Derek Cole explains when you need a carbon monoxide detector: if your home has any gas appliances like a water heater or stove. CO is odorless and colorless, so detection is critical. Mount detectors low, near the floor at a wall outlet, not on the ceiling. They last about 7 years and need battery backup.
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. The best place to put it is at the wall outlet near a bedroom. 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 just because it has no electricity, you still want that alarm to work in case something were to break and something were to happen. And you want it close to a bedroom because you want— 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 are waking up to it and saying, "Hey, something's going on here." So 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. Obviously sugarcoating here, but it's very deadly and it's nothing to play with. So any gas appliance, CO alarm.
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