How Long Does It Take For Carbon Monoxide To Dissipate?
Carbon monoxide is the byproduct of partial combustion. When there is not quite enough oxygen around when an appliance is burning fuel, it will produce carbon monoxide. This is often true because it is extremely difficult to get an appliance running absolutely perfectly and then keep it that way through the life of the system. During normal operation, the deadly gas is simply blown to the outdoors through the appliance’s exhaust vent. Once it is outside, the gas is harmless because it dissipates and very small amounts of it are found in the air all the time. Forest fires, volcanoes, and other naturally occurring events produce the gas on a regular basis.You should have install smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector to detect poisonous gas in your home.Initial detection is your best bet for being out of danger, because failure to identify high levels of gas in your home can cause illness, explosion risk and death. The gas ends up in your house when an appliance is not venting properly. This could happen if your water heater does not have enough draft to pull the exhaust out of the house. It also could happen if your furnace has a crack in its heat exchanger. The heat exchanger is just like your car’s exhaust pipe but it’s inside your furnace.Have you ever noticed how hot your car’s exhaust pipe gets? In the furnace, indoor air is blown across the heat exchanger in order to heat up the air and then the air is blown back into the house. As the furnace runs, it continually burns gas to keep that heat exchanger hot. The exhaust fumes are pulled through that heat exchanger and then blown outside through the exhaust vent. When the heat exchanger cracks, exhaust gases, including carbon monoxide, get mixed in with the indoor air and it’s blown into the house. This is much like running a car and blowing the car’s exhaust into the house. In this case, however, the exhaust gas is odorless, colorless and tasteless so you could get poisoned by it before even noticing that it was there.
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