It’s a silent killer: Carbon Monoxide kills over 500 people each year across North America, and this number could be widely underestimated. Current research indicates that the number of deaths could be well over 2000.

It’s always a tragedy when a family is struck down by something that is preventable. There are many accounts in the news of individuals or entire families admitted to the hospital for Carbon Monoxide (CO) poisoning. Luckily, in almost 40,000 of these cases each year, they escaped with their lives.

Why does Carbon Monoxide strike some homes and not others?

One common cause is improper venting. As cited in a case that occurred in an Idaho apartment complex, a poorly vented water heater resulted in the leaking of CO throughout the building. Unlike gas, CO doesn’t smell and your body can absorb it more quickly than even that of oxygen. Headaches or nausea can indicate CO poisoning, but by the time you start showing symptoms you have already become exposed to and absorbed a massive amount of CO.

Preventing CO leaks is easy if you practice common sense. Hire a professional and get them to check your furnace and water heater for leaks. It’s best to perform these checks on an annual basis to ensure that you have a sound system.

Carbon Monoxide leaks are not commonplace, yet you should keep in mind that parts of your furnace can develop fine cracks over time. As well, the flue pipes that are responsible for emitting CO exhaust outside of your home can become corroded over time. Have a service professional check for these issues, and ask them to examine the flue pipes in case they have become disconnected.

Purchasing a CO detector can save your life.

A family in California recently had their air ducts cleaned out, and the company they hired did a poor job of reconnecting the flue to the furnace. The result was a deadly seepage of Carbon Monoxide. If they wouldn’t have had the alarm in place, the family surely would not have woke up in the morning. The elevation of CO in the home was 118 parts per million, which is 3 times greater than the 35 parts per million level that indicates to fire fighters that they need to wear a mask. Purchasing more than one Carbon Monoxide detector is vital, especially in a large home. Another preventive step is to only hire companies to service your furnace that is licensed to work on such an appliance. As this family discovered, a duct cleaning company is not knowledgeable enough to work on a furnace.

There are many companies who will try to get your business by advertising that they are able to perform jobs they are not skilled or licensed to do. Always be sure that a permit, especially something such as the installation of your heating system, is provided for major work. Contractors such as this can walk away with a slap on the wrist, but you could lose your life.

Backdrafting is the result of air that is exhausted from our homes through kitchen, dryer, or bathroom vents. Backdrafting occurs when the exhaust may depressurize within your home. When mixed with wind, the pressure differential can overwhelm your ventilation, reversing the flow of exhaust back into your home. The result of this situation? CO poisoning can make its way into your home. As homes have grown tighter and tighter in construction, the problem of backdrafting has become worse. The only prevention for this problem is a properly installed high efficiency furnace and water heater, that both feature powerful ventilation systems.

Unfortunately there are certain circumstances where CO poisoning is the consumer’s fault.

Leaving your car running in your garage is foolish and extremely dangerous, resulting in CO to leak into your home and sending many a person to the hospital. Burning a gas light stove or wood burning fire place inside your home can also generate CO. Generators should not be run within a home either. Your best protection is becoming educated about the dangers of Carbon Monoxide, getting some detectors for your home, and always replacing the batteries on a bi-yearly basis.

Vaporous apparitions, disembodies voices and sounds, and a general feeling of dread in certain areas of your home. These are the classic signs of a haunted house – or a carbon monoxide leak. Carbon monoxide poisoning can lead to all of the phenomenon that are commonly believed to be signs of a haunting. However, people become convinced that they are being visited by long dead relatives or the previous occupants of a home and it never occurs to them that what they are experiencing is often the sign that they have been inhaling a toxic and odorless gas called carbon monoxide.

So,if you believe your home is being invaded by visitors from the netherworld, you could be right. However, in the interest of safety, you should have your home checked out by a qualified plumber. They have the ability to do a carbon monoxide test your home for deadly carbon monoxide leaks and find the source. Calling a plumber can prevent you from becoming a ghost yourself.

