Carbon monoxide is extra yucky
Posted by John Manzo on December 6, 2007
I’m a little under the weather–hopefully just a little, feelin’ that cloudy head-cold feeling and had a bit of a sort throat yesterday–and given our really, really cold weather over the last days AND all the work I have to get through by the end of the month, I’ve been stuck inside for what seems like days now. I did take a long walk downtown yesterday to check out as much development as I could and had lunch at the beautiful new Good Earth in the NW corner of the now-refurbished Lougheed Building:
And it was not bad, one of the few spots downtown that was not completely clotted with downtown lunch-ers.
But as I say I started to feel a little off on my return home, so here I am, inside all day, and being stuck inside during the winter invariably makes me worry a bit about carbon monoxide poisoning. Part of the issue for us in this old house is that we have an old boiler. Yes, a boiler, not a furnace, and our old cast-iron radiators really do heat the house (and don’t do a terrible job of it). This is what a 84-year-old boiler looks like:
Yep, the doors are for loading coal. Ours has been retrofitted for gas, of course, but aside from that and some patching, it’s the same as it always was. It costs more to heat with it than would a high-efficiency furnace, but not as much as you’d think, especially at a time like this when natural gas is not too expensive.
BUT having this old appliance and having gas in general does make me think about carbon monoxide, especially when an elderly couple died of CO poisoning in their home in Calgary yesterday. The levels were so high that four EMT workers and two police officers were taken to hospital too. Apparently a car was running in the attached garage. Yeah, I don’t get it either. Very scary thing.
So I checked our CO detector–it’s hard-wired, one of the renos we did when we bought this place–and all’s well there. This site from the EPA is clear and helpful. I’d also suggest you not leave cars running in your attached garages but that’s pretty obvious, or so I’d thought.
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