More Carbon Monoxide!

Thursday night is when the CO detectors went off after we had both taken showers. Friday morning Vince went and bought three new detectors that have numerical readouts that give you the “number” for the CO in PPM I think.

Friday night, we both took showers. Everything was fine. We thought our issue was solved – bad CO detectors replaced.

This afternoon after working in the garden, I was exhausted. I told Vince I was going to take a shower and take a nap. I took a nice, long shower; washed my hair . . got out and went to the bedroom. It smelled funny in there, though I know CO is odorless. I went into the closet to look at the CO detector. It’s been saying zero but, now it said 110 but the alarm wasn’t sounding yet. I went to get Vince and by the time he got from the living room into the water heater closet, the number was about 420 and the alarm was going off.

Vince opened the window in the closet, put a fan outside the window to suck the air out and closed the door from the closet to keep the bad air in there as best we could.

The CO2 in the hallway by the other two bedrooms never read anything but zero so we know that area stays safe, even with a number above 400 near the water heater. Don’t worry about us – we’ll sleep in the other end of the house and I’ll keep the windows open til we can get a plumber out here.

I sent a message to a plumber asking him to contact us next week. We need our toilet seals changed anyway.

We went outside and looked up at the vent pipe. It has a cap on it and a screen around it so I don’t think a bird built a nest in it. Vince was looking at the water heater and the newer water heaters have a plastic meshy screen around the bottom to catch the dust and we never knew that was there so, after 5 or 6 years, it was pretty dusty. Vince took it off, took it outside and washed it and will put it back on, then when he takes his shower tonight, we’ll see what happens. He talked to a friend and he suggested looking to see if that screen was dirty. He said sometimes if it gets dirty, there’s not enough air flow to result in complete combustion and that results in CO so . . we’ll see what happens. I think the “funny” smell I noticed might have been dust . . like when you turn your furnace on for the first time each winter.

Maybe we’ve solved our problem . . maybe not. We’ll have a plumber look at it but probably not before Tuesday at the earliest. Carbon monoxide is not something to play around with or hope you have it fixed. We’ll leave that to the experts. I’m pretty sure that water heater needs to be changed out anyway but, he can make that decision.