5 Die of Carbon Monoxide Poising

Le John

I was watching an episode of Lt Joe Kenda where a family of 5 and a Cat were found dead in various parts of the house. The case was initially thought to be a religious ritual but is later determined to be carbon monoxide poisoning. The landlord incorrectly installed a heat exchanger backwards. The landlord later commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.



This is pretty scary and people must be made aware of the dangers and symptoms.



Sometimes you have to let the people know what they do, do what they do......

icesailor

CO Poisoning:

The real issue to be concerned about was the initial decision of the deaths being caused by a "Religious Ritual".

I have to wonder which MENSA member came up with this "Air Cause". A cause retrieved from thin air to solve a problem that they had not a clue about.

How many people have been criminally prosecuted for something like this?

More that you want to know.

I also wonder how connecting a Warm Air Furnace backwards would cause the CO to be released. Maybe the exhaust was installed backwards but the unit shouldn't have run. There, as usual, is a lot more to wonder about this story.

$10.00 and a box of Dunkin Donuts says that the cause is something more simple to us but incomprehensible to well trained fire inspectors. Who know what they were erroneously taught by other know nothing people.

Like the person I recently met who told me that you could smell CO and therefore, couldn't die from it unless you couldn't smell, smells.

Jean-David Beyer

Maybe some people can smell CO.

But I do not believe it. My sense of smell is not too good.



I used to be able to smell natural gas (as delivered to a residential customer). But not very well anymore. When they were installing my boiler, they pressure-tested my gas line and it had a very slow leak. They tightened everything and tested it and it seemed OK. But they could smell gas, and I could not. And that is supposed to smell and get my attention. So they finally found the leak. It was too slow to make the soap slop make any bubbles. They just kept on tightening until the leak stopped. Then a 24- hour pressure test revealed all OK.



So even if CO smelled (I know it does not) as bad as the stuff added to natural gas, I could not smell it, so I rely on one of those CO-Experts CO detectors, and a coupla big box store ones too, to make the inspector happy.

Bob Harper

odors?

I has never been proven scientifically that CO has any odor. You may, however, smell aldehydes, which may or may not accompany it. With fuel gases, they typically do not have an odor of their own so producers are required to add various types of odorants depending upon the application. Not everyone is sensitive to these odorants and one person might be sensitive to one odorant but not another. You couldn't tell which stink gas was used without a gas chromatograph and someone who knows how to use and read it.



Would be interested to see if there was a UL listed CO alarm present in that house.

icesailor

Smelling CO:

In NO way was I suggesting that you could smell CO. You can't. You may smell  other products of combustion but not the CO. The smell of combustion can e an indicator of CO being present.

What I sais was that someone who was a fireperson or some other equally expert in the subject told me that you could smell CO and if you couldn't smell it, it couldn't hurt you.

I know that that comment is 100% wrong.