Have you ever watched a movie about a haunted house and found the situation to be strangely familiar? If you’ve ever felt that your home has become the domain of something from the other side, you might want to call a plumber before consulting with your local exorcist. Inhalation of carbon monoxide has been linked to many of the phenomena that are typically attributed to ghostly activity, including hallucinations and feelings of dread, because it is odorless and people can’t detect it. And while ghosts can be scary and make you feel unwelcome in your own home, a carbon monoxide leak can be far more dangerous.

Now, I’m not saying that ghosts don’t exist. If you believe that your home is being shared with spirits from beyond, you could right. However, Ockham’s razor says that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. So, in the interest of health and safety, it’s a wise decision to cover all of your bases. If no carbon monoxide leak is detected, you may want to explore other avenues.

It’s late at night. You know you’re supposed to be alone in your house, but you hear something that you can’t quite explain coming from another room. You get up to investigate. As you approach the source of the unknown sounds, you begin to feel fearful and nervous. After failing to find any identifiable source of the sounds, you head back to bed. On your way, you see something. It looks like a person except for the fact that you can see right through them. The vaporous form hovers for a few seconds before disappearing through a wall. You are now convinced that your house is haunted. However, it’s more likely that there is a carbon monoxide leak somewhere in your home.

Carbon monoxide poisoning has been linked to many of the classic signs of a haunting, including the visual and auditory hallucinations and unexplained feelings of dread. And while you may be experiencing a genuine haunting, it is still a good idea to rule out the possibility that you are suffering from the effects of breathing in odorless noxious fumes for an extended period of time. Carbon monoxide testing could be the solution. Call a plumber to have your home checked before breaking out the Ouija board. It might save your life.

“Silent but deadly” might have the schoolyard toppled over with giggles, but when it comes to carbon monoxide poisoning, it´s no laughing matter. Every year the colorless, odorless gas brings with it tragic stories of people being killed such as an elderly Calgary couple that died in December 2007 and sent nine others to hospital. A car left running in the garage was said to be the culprit in this case, yet other malfunctioning or aging furnaces and gas-heaters have played a role in other tragic cases.

Last year the fire department was involved in more than 1,000 carbon monoxide investigations and Jeff Budai, public information officer said that “.. one fatality is too many” because a little preventive maintenance and common sense can keep families safe.

Bringing awareness to the dangers of carbon monoxide can decrease the amount of incidences. Although some cases are sudden tragic ones, others are a gradual process because symptoms often are mistaken for the flu or common cold. Symptoms such as headache, mild nausea, fatigue and aches and pains are common with both flu and carbon monoxide poisoning. As levels of CO increase in your blood, you become disorientated and lapse into unconsciousness. A clue to CO poisoning is if these flu like symptoms are common in more than one family member.

Furnaces are the biggest culprits for CO poisoning. A small crack or unchanged filter can add stress to the furnace and could put your family in immediate danger. The best defense is combined regular maintenance and inspection of appliances and furnaces with properly placed CO detectors.

Do you ever get the idea that you´re not alone in your home? Do you ever see or hear things that you shouldn´t? Do you have any reason to believe that your home has a visitor from beyond the grave? Before you call your local ghost hunters or an exorcist, maybe you should have your home checked for carbon monoxide leaks.

The inhalation of carbon monoxide has been linked to numerous side effects, including audio and visual hallucinations and the feelings of dread that are often attributed to a haunting. And, unlike the spirit of a loved one or a previous occupant of the house, carbon monoxide can and will kill you over a long enough period of time. Because carbon monoxide is odorless, people cannot smell it and therefore it posses a bigger threat and danger.

So, if you have seen a spirit in your home, heard voices or footsteps that you cannot explain, or just get the feeling that you’re not alone, perhaps it´s time you called someone. However, instead of calling Ghostbusters, start with your local plumber. They’ll be able to test your home for dangerous carbon monoxide leaks.

