Carbon monoxide

also could be that your chimney isn’t adequately lined, especially if you’re venting HW heater/boiler through it.

Guest 7:11,

You mentioned LI home inspectors but is this something I was involved with?

I got called by a woman at her job who was reading an article I wrote about CO, which was running at the time. She called and said her daughter was home sick from school again and her doctor had no idea what was wrong with her. Many details to the story, but it turned out the teen girl’s bedroom was filling with carbon monoxide through her drafty window when the neighbor’s boiler ran.
Was that not you? The girl had guitars in her room?

I’ve got crazy stories.

Another one last year was in attached brownstones where every morning and once in the early evening a home’s CO detectors would sound like clockwork.
They turned off all their gas as well. FDNY and Keyspan both advised them to buy new detectors. But I knew the consistent timing was the key to finding this problem.
Long story short: I went and introduced myself to the neighbors, explained the problem and asked if I could check their heating equipment. They reluctantly agreed to let me in to their boiler room.
Turned out they just had a new boiler installed with a programmable thermostat (set to run the boiler once in the morning and once in the early evening) and the chimney was never inspected, much less relined, as is now code. The chimney was completely blocked and the boiler’s safety switches were not installed properly allowing the equipment to spew ALL of its CO gas into the boiler room and surrounding area. Nothing was being expelled through the chimney at all.
Here’s the kicker: all that CO squeezed through a POROUS BRICK WALL common to the two buildings and filled my clients’ home to activate their alarms twice a day for weeks.
The neighbor’s installing plumber was held accountable. I received a letter of thanks from my client that is very valuable to me.

Another was in the exquisite and brand new West Village home of a renowned gallery owner and art collector. Her six (6) CO detectors were sounding almost daily for the first two weeks the parents and children lived there and her contractor was blaming the electricians for wiring them incorrectly. This was the FDNY’s suggestion.
Smartly, the children were being sent outside during the daily crisis.
They replaced the units and most of the wiring but the alarms still sounded daily.
My CO detector vacuum wand found nothing out of place in the home although I searched for hours. Carbon monoxide has to come from somewhere.
Finally I went to the giant commercial-grade Viking stove and turned it on. I got low level readings immediately. Then I put a pot on the burner…my digital analyzer jumped to 200 parts per million even though I was standing far away from the appliance. (The pot impedes the ability of the flames to completely burn the gas in them, CO is fuel left unburned after the combustion process has taken place) If that doesn’t shock you, please note that you should be concerned about CO levels when they reach about 10 parts per million and evacuate the building at about 60.
The nanny wasn’t using the well-engineered exhaust fan/duct system designed to handle this commercial cooking equipment when she prepared meals because she said it was too noisy.
They use it now. Children safe.

I get called to trace carbon monoxide problems all the time, but in the past few years I’ve gotten some real tough cases. More than I can list here, and I haven’t left a single one unsolved. You’re right about the Fire Department and Keyspan being useless…unless the source is obvious…the temptation to call these things “false alarms” is overwhelming.

There really is a lot more to say on the subject, but I like 7:11’s statement: “you don’t want to f* around with this”

We were driven insane by our CO alarm going off a year ago. Even after key span turned our gas off, the damn thing kept waking us up in the middle of the night. We got a second detector and that went off too.

We were terrified, to say the least. We were sleeping with the windows open in January, with the gas off, and the damn alarms, you guessed it, kept going off.

What finally helped us trace the source of the problem was buying another detector that showed you the actual reading of the CO level. When it goes off, walk around your apartment and see where the numbers start going up. I traced the CO to the bathroom window, through which fumes from our neighbor’s incorrectly vented new boiler was entering our apartment.

You do not want to f* around with this. The levels of CO coming into our apartment were enough to make us very sick. The fire department and Key Span are of no use.

If you cannot trace the source of the CO after getting a new alarm, get someone in to help you. Long Island Home Inspectors were very helpful. The $350 we spent saved my sanity.

We have to vacuum ours a few times a year. Try it. If not buy a new one.