Adding Residential Carbon Monoxide Security

When we work with customers to design residential security measures, we work hard to address the widest variety of security needs possible. This includes securing your home against the threats of burglary and vandalism commonly associated with the term “home security.” Moreover, we also aim to add environmental security and even home automation whenever possible. Finally, we always recommend installing valuable life safety measures to help secure anyone in your home as well. Carbon monoxide, the “silent killer,” sits right at the top of the list of life safety threats we wish to secure against. In this post, we show you some of our top tips for adding residential carbon monoxide security.

First, we’ll help you understand what creates carbon monoxide. This conversation will also include some tips to help alleviate the risk of falling prey to carbon monoxide poisoning. Then, we’ll go over the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning to prepare you to detect a potential emergency. From there, we’ll review where you should install carbon monoxide detection in your home. This review will include legally-mandated locations as well as some additional, recommended spots to install these important devices. Finally, we’ll explain how we can add our security monitoring services to your carbon monoxide detection system. Following this tip adds tremendous life safety. Now, let’s dive in and look at both the creation and the dangers of carbon monoxide!

Understanding Carbon Monoxide and Dealing with its Dangers

As a quick introduction, carbon monoxide (or “CO”) is a gas produced by burning fuel. Vehicles, lanterns, gas ranges, fireplaces, and appliances make up just a few potential sources of CO. While building up indoors or in an enclosed area, carbon monoxide proves especially dangerous. When victims of CO poisoning breathe in too much of the gas, the CO replaces the oxygen in their red blood cells. Tissue damage and even death can follow once this occurs. While many appliances or circumstances will create CO, you can take steps to limit the amount that you breathe in.

One step that you can take involves ensuring proper ventilation of fuel-burning appliances. These appliances should have ventilation that deposits the carbon monoxide they create outside. If part of this ventilation system breaks or malfunctions, CO can stream into your home instead. Regularly scheduled maintenance for your home’s fuel-burning devices can help prevent this. We also recommend not warming cars up inside a garage. Occasionally, CO from the garage can leak into your home. Additionally, walking into your garage with an already-running car inside could expose you to CO buildup. At this point, we have a brief overview of carbon monoxide and how it accumulates. Let’s look at the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning next.

Watching for the Symptoms of CO Poisoning

Realizing when you may have experienced too much exposure to carbon monoxide can help you escape a dangerous situation. Overexposure to CO can lead to unexpected dizziness, vomiting, confusion or weakness. Unfortunately, many mistake these symptoms for the flu instead of CO poisoning. If you experience a sudden onset of these symptoms, get some fresh air outside as quickly as possible. Failure to do so can lead to passing out and, eventually, death. Acting quickly when these symptoms arise can make a huge difference. At this point, you have an idea of why CO can prove so dangerous and what happens to people experiencing poisoning from this deadly gas. Now, let’s shift our focus to creating an effective system for detecting carbon monoxide.

Required CO Detection

National and legal laws and fire codes mandate specific locations that require carbon monoxide detection in homes across the country. Minimally, you must install one carbon monoxide alarm on each floor of your home, including the basement. Unfortunately, sleeping individuals may fall prey to carbon monoxide poisoning without experiencing any symptoms. That makes effective CO detection around sleeping areas all the more important. For that reason, homeowners must also install CO alarms within ten feet of all sleeping areas. Often, builders design homes so that a single CO detector on a floor meets both of these requirements. As long as all of a floor’s sleeping areas are within 10 feet of a given central location, that floor only requires one alarm.

Additionally, houses built in or after the year 2008 require hardwired, interconnected CO alarms. This means that when one alarm senses a dangerous level of CO buildup, all the alarms will sound. This creates additional carbon monoxide safety, as CO building up in your basement, for example, will create an alarm that you can hear anywhere in the house before the deadly gas creeps up closer to the upper floors. This covers your minimum legal level of CO alarm coverage. Now let’s look at some ways you can add detection above and beyond what’s required.

Additional Suggestions

As we discussed earlier, carbon monoxide buildup occurs most near very specific areas of the home. Fireplaces and certain appliances create CO, and you will want to know if they create dangerous levels of this gas. We recommend installing carbon monoxide alarms 5-20 feet away from fireplaces, furnaces, water heaters, and other appliances that may warrant this treatment as well. Garages attached to your home can also create CO in your house if you have air leaks near the garage, or if you need to better seal your interior garage door. Installing an alarm near the wall between your garage and the rest of your house can help detect these conditions.

Additionally, installing CO detection in any areas where people might drift off to sleep adds tremendous life safety. We already mentioned the requirement of installing CO detection near sleeping areas. Furthermore, we also suggest installing detection around any areas where residents may fall asleep, intentional or not. For example, living rooms, reading areas, and other popular napping locations make great spots to add these detectors. Making sure that these events wake up anyone in the house adds tremendous life safety and peace of mind. At this point, we’ve seen where you must put devices to detect CO, as well as some additional recommended locations. Now, let’s show you how you can monitor this CO detection to create another important layer of life safety and security!

Creating Monitored CO Detection

If you’ve kept up with our blog at all, you know that we tout monitored burglar alarms as one of the most effective means of adding security to your home. These alarms create security in multiple ways. For starters, an activation of your alarm creates a blaring siren response. This alerts anyone at home to the danger at hand. If an attempted robbery creates the alarm, the siren often scares the intruder away as well. Additionally, our monitoring service ensures that an alarm creates a central station response. Upon receiving an alert, a central station dispatcher will reach out to the premises and, if necessary, create a police, fire department, or ambulance dispatch as well depending on the situation.

Obviously, these alarm responses create tremendous security and peace of mind. But you may wonder what any of this has to do with adding carbon monoxide security to your home? Glad you asked! We can install monitored CO detectors and connect them to your home’s burglar alarm. This ensures that an activation of a CO detector will now create a central station response. In turn, this will also lead to a fire department dispatch when necessary. This can alert you to any CO-related emergency that occurs in your absence, allowing you to send the proper professionals out to address the issue. More importantly, adding this security can also save a life if your home takes in excess carbon monoxide with someone at the house. Adding monitored CO detection represents one of our most effective means of adding carbon monoxide security to any home.

Adding Carbon Monoxide Security to Your Home

We hope that this post assists you in adding carbon monoxide security to your property. Additionally, we encourage you to contact us with any questions this post may raise for you. We will happily answer any and all of your security-related inquiries. If you wish to obtain further information, consider having us out for a complimentary site survey. We provide free security walkthroughs and equipment quotes to both new and existing customers alike. While on site, we can address your existing security and life safety concerns. Moreover, we can make suggestions of our own based on our observations of your property.

We believe that adding CO detection, and life safety in general, should be of utmost importance to anyone. Over 36 years in business, we’ve helped over a thousand customers create the security, safety, and peace of mind that installing this equipment provides. We’d love the opportunity to help you make your own home, and everyone in it, as safe and secure as possible!