On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 11:48:18AM -0500, Michael Lupynec wrote:
> >>>.If you should decide on a kerosene
> > or combustion type heater, please make sure that you vent it
> correctly.
> > Carbon Monoxide (CO) can kill quickly.>>>>>
>
> For carbon monoxide you need 2 things. Incomplete combustion and a
> method for spreading the products of incomplete combustion. With
> UL approved portable combustion type heaters speading is of course
> automatic but incomplete combustion can only occur with a
> defective unit and or with wrong useage/placement resulting in
> oxygen starvation to the flame.
>
> It's economically counter productive to be ventilating warm air to
> the cold outside. Instead buy a carbon monoxide detector. The plug
> in types are best. The cheapest models have the same tin dioxide
> semi-conductor sensors (which last many years) as the models with
> all the bells and whistles like LED readout. For my money I would
> buy two cheaper models for the price of one deluxe. Unlike a smoke
> detector, when one of these CO babies goes off, since you can't
> see or smell CO, so it helps to have a backup to confirm. This is
> really important inside the house when you get an alarm at 3 AM.
I had a First Alert detector upstairs in our house. It went off one
night. I first called my neighbor, a deputy fire marshall. He told
me those were junk and to ignore it. My wife was still nervous, so we
called the gas company. They cameout and sniffed everything. False
alarm.
I went back and talked to my neighbor. He told me the digital
readouts were better, as the First Alerts' counters don't reset.
I think I replaced the battery insert on the First Alert and
after a month or two, had another false alarm, including the gas
company coming out again. Good thing house calls are free. I got a
digital one (seems it has a bird name as a company, I forget) and
have had no problems since. That's 2 plus years.
>
> 10 years ago the natural gas lobby did everything to kill the Co
> detector business. It was a learning curve and they have since
> come around, but back then the First Alert battery operated, short
> sensor life, highly sensitive detector was causing many
> accusations of false alarms (7000 in two nite in Chicago in Dec
> 23,1994).
Ah ha.
--
"It's a real downer."
--The Alabama state textbook committee, trying to explain why they
recommended that the "The Diary of Anne Frank" be banned from the
state's public school libraries, 1983.
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