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Safety & CO

Carbon monoxide, alarms, ventilation math and the failure modes that turn a working heater into a hazard.

This is the section everything else on the site depends on. Carbon monoxide is produced whenever a carbon-based fuel burns without enough oxygen, it is colourless, odourless and tasteless, and it binds to haemoglobin roughly 200 to 250 times more strongly than oxygen does. Its early symptoms — headache, nausea, dizziness, confusion — read as flu, and the confusion arrives before the alarm does.

Two facts here surprise most readers. The first is that a fully compliant CO alarm is deliberately slow: under UL 2034 it must not sound below 30 ppm within 30 days, and may take up to four hours at 70 ppm. That is by design, to avoid nuisance alarms, and it means silence is not evidence of clean air. The second is that the most dangerous objects are not heaters at all — charcoal, generators and camping stoves brought indoors during a power cut cause a predictable cluster of deaths after every major storm.

If you read one thing before lighting anything indoors, read the guides in this section.

What goes wrong most often

  • Mounting a CO alarm at ceiling height, in a corner, or only in the hallway.
  • Assuming an alarm that has never sounded means the air has always been clean.
  • Bringing a charcoal grill, generator or camping stove indoors during an outage.
  • Ventilating and re-entering a building after an alarm instead of staying outside.
  • Keeping an alarm past its printed end-of-life date — the sensor ages whether or not it is used.

2 guides in Safety & CO