Whenever someone buys a home, they cannot help but fantasize about what sort of life will unfold within its walls. Having children and watching them grow, thinking about the joys of the holidays, and all of life’s magic moments that will play out in the home. However, when people buy a home, they do not tend to focus on the things that can go horribly wrong and turn their dream homes into nightmares.

One of the most overlooked dangers that can exist in a home is the possibility of a carbon monoxide leak. A carbon monoxide leak is dangerous because it is difficult to know for certain if you have one. As the gas slowly poisons you and your family, the effects might be attributed to just being tired, having a “bug,” or even ghosts. In order to protect those that live in your home, you should call a plumber and have your home checked for leaks.

As we all know and experience, Calgary winters are pretty darn cold!!! If there were such a thing as an opportune time to have a heating problem, now would not be it. Of course, we all know that there is never a good time to have a problem with your heater. That is why it is important for your family to take advantage of furnace maintenance agreements that include Furnace inspections and tune-ups.

Regular furnace tune-ups are very beneficial for a couple of reasons. To begin with, there are the significant cost savings. A well tuned furnace burns as much as 10% less gas than a furnace that is not well maintained. Also, a well-tuned furnace will be a longer lasting furnace, by five years or more, than a not so well-tuned furnace. An additional benefit to regular testing and tuning is that, at ClearView’s Calgary Heating and Air Conditioning anyway, you will get professional Carbon Monoxide testing that are ten times more sensitive than home testers. That is a benefit that goes beyond cost savings.

I hate it, but it’s happening again—the senseless, tragic deaths and injuries caused by carbon monoxide poisoning.  Recently a Campbell River, B.C. man died from fumes while fishing.  In Toronto, six people were rushed to the hospital after inhaling toxic fumes in their home.  And in Woodstock, Ont., a family of four—the Hawkins family—all died from carbon monoxide poisoning in their home.  There was a plugged exhaust-ventilation pipe for the gas fireplace located in their basement family room.

These stories affect us deeply here at ClearView Plumbing and Heating because we know how absolutely preventable such deaths are!  Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. David Recktor, who worked closely with police officer Laura Hawkins, the mother who died, said, “The irony is that one of her last messages on this Earth was to get a carbon monoxide protector… She was so dedicated to safety and would want people to take that message home. A carbon monoxide detector is every bit as important as a smoke detector.”

So let’s make sure Laura Hawkins’ message gets out!  If you don’t have carbon monoxide detectors, please, get them today!  Don’t procrastinate!  Just do it!  And please pass the word to friends and relatives.  And if you have any question about your heat ventilation, call ClearView Plumbing & Heating and we’ll come check it out for you.

A carbon monoxide alarm sounded at the Inglewood indoor swimming pool this weekend, resulting in the evacuation of nine people.

Of the nine people evacuated, each one had a blood test to test for Carbon Monoxide Poisoning. One swimmer was escorted to the hospital after tests indicated she had 21% carbon monoxide within her blood stream. Luckily, she was fine and later released.

Now for the very significant portion of news to take from this story, which I originally read in the Calgary Herald. The woman who was rushed to the hospital after displaying a reading of over 20% carbon monoxide (CO), showed absolutely NO outward signs of illness. If she had shown signs of CO poisoning, they would have closely resembled flu-like symptoms. This means that, if you or your family is suffering from Carbon Monoxide poisoning, you may not know it until it is fatal. I am not trying to scare anyone, but I have always believed strongly in families taking active measures against Carbon Monoxide.

The best prevention against Carbon Monoxide poisoning is to have a professional come to your home and perform an annual inspection and test. Give us a call if you believe your family could benefit from Carbon Monoxide testing in Calgary. Also, take a look at this past blog entry, Home Carbon Monoxide Detectors Are Not Enough to Provide 100% Protection.