Carbon Monoxide!?

Image
Weird. The smoke alarm went off, not incredibly odd when I am using the fireplace, but it wasn't the smoke detector. It was the CO alarm. I was totally surprised. It had never gone off as long as I have had one, over many many years. Yep, after resetting it a few times. It was getting a reading over 200 ppm CO. When I took it downstairs I got a reading near 300 ppm. I started getting light headed at this point. After thinking maybe the furnace heat exchanger failed and puzzling around a bit I figured out what happened. As part of the huge winter storm that recently covered almost half of the US, we lost our electricity. So, being well prepared, I rolled out the generator and started doing what I normally do. The generator (although it was completely outside) was creating CO to get in the house. Using the fireplace draft (and possibly other leaks) the whole house created a vacuum around the seal of the basement garage door. After the CO got into the house the forced air heat...

From my long time friend in Japan,


Hey Chuck,

We're OK. Stuck at home, but we have power, heat, food and some water so we're fine for a day or two.

Had to walk about 25 miles until I could find a taxi - my legs and feet are on fire. Other than that, and the memory of wondering if our office building and others would still be standing at the end of teh day (they are, the quality of construction is fucking remarkable), we're FINE.

Just resting for now, though we live basically right next to the ocean so we're watching the tsunami updates incase we have to get out of here.

NOST

Comments

Popular posts from this blog