Protect Your Home from Carbon Monoxide: The Importance of CO Alarms

If we find it in the home, we shut the gas off to it completely because you can't keep that running. I mean, when you have a cracked heat exchanger, you're having now the carbon monoxide possibly going into the home. So anytime you have a gas-fired appliance—dryer, stove, furnace, gas pack—you need to make sure you have a carbon monoxide detector in the home. It's odorless, you're not going to smell it, it's going to creep up on you and by the time you get headaches, it's probably way too late. You're going to have some problems there. So make sure you have a carbon monoxide alarm and this question was not about carbon monoxide alarms but while I'm on the subject, I will tell you the fire and smoke alarms with the carbon monoxide that's in the ceiling, that's not going to help you out any. You need a CO alarm that is at the receptacle floor level, and it's also recommended to put it close to a bedroom. Therefore, if it goes off during the night, you can hear it. So I would put one at each level of the house and in the middle of the hall at the bedrooms, low to the ground because again, it's a gas, it's going to be low to the ground. By the time it gets way up here, I mean, we're already having problems, so that's going to be too late. So get a CO alarm that is at the ground, plug it in at the bedrooms. That way you can hear if it goes off. Possible causes for cracks in the heat exchanger? So causes for cracks, lack of maintenance as well as just gas makeup, depending on what kind of products in the home and if it's LP or natural gas. And depending on how it was installed, all this is gonna really play into what happens with the heat exchanger down the road. But those little tips I gave you are good advice. 7 years is the lifespan on the CO alarm, but 7 years is the lifetime on that alarm. It can't normally come to your house and then leave a safety hazard in place and just walk away. So you want to make sure you're safe, your family's safe, So CO, carbon monoxide, is nothing to play with. So a cracked heat exchanger is a problem. Really, that's the biggest problem we've seen out in the field is having the alarms that are on the top of the ceiling or on the wall, and really it's not doing you any good because by the time it reaches, it can read that level, and the issues are that people in the house are not living anymore. I mean, if you read up on CO, it's very, very deadly, and it can sneak up on you.