If you heat your home or hot water tank with either: an oil furnace, a natural gas or propane burner, a woodstove, or a recycled wood pellet burner, do yourself a favour and get a Carbon Monoxide (CO) Detector. You never know how a combustible furnace device could malfunction.

I think everything has now cleared up at my home satisfactorily, but what I want to say is that this morning we had a scare: at 3:45 a.m. our brand-new CO Detector went off. I woke up to find the house filling with the smell of half-combusted heating fuel oil.

The fully battery-charged smoke detectors we had in the house never let out a peep.

We opened up windows, shut off the furnace which was smoking threateningly from a yellow-burning flame (yellow is bad). Then we waited all day for the furnace repairman to come tell us what the problem was, and a professional chimneysweep to clean out the chimney liner. By the time they came, the house was 14.0ºC (Brrr....)

It turned out that a bit of soot had stuck in the furnace's fuel injectors, causing the flame to "burn dirty," only combusting partially. Hence the fuel smell (and carbon monoxide!) circulating through the air ducts. The excessive smog and soot being generated by the dirty flame was not vented into the ventilation system, which is why the smoke detectors never went off. Instead the soot went up the chimney liner and, as it turned out, clogged the mesh on the exit screen vent. So it was a good thing we got the chimneysweeps to clean up the mess. Everyone was very professional and they did not seem to mind working on top of the roof through three feet of snow. Nobody knew why the furnace nozzle(s) had gotten dirty, given that we'd put the furnace through its annual cleaning in October. But they all thought that we were lucky to have had the Monoxide Detector.

The instruction manual for the Detector had some interesting (read: scary) charts on the effects of exposure to CO poisoning. For example, it seems 200 ppm (parts per million) of CO over 2 hours will produce headache and drowsiness. But just under 400 ppm over the same time frame will produce brain-damage and death. As you probably already know, carbon monoxide is a toxic gas which is colourless, odourless, and tasteless. Unlike iocaine powder or The Matrix, it's a lot more deadly.

I don't like to think what might have happened if the CO alarm didn't go off when it did, waking us up long before the circulating air became more toxic. Dave and I had bought the alarm on a whim from the local Canadian Tire hardware store, just before Christmas. It simply struck us as one of those things that would be, you know, good to have. One could look at it as a most fortuitous coincidence; or, more boldly, as God moving in our lives with his gracious protection. I believe he cares for us all, in ways for which we do not express enough thanks.

Wolf "Will also be making sure to do rigourous preventative maintenance on all fuel-burning appliances and tools and exhaust vents from now on" spirit