Carbon monoxide danger: please read!

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Countryside : One Thread

I have recently been to a construction conference on energy efficiency issues and one of the topics they discussed was the following:

A certain monitoring station was getting a huge volume of carbon monoxide alarms and they decided to check it out and see what was up. What they found was that if a house has an attached garage, the process of starting a car in the garage, opening the door, and backing out was putting enough CO into the attached house to set off the alarm. This is a not insignifigant amount of CO. Imagine what happens if you let the car warm up (or cool down, as the case may be)?

It gets worse. These new cars all seem to have these little keychain starters on them. So you can (and are tempted, nay, encouraged, to) start the car long before you leave the house. Got kids? What do they all love when they're small? Buttons and lights. Now, as our speaker said, it is possible for a 3 year old to poison their entire family for only $150. Please consider this when you build on a garage! Put in an exhaust fan and rig it somehow to run when you need it to! Motion detectors, CO detectors, whatever, can be wired to switch on a fan. Put it on the light switch. Don't run your engine, even for a moment, in an attached garage without some ventilation besides the garage door (the air ends up rushing in, not out, of the house.)

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), January 27, 2001

Answers

We park outside, It works great!

-- David C (fleeece@eritter.net), January 28, 2001.

We have an attached garage, it is directly below our bedroom. We keep the car in the garage. We start the car after opening the door and immediately back it out. We have a carbon monoxide detector and it has never gone off. I'm not trying to dispell the danger of carbon monoxide, it can kill. But if one uses common sense, I do not feel attached garages are that dangerous.

-- bwilliams (bjconthefarm@yahoo.com), January 29, 2001.

We do the same thing as bwilliams. Just think a little bit of common sense will avoid this problem. But Soni, you are right to mention this, some people never give it a thought.

-- Colleen (pyramidgreatdanes@erols.com), January 31, 2001.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