Lesson Learned

Matty sent this out in an email to family today and I thought I would post it here so hopefully everyone who reads it learns from our experience and gets a carbon monoxide detector just in case!


We had an eventful evening last night. At about 11:30 our carbon monoxide alarm started going off. We got out of the house, I called 911, and the fire department came about 10 minutes later.  They came in the house with their monitors and immediately found high levels of carbon monoxide.  They called atco gas to come check it out since they have more accurate monitors and they can detect other things in the air as well. The firemen suited up with air tanks and looked around the house but could find no cause.  The Atco gas guy came and he found out that it was the hot water heater.  When he put his monitor right by the hot water heater his monitor went to EEEEE which means greater than 1000 ppm carbon monoxide. The rest of the house was reading about 70 ppm when the fire department got there, the Atco guy said about 25 - 75 ppm is when you should evacuate. His opinion is that the hot water heater vent needs to be fixed and maybe the baffles inside the heater are plugged.  We turned the hot water heater off opened all the windows and the readings fell to 1 ppm which is normal.  We all got back in bed at 1:00. We are very thankful the previous home owners had installed a carbon monoxide alarm. If any of you don’t have one installed it would be a great idea! You can get ones that just plug right into any outlet.


Another lesson: don't ever have a non-professional install your hot water heater. We talked to the previous owner today and he'd had a friend do it. It took a few years for the problems from a less than perfect installation to show up but they did!