New Article on CO

how much co is produced by a self cleaning oven? it is like the amount of material involved in burning a couple candles.

and over what time period? burning an ounce or 2 of gas in an engine over a minute or 2 can produce significant concentrations of co but burning a couple ounces of food in an oven over a couple hours seems very unlikely to produce concentrations that are detectable if you have adequate air changes in the structure for normal use.

I believe Jim Davis taught us an electric oven in self-cleaning mode has been measured at over 1,500 ppm depending upon how much of what crap it's cooking off. Remember, oxidation of the deposits equates to a non-aerated luminous flame- no pre-mixing of air with fuel. There's no catastrophic combustor to reburn the fumes. Ovens are often low in ambient O2. All you need to to drop down around 18 % or less and you're knocking on the CO door.
The ANSI max. allowable CO on a gas oven is 800ppm. They figure you won't cook that turkey more than 3 hrs. and at 0.35 ACH, the entire volume of any house is supposed to flush out according to ANSI 62.2. Therefore, theoretically, that amt. of CO 'should' dilute out to negligible levels. Of course, there is no consideration for walls, floor plan, ventilation, foot traffic, competing air sources, depressurization, etc.

All my ranges since I first took the NCI course about 20+yrs ago were gas and they typically ran btw 200-400 ppm. I kept them clean and set up but you won't know unless you run combustion analysis. Or, trust it's just the L-tryptophan in the turkey making you sleepy.

The again, I don't take chances- I have a dual sensor ionization and photoelectric smoke alarm in the dining room for a cooking timer and a Jiffy Pop container on the wall over the door as the fire alarm.

And low level CO monitors on every floor level within 15lf of bedrooms.

Key words ‘mostly sealed’. If you can smell something burning you got CO, right.
How much depends on the other factors that Bob Harper mentioned.

LOL Jim. I learned about hair styles from you! JK.

As for the aforementioned calculations on CO from an electric range, the 1,500 ppm is not flatulence. It is not a momentary release of a fixed quantity of gas. It is a continual emission of noxious gas, often into a rather compartmented room that is also full of aerosolized fats, odors, and lord knows what witches brew of other noxious hydrocarbons from compounds breaking and reforming hundreds of times per second entering lungs. Think of this (Warning! Jim Davis point coming): if you do not have an effective powered exhaust for a gas range or the electric range in self-clean mode, where is the CO2 going? Have you measured the ambient O2 at the floor to see if you're standing in a lake of CO2, which displaces the O2? If you're in a small, compartmentalized kitchen, CO will slowly rise to the ceiling spread out, then stratify but also mushroom out to any cold exterior wall where the air (with some CO along for the ride) may densify and thus fall towards the floor instead of escaping the thermal envelope of the structure as much as we would hope.

Just because you can measure an emission range into the ambient air from one appliance does not translate into a constant concentration throughout the structure. Air movement in a building is anything but predictable. If you have forced ventilation, that's one parameter that tends to set up certain tendencies (not rules). The lack of ventilation produces another. You walk around all the time into and out of varying zones of gas concentrations daily. Now, consider the effect of moving bodies, esp. people or large dogs. As a body moves through a space, there is a trailing eddy churning behind them, similar to waves crashing onto a beach. Likewise, the front of their body acts like a piston compressing the air in front of them forcing air from one space into another. I've told the story of a see-through woodburning fireplace I investigated where people walking into the small room forced air into the dining room on the other side causing a smoke odor. The soot stains on the firebox sidewalls confirmed this phenomenon.

The code requires MUA where there is an exhaust fan at 450 CFM. You have to dump fresh outdoor air somehow into the same space and it must be interlocked with the exhaust. However, an exhaust fan is not required. Even if your equipment is producing negligible levels of CO you still want to ventilate the space to remove the aerosolized fat droplets so your ceiling, walls, cabinets, and counter utensils don't get coated in grease.

As to Jim's other point, the medical community is not studying chronic low level CO to the degree required but I am happy to report there are a growing number of practicioners collaborating on studies and sharing data. Still, there remains a strong incentive NOT to record CO deaths or to minimize them. There is no functional reporting system that comes close to the true numbers. The morbidity effects from chronic low level CO may never be known but certainly not any time soon. Meanwhile, you can breathe deeply knowing huffing cooking fumes is totally 'safe', right??? Maybe for you…