setup and you have the AC and the furnace inside. In that case, it's all electricity and it's costing you quite a bit of money. So when you go back with a heat pump and with a electric furnace as a backup heat source and not primary heat source, it saves you a lot of money in that situation. But that was a roundabout way to answer that question. Does that make sense? Do I need a CO detector in my house? So this kind of plays into that first question. If you have all electricity in the house, you don't need a carbon monoxide detector because that is for gas appliances. Now, if there is any gas in your house whatsoever, I'm talking gas logs, water heater, stove, even if you have a heat pump outside but you use gas logs as LP gas inside, then you need a CO detector. A carbon monoxide detector is very important because when you deal with gas, you're dealing with an odorless, colorless poison that could be carbon monoxide. So you need to have that detector in your house. So when we change out equipment and we change out to a gas equipment or change out gas equipment, we have to go back with carbon monoxide alarm in the home, and that's required by the state code. We go to a lot of houses that do have a carbon monoxide alarm, but it's that combination fire smoke carbon monoxide alarm that's up on the wall somewhere. That's not doing any good because carbon monoxide is so heavy, it needs to be close to the ground. So the best place to put it is at the wall outlet. Near a bedroom, and if you have a multi-story house, it needs to be on each story of the house to make sure you're covered. It's something very, very important that everybody needs to have if they have any gas in their house whatsoever. So those last about 7 years. They're making ones now that last 10 years, but it should always also include a battery backup because a few weeks ago we had the You know, we had the ice storm and the power went out for some people 24, 36 hours. You still want to have a battery backup even though your equipment can't work because it has no electricity. You still want that alarm to work in case something were to break, something were to happen. And you want it close to a bedroom because you won't— if something happens at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and it's sitting in the kitchen and you can't hear it, it does no good. So you want it in that hallway of a bedroom, or if you have a main bedroom on that side of the house, you want it in that bedroom. Usually in most homes you have kind of a common little space of the hallway where you got 2 or 3 bedrooms around it. That's where you want to put it. That way if that alarm goes out, you're waking up to it and saying, "Hey, something's going on here." Any gas whatsoever, you need an alarm. If you have no gas whatsoever and you're all electricity, you don't need one. And if you do have one, make sure it's in the right spot, which is close to the ground at the outlet. I cannot tell you, it's probably over 5 or 6 people a week that we go to and the carbon monoxide alarm is that combination alarm up at the ceiling, and that is not the right place for that to go. It is It's fine for our smoke and fire alarm, but CO alarm needs to be close to the ground because once it gets to that level and goes off, everybody is obviously dead in the house. I'm not obviously sugarcoating here, but it's very deadly and it's nothing to play with. Any gas appliance, CO alarm. That's it. All right, that's episode 68 of the Ask Derrick Cole Show. Make sure you hashtag #AskDerrickCole on Facebook, Twitter. And Instagram.
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