CO - learn from our mistake (PAH)

Dave Yates (PAH)

Scenario was as follows:

Gas Co red-tags water heater for CO and improper venting. Our mechanic arrives to find a standard 40 gallon gas water heater sidewall vented. Virtually all products of combustion spill out into basement. CO detector upstairs never went off.

We install direct vent water heater. End of story? Un-uh.

Customer calls back. Still feeling ill. We return & check furnace, which is just ten years old and it's a direct vent model. The heat exchanger is toast! Two out of four burners get blown out by fissures in the HX allowing backdrafting into the HX! Obviously, this has been goung on for some time (I'm thinking at least two or three years.).

We saw the obvious & missed the second problem.

The CO detector has a "highest" recording of just 13 PPM. It doesn't even go off until passing 400 PPM! Even then, it takes anywhere from 4 to 15 minutes to give an alarm. Gotta read the fine print!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Be careful out there.

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Dale

Furnace question

Thanks for sharing, guess why I have NO trouble seeing how that happened. On the furnace, you say direct vent, was it a 90+ with plastic pipe and the normal safeties or a 80% vented as a catagory 3, if the latter was it correctly vented? I ask this because we see 80% furnaces and boilers that say "may be sidewall vented with kit #xxxx" being a tjurland or Fields kit, somehow the expensive xxxx never gets installed and there's just pipe out the sidewall with holes eaten through it.

Mark Hunt

Like this?


Gas company caught this one.

Previous owner did not want to spend the money for a new power vented water heater when the old one quit.

The folks were lucky the gas company was in the area checking meters.

Check out the matches on top of the tank. Good old "draft test"!!! Only these matches were being blown out.

Mark H






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Rudy

Speaking of fine print.....

If you read the fine print on the UL 2034 standard for CO alarms it does not require any degree of accuracy for the digital displays.

I love the way the folks at the GRI put it when they did the study on the 'Performance and Reliability of CO Alarms".

"The UL 2034 standard does not require any accuracy for alarms with digital displays, and indeed some alarms have such poor accuracy as to seemingly produce random numbers……."

Then they sum it all up by concluding:

"The results of the tests reported here indicate that certification to UL 2034 does not assure the performance or reliability of CO alarms……."

Whatever you do, don't depend on a "UL" approved alarm to protect you, your family, or your customers.....

JMHO

Geo_2

co

Dave, don't mean to pry but what ever happened with the guy that stubed his toe on the job site and sued everyone??.

Dave Yates (PAH)

Hi-E

Reclaimer 90+ model.

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Dave Yates (PAH)

good records

saved our butts & we were dismissed from the suit. Between the original contract language, our daily worksheets, my notes/records and more than one clear memory of how the tile guy injured himself, we were able to pull away from the legal tangle and left the rest of them to duke it out.

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