Paul D Kimbrel

When we bought this house, I found it astonishing that “they” (whoever “they” are) recommend a smoke detector, not only on every floor… but in every sleeping space. Then I really felt the pinch when I started remodeling and found out that all my smoke detectors had to be wired into the house wiring *and* interconnected. Well, I finally got them all wired up and I truly feel that it was worth the effort. We feel much more secure now that we have a smoke detector in almost every room.

But I always felt that the carbon monoxide detectors were extreme overkill. I mean - how mean people have really die from CO poising?

Well, yesterday, it was almost my family.

Tonya called my at work and towards the end of our conversation, she mentioned she had a headache. She thought it was the front moving through ahead of the rain. I didn’t give it much thought. But then she said that Eli woke up and was acting like he had a headache. She thought it was the weather for him, too. But for some reason a vision of my hot water heater popped in my head. Then she said Clayton woke up nauseous and pale. That’s when I started to panic.

See, when the previous owner of our house had the hot water heater put in, whoever did it cut a corner and left the old vent hood in place. Newer water heaters already have a hood in place and don’t need an extra one. They just left it because it meant one less pipe to cut. I recall a contractor mentioning to me that I should ditch the extra hood to prevent exhaust from escaping into the basement. I put it on my “to do - sometime” list and forgot it.

Well, that hood would not leave my mind and I had Tonya dig up the carbon monoxide detector. Yep, we had one. It was one that plugged into the wall and kids never left it alone. So we put it on the shelf. She plugged it in and a few minutes later - it went off.

So they went shopping for a bit in the clean fresh air while I came home to figure out what was going on. I cranked up the hot water heater to get it going and held a mirror up to the exhaust hood. Sure enough - it got foggy immediately. My “to do” list got a quick shift.

My father-in-law, Jim, came over and helped me pull and replace the extra hood with a piece of pipe. It was a quick job and we saw an immediate result. The mirror didn’t fog up and we got good suction up the hood.

And we now have four carbon monoxide detectors throughout the house.

The moral of this story…

If you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector - get one! If you have one carbon monoxide detector - get another one! Don’t mess around with this. When I think about what I could have lost, it scares me to death.