gitrdonecoal wrote:we had a fire call and went to a house that had a CO detector going off, we needed to investigate. I know the guy, friends of the family. so we asked when it started, and he said a day ago
. he said his went off over the night before, so he fiddled with this and that, reset the detector, kept going off. said eh, must be junk. that night got home from work and borrowed his dads. wow, that one went off. ok, so NOW lets call the fire department after screwing around for 24 hours. at this point his wife of 4 months started feeling sick and went into the hospital. they said if she was in the house a few more hours she was gonna be dead. I really am glad you shut the stove off. you need a baro and a manometer. I really hope pastor55 is reading our posts on this thread, think im gonna pm him.
I don't have the draft gauge, the stores didn't have one in. I wanted to get the baro in because this week is going to be hectic as heck (as I'm sure most of you can relate), the stove shutdown had already started and takes awhile to complete and it's a hassle for me to let it go out and bring it back up, and the weekend was the best time for my dad to come up and help with getting things in place...so I put in the baro damper and just kept an ear open for the CO alarm or smoke alarm to go off. I was in the basement for about three or four hours after starting the fire back up and felt no side effects of CO nor did the alarm go off, and I still don't hear anything going off down there.
I did find the cat...sleeping on a chair in the basement. Figured she's closer to the floor so she is kind of a defacto canary. She's still acting like herself. And like I said, I was down there for several hours with no effects, so I think it would be relatively safe. There's a CO alarm and smoke alarm located not far from the stove.
The damper didn't seem to do much, just wobbles a little once in awhile. The flue pipe was near the 160 or 170 degree mark at the elbow going into the chimney, still seems rather warm...but the firebox was radiating a temp closer to a range of 350 to 400 degrees whereas before it was around 300 to 350 degrees, so it must be having some effect. I just have to wait until tomorrow morning when I shake down the ash to see how it's working (or if it's going to inexplicably die on me overnight).
Right now I just set the baro damper to the .02 setting, the lightest one. It's barely moving much at all. Until I can locate a draft gauge I'll just settle for this at the moment, since I can't really fix it right now. I figured as long as the CO alarm's not going off and the coal continues to burn well it can't be all that terrible the way it is, unless someone has some tips for tuning it while I'm still calling around to stores for a draft gauge.