CO Incident

[diamondgas]

Hi all,

1st one in a long long time! Got a call from a custard day before yesterday; she'd got my details from the GasSafe website! Transco ( or whoever they are now) turned off their supply for suspected CO poisoning! Honestly my first thoughts were to tell her to look elsewhere, but a sucker for a nice voice I said I'll take a look.

The property was pretty small, appliances consisted of a fireside central heating boiler and a cooker on the ground floor, kitchen off though the livingroom door where the FCH is situated. I quizzed the customer who said the boiler was only on for an hour in the morning to heat the water and wasn't being used when the problem was noticed! FCH flue flow good, no spillage and analysed the flue gasses with only 10ppm CO! hmmmmmm!

I moved to the cooker. Bare in mind i haven't got any of the fancy gather hoods or attachments for doing a test 'by-the-book', so to speak. 🙂 However I stuck my probe in the oven flue tested the burner high and low ... minimal CO, 8ppm... Grill slightly higher initially but then dropped back to 20ppm.... All the burners okay too! The customer had gone and bought herself a posh CO detector that had registered 267ppm on the day of the problem....!

Quizzing the customer some more i found out they like to cook... "a lot!" she said.

By the time I'd done the tests on the cooker I was sweating buckets! The kitchen was a small galley affair! Well I can't remember top of y head the flippin sizes for kitchens and cookers but decided to close the door to the living room and set the cooker and a couple of hobs away ... Well within about 15 mins Co was up to 45 ppm in the room and it was like a flippin saunna! Closer inspection of the kitchen I noticed some of the veneer on the cupboard doors had lifted off the door mould...! Had I given it the 2 or 3 hours the custard had been cooking for you can imagine how much worse the situation could have become!

The kitchen, on measuring out was 15m[SUP]3[/SUP] --- I recconed if you took off the volume reduced by the kitchen units there'd be a volume of around 8-9m[SUP]3[/SUP]. Just so happens that they'd had the door shut for the smells and hadn't opened a window or the door to outside!

First time in 30+ yrs I've come across anything like it. I now know why the regs, that I've always taken little notice of to be honest because I thought they'd never effect me, are present! I explained to the customer that it's recommended that she cooks with the door open... That would make the difference between safe & potentially lethal! That scared me to be honest! There's little emphasis anywhere to my recollection regards the REAL importance when working on cookers in confined spaces/small kitchens. In my experience it's been one of those issues bi-passed!

Just wanted to share with you something that you'll rarely come across but well worth being aware of all the same 🙂

Steve

 

[diamondgas]

Forgot to mention the CO detector was in the livingroom when it registered the reading and the living room was quite a size, 12' ceilings and at least 4m square! I can only think that when the kitchen door was opened there was a lot of CO released into the livingroom!!!

 

[AWheating]

Even worse on new builds in the last few years due to the fact that the rooms have lost the adventious ventilation and kitchens seem to be getting smaller and smaller.

It does not take long for co levels to build in a small room with inadequate ventilation, trouble is joe public has no real idea of the dangers a cooker holds as its only really gas fires and boilers that get reported as killers and how many have there cooker serviced/checked yearly?

 

[AWheating]

and well done for finding the cause Steve. 🙂

 

[Billy Bob Bob]

if shes going to cook with doors and windows direct to outside closed fit permenant ventilation and a extractor

 

[GrahamM]

My Mums kitchen is quite small and for years I have been telling her to open window when cooking.
She recently qualified for government subsidised promax and they also fitted CO alarm outside kitchen. The alarm has went off a number of times now when cooking and she has now accepted what I have been telling her all these years about opening that window.

 

[AWheating]

its not like you know what your talking about Graham 🙂

mothers never listen, ive been trying to explain trv's to my mother for years, arrrr!

 

[mountainman]

Well detectived diamond, nice one!

 

[diamondgas]

Even worse on new builds in the last few years due to the fact that the rooms have lost the adventious ventilation and kitchens seem to be getting smaller and smaller.

It does not take long for co levels to build in a small room with inadequate ventilation, trouble is joe public has no real idea of the dangers a cooker holds as its only really gas fires and boilers that get reported as killers and how many have there cooker serviced/checked yearly?

To add to that folk are going out for the bigger ranges also! Even more gas being burned!

 

[diamondgas]

if shes going to cook with doors and windows direct to outside closed fit permenant ventilation and a extractor

Cheers mate, I recommended that she has a ducted extractor to outside, would be an easy job as the cooker's on an outside wall with a filtered extractor above! What concerns me is that the regs ask for an openable door/window to outside but that doesn't mean the custard is going to open them which allows for the potential issues I encountered! Maybe this is somewhere were the regs should be tightened? I purposely did the air test with the window closed because that was the real life scenario the customer described had occurred!

An eye opener in my experience 🙂