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Was sleeping soundly last night, when, at around 3AM I hear BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!!! Well, of course, I hop out of bed and run to see what's going on. Sounded like a smoke alarm. I had been having trouble with getting the smoke to go up the chimney of my downstairs wood stove earlier (which I thought was strange since its pretty cold out and when its cold usually I have no trouble getting the smoke to draw up the chimney). Anyway, I just figured some smoke had made it up stairs and I just needed to clear it. Nope. It wasn't the smoke alarm. It was the carbon monoxide detector! I checked the display and it was under 100ppm in the upstairs hallway, so i didn't freak out (ok, I did a little). I went downstairs to check the stove... SMOKE everywhere (come to think of it - why weren't the smoke detectors going off?). The CO levels downstairs were over 400ppm! I quickly opened the wood stove doors and see that there is a hot bed of coals there - potentially generating the carbon monoxide if there is insufficient oxygen. I opened some downstairs windows then quickly went upstairs and checked the CO levels in the hallway outside my bedroom again. Now the levels were over 150ppm! Well, not wanting to die, took the CO detector into the bedroom and shut the door and then opened the bedroom windows, turned on a small fan and watched the detector. I was contemplating evacuation the house but keep in mind that it was about 5 F outside! Fortunately, the CO levels in the bedroom dropped fairly quickly.. down so low that the detector couldn't read them - so I put on my coat and snuggled up with my dog to sleep.
I successfully survived until morning (I didn't sleep well in that cold) and then I got up and checked the levels in the hallway again - they were still very high - over 150ppm. I checked the stove again - the coals were almost out so I scooped them up and carried them out of the house. Then I opened all the windows and doors, put two big fans to blow the gas out of the house, turned off the electric heat and watched the detector until the CO levels were below the detectors ability to detect. Then I shut everything back up and turned the heat back on.
I then checked to see what happened to cause this problem. I removed the stove pipe and examined it. I noticed lots of soot buildup - but not enough soot to stop the smoke from going up the chimney. Then I noticed that the butterfly valve was shut! But I know I opened that valve when i was building the fire. In fact I checked that the valve was open when I was having smoke issues. I know that when the valve handle is vertical that the valve is supposed to be open. Well, I checked and the valve handle was still vertical - but the valve was closed! I fiddled around a bit and discovered that I could turn that handle all I wanted but the actual valve did NOT move at all! SO basically, the chimney was CLOSED the whole time and the fire in the fireplace was just eating up the oxygen in the basement! The fire was hot, so when it became oxygen starved it started producing carbon monoxide!
Bottom line: If you burn wood, coal, kerosene, or whatever, for your heat, then I HIGHLY recommend getting a carbon monoxide detector. If it weren't for mine, I quite possibly would have woken up dead this morning!
Here are some pictures of the stove pipe that shows the valve controlling the flow of combustion gases from the stove (commonly called the "flue"):
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| Valve (flue) in closed position. |
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| Valve handle closed: good - thats right. |
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| Valve in the closed position. |
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| uhoh! The valve handle is in the open position but the valve is still closed! |
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