Carbon monoxide poisoning is the leading cause of death by poisoning in the United States each year, and every year, more than five thousand people are hospitalized with injuries and sicknesses related to it. Of the twelve thousand poisoning deaths that occur in the United States each year, at least six hundred are from CO.

This deadly poison, which is colorless and odorless, can attack in even the safest-seeming of homes. It can seep into the air you and your family are breathing, and you may not even recognize its presence at first. Although carbon monoxide is usually noted for how quickly and easily it can cause deaths, it can also cause chronic symptoms, including flu-like symptoms, upset stomachs, headaches, and even brain damage.

CO poisoning is even worse for young children and pregnant women. People who smoke a lot or who have heart or lung problems can easily succumb to the effects of it. This danger, however, can affect any members of your family, including your pets, but you can protect your family members from this dangerous poison by using a few simple techniques.

One of the best ways to protect your family from CO is to replace your old furnace and hot water heater. A low-efficiency heating system can leak the residue of the burning natural gas or oil, and high-efficiency furnaces and hot water heaters will leak less residue. Replacing your furnace can also keep your home safe by getting rid of the old appliances, which may have rusty spots that are more likely to leak carbon monoxide and other bad residues.

Another one of the easiest ways to protect your family from the deadly gas is to have your furnace serviced each year. Get a professional to perform your furnace maintenance, which can keep your furnace more efficient. This can also keep the area around your furnace clean, and all of your ventilation systems clear of blockage that can cause carbon monoxide to back up and leak into your home.

After you’ve taken all these precautions, you should install carbon monoxide detectors in your home. These detectors come in many different sizes and shapes, and they have many different functions. For instance, some digital detectors offer a function that shows how much carbon monoxide is in the air of your home. Since there is always some CO around, you can see whether or not the level is approaching dangerous. More simple detectors will simply have a light or noise that would tell you when the carbon monoxide level is so high that you need to get out of the house.

These steps should be enough to keep your family safe from carbon monoxide, but if you have a chimney, you should also make sure that it’s in good shape, since loosening masonry can also cause you to have carbon monoxide poisoning in your home. Be sure, too, to check any of your other appliances that run on oil or natural gas, since they will also have potential to leak the dangerous gas. 

 

These days, you might hear a lot about humidifiers, since many doctors and clinics are beginning to recommend them for different medical conditions. A humidifier basically takes water and puts it back into the air, creating an environment that is less dry and irritating. You can actually buy furnace-mounted humidifiers that will keep your entire home from getting too dry, which can help with asthma, allergies, and other health conditions.

 

How a Humidifier Helps

If you have one of the following conditions, a furnace-mounted humidifier can really help you feel better and stay healthy:

·         Asthma and allergies: Although a humidifier won’t completely get rid of these conditions, it can help ease some of the irritation in the nose and throat that people with asthma and allergies tend to experience. If you or your children are constantly fighting sore throats and dry nasal passages during allergy seasons, a humidifier can certainly help ease the itching and pain.

·         Dry Skin: There is nothing more annoying in the winter than dry skin. It can seem like no matter how much lotion you slather on and how many glasses of water you drink, your skin is still constantly itchy, flaky, and even painfully cracked. A humidifier can put moisture back into the air to help solve this problem.

·         Dry Eyes: Contact wearers know the annoyance of being in too-dry air. Just think about what happens when you spend a lot of time outdoors on a hot, dry day, and your eyes will probably start to itch. Dried-out contacts can cause blurry vision, and they can be downright uncomfortable. Putting moisture back into the air of your home can help your contacts become more comfortable.

·         Colds and Flu: During cold and flu season, there’s nothing worse than dealing with both a runny nose and a dry nose. Using a humidifier in your home can help ease many of the symptoms of colds and the flu, and it can help make your sick little ones much more comfortable.

 

The Importance of Cleanliness

Humidifiers can certainly help your family in all of the above ways, and they can even help your home, especially if you have wooden floors and beams that can crack and creak when they are too dry. However, it’s important to keep in mind that you need to keep your humidifier clean. Humidifiers that are spurting dirty or contaminated water into the air will only make things like colds, the flu, allergies, and asthma worse.

 

Furnace-mounted Humidifiers

While you can buy small humidifiers that will put moisture into the air in a single room or a large living area, the simplest and most effective way to humidify your entire home is with a furnace-mounded humidifier. Many modern furnaces come with these already integrated into the furnace system, but if yours didn’t, you can have a professional install a humidifier on your furnace.

These humidifiers work like many of the smaller ones do. Most of them have a fan that pulls water from a reservoir into your air ducts, which disseminates it throughout your home. The best part about these humidifiers, though, is that they almost all have self-cleaning cycles, so you only need to service them a few times each year.

 

Did you know that one of the most important things you can do for the safety of your family and home is to get your furnace checked out and maintained by a professional every year? This might seem far-fetched to you, but furnace maintenance can keep your furnace from leaking carbon monoxide. This very dangerous compound can make your family ill, and it can even cause death.

Here are the facts that you need to know:

1. Carbon Monoxide Causes Death

Carbon Monoxide (CO) kills, on average, 1,500 people per year in the United States, but it can make many more people sick. It is, in fact, the leading cause of poisoning deaths in the country, and children, pregnant women and their unborn babies, anemic people, and people with lung or heart conditions are particularly susceptible.

When CO gets into your air, it starts entering your blood stream and replacing the oxygen there, which can cause flu-like symptoms including fatigue, weakness, vomiting, trouble breathing, heart palpitations, and even gastrointestinal problems. When people are exposed to high levels of CO, they can pass out before they even have symptoms.

Sometimes, though, insidious but slow CO leaks can poison an environment so that people experience chronic symptoms that worsen over time. One thing that can cause problems like this is an oil-burning furnace that isn’t working properly. This type of problem can go unnoticed or misdiagnosed until it’s too late to reverse some of the effects of the CO poisoning.

2. Protect Yourself and Your Family

One of the most important things that you can do to protect yourself and your family is to install CO detectors in your home. These detectors should be battery operated so that they’ll work even when the power is out, and they should be installed in all the central areas of your home and nearby to the areas where your family sleeps. These detectors can show the levels of CO in your home, and they can beep like a fire alarm when levels reach a dangerous high.

Installing detectors protects you by warning you when there is too much CO in your home, but the simplest way to prevent your home from being poisoned is to have your furnace – and other oil or gas burning appliances – services on a regular basis. Although things like gas stoves and water heaters can leak CO, furnaces are a very common way for the contaminant to get into the air.

If your furnace vents to the outside of your home, be sure that the vent isn’t covered by leaves or snow, since backing up this vent can release CO into your home. