Came Home to Loud Beeping Noises (CO)

Up here in New England we've been hit with fluctuating temperatures - 7 degrees yesterday and 52 degrees today. Needless to say, when I left early this morning after filling her up I didn't change the draft conditions on the stove to account for warmer weather. I honestly didn't know the temperatures would get up into the 50's today.

Anyway, came home and two carbon monoxide detectors were going off in the basement. One read 194 and the other just said, "Get the F out!".

The upstairs smelled like sulfur - or as my wife says, "rotten eggs".

I told her to get back outside with the baby... I went down to the basement where I was hit with an immediate headache - opened up all the windows and opened up all of the draft on the stove. Within 10 minutes the stove was roaring and burning hot so I dialed her back down.

It took about 45 minutes for the CO detectors to shut off - we stayed at the neighbors house for a few....

I searched and found a few threads on here about CO problems... seems it happens every once in a while when warmer weather hits.

Anyway, just thought I would share - for anyone who doesn't have CO detectors you really need to buy some. My home has a total of 5. Only the two in the basement went off....

What do you have for a chimney?

Lightning wrote:What do you have for a chimney?

We have a 6" round pipe that goes into the foundation that picks up a clay lined chimney up to the top of our house.

The stove just seemed choked out.... coal was still lit in the stove but there was no movement up the flue. All of the gasses were just sitting and (I assume) leaking thru the stove and stove pipe.... maybe even a bit of back draft potentially as there has been some wind. Although I would think wind would help with the draft out the chimney... not back down the chimney.

sounds like you lost your draft or it was burning way too low to maintain a good draft. If the chimney cooled down enough, it didn't pull the exhaust gases out good enough. and if it was cool enough and windy, it would backdraft down the chimney.

thank goodness we HAVE these CO devices!

Just curious, what do you have in your stove pipe ? baro? mpd? both ? neither ? I have the same stove.

ASHDUMP wrote:

Lightning wrote:What do you have for a chimney?

We have a 6" round pipe that goes into the foundation that picks up a clay lined chimney up to the top of our house.

The stove just seemed choked out.... coal was still lit in the stove but there was no movement up the flue. All of the gasses were just sitting and (I assume) leaking thru the stove and stove pipe.... maybe even a bit of back draft potentially as there has been some wind. Although I would think wind would help with the draft out the chimney... not back down the chimney.

Exterior block and mortar?

windyhill4.2 wrote:Just curious, what do you have in your stove pipe ? baro? mpd? both ? neither ? I have the same stove.

I have one manual pipe damper. No baro.

Lightning wrote:
The stove just seemed choked out.... coal was still lit in the stove but there was no movement up the flue. All of the gasses were just sitting and (I assume) leaking thru the stove and stove pipe.... maybe even a bit of back draft potentially as there has been some wind. Although I would think wind would help with the draft out the chimney... not back down the chimney.

Exterior block and mortar?[/quote]

Correct. Chimney is on the exterior of the home.

OK, so basically what happened is we had that quick warm up from frigid weather from near zero degrees. Outside block and mortar chimneys are heavily influenced by temperature fluctuations outside. It wasn't able to warm up as fast as the outside ambient air did which aided in the draft failure. I use secondary air to maintain draft in these situations which seems counter intuitive but it works great. The extra secondary air doesn't contribute much to combustion, but instead gets heated and keeps the draft moving the right way. Here's a thread about keeping draft in warm weather. Lots of good information here.

Warm Weather Burning in a Hand Fed

Just glad to hear that you and your family are ok.

So glad you had working CO detectors ! I am also glad that my 404 runs with no sideways plate in the exhaust pipe.I am no expert,but have only expressed my opinion on these 2 subjects.

We had a similar problem the other night.

Our boiler called us at 1 am. As she is set not to call during sleeping hours for ash dump requests, I knew it had to be something serious.

As soon as I opened our bedroom door, I could smell the rotten egg smell.

I went to the basement and looked at the CO monitor, it said 0, so hopefully the issue just started.

I looked at the barometric damper, it was pulling open, I checked the breach manometer, it read fine.

I felt the auger tube and it was hot!

I looked at the bulk bag our boiler feeds from, WHOOPS!, we ran it out of coal!

I opened the top of the bag to look in and got a face full of fumes coming up out of the auger tube.

I knocked some coal from the sides of the bag to rebury the auger tube and high tailed it out of the basement.

The good news is that the high auger temperature sensor did its job and called us through the autodialer as soon as the problem started happening.

The autodialer is also set to call if the CO alarm above the boiler goes off, but the auger temperature sensor beat it to it.

SHE called you in the middle of the nite & didn't disturb your wife ? You have her trained real good, WOW,what a set-up you have there !

My MPD was wide open - as it is 99.8% of the time. The two knobs on the front of my stove were only 1/4 turn open. And on a day like yesterday they probably should have been 1 full rotation open.

I'm really glad I have those two CO detectors. Not sure which one went off first but the assurance that both were going off makes me feel good.

I have three Nest Thermostats for my home... never thought to get the CO/Smoke combo but if I did, I would have gotten an alert on my phone that there was a problem. Maybe next year I'll get one.