Declare Your Safety with a Carbon Monoxide Detector

If you’re like most residents of northeast Ohio, safety is a priority in your household. Whether it’s a smoke detector or burglar alarm, you’ve probably taken every precaution to protect your family from potential danger. Unfortunately, one precaution many homeowners tend to miss is carbon monoxide detection.

There are a number of things that can go wrong with your heating and ventilation systems. As a result, dangerous combustion gases such as carbon monoxide can end up in household circulation. Since carbon monoxide is invisible and has no odor or taste, you’re left totally unprotected if this gas enters your home — unless you have carbon monoxide detectors in place.

Why are these detectors so important? Carbon monoxide inhibits your blood’s ability to carry oxygen to your vital organs. As such, low levels of exposure can be dangerous to your family’s health, and long-term exposure can lead to death.

With that in mind, we recommend placing at least one detector on each level of your home, hung at eye level or above, up to 10 feet. Areas of interest would be near combustion sources, such as your fireplace. Areas to avoid would include the bathroom and kitchen, which sometimes experience high relative humidity. It’s also important to have a carbon monoxide detector within 15 feet of your master bedroom, especially if you’re only installing one detector in your home. This will ensure that your detector can wake you in case of a nighttime alert.

Here are few tips to consider when choosing a carbon monoxide detector.

• Look for a label declaring that the detector meets safety code.
• If your detector runs off electricity, be sure to select one with a battery backup. This ensures continued protection, which can be beneficial, especially if you’re burning wood to remain warm during an outage.
• Consider wireless networking. This enables you to synch all of your carbon monoxide detectors, so that the original alarm will trigger alarms throughout your household.

For more on the proper selection of carbon monoxide detectors for your home, speak to one of our trained technicians. Contact Stack Heating & Cooling today.

Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).  For more information about carbon monoxide detectors and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

Stack Heating services Cleveland, Ohio and the surrounding areas. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!