CO Valentines

Heidi & I had quite the Valentines weekend. :-) We woke up Saturday morning to the smell of Propane in our house. I took a look at our furnace and it definitely wasn't burning correctly. The burners only had flame over about half of their surface. I called Paul to see if he had time to come and check it out and he said he'd be there about 1:30.

Ok, sounds good. Heidi made some breakfast, and as we were eating an alarm goes off. Smoke? Nope. Carbon Monoxide (CO) - "The silent killer". Ok, so maybe that's a little dramatic, but it's an oderless and colorless gas that slowly suffocates you in your sleep. It's a good thing we weren't sleeping.

So anyway,I turned off the alarm, shut off the furnace, opened a window, and turned on the bathroom vent fan. All good right? Nope. About 10 minutes later it goes off again. I turned off the alarm. About 10 minutes later it goes off again. Well, I knew, without the furnace on, there was no new CO getting in, so I just pulled the battery out and we went about our business.

About an hour later, both Heidi and I both noticed we were getting headaches and our stomach's felt weird. We decided to get out of the house for awhile. We went to the gym for about an hour and Paul showed up shortly after we got back.

Turns out we were really low on LP in our tank, so the burner couldn't keep enough volume burning. That was resulting in an incomplete burn which produces CO. Our house had sat empty for a year before we moved in and my Uncle-in-law had told the LP company that they would call them when it needed filled, rather than the LP company just checking periodically. Well, no one told Heidi or I that, so we assumed that the LP company was taking care of. Turns out you can't get Hicks to come out at 3:30 on a Saturday, so we were without heat for a couple days.

But hey, we thought, no big deal. We'll just go out for V-Day like we planned and pile on extra covers Sat. night. If our furnace is off, our CO problem should go away. Well, we get home at 11:00pm Sat. night and our CO detector is going off again. We pack up our Sunday clothes and go over to Heidi's parents' house and sleep on the floor with a couple of sleeping bags. That's where my Valentines day ended...on the floor at my in-laws. :-) Memorable for sure.

By Sunday after church our CO levels were back to normal, and it was a balmy 53 degrees at 5:15 when I woke up this morning to go to the gym. Hopefully when I get home tonight we'll be all back to normal.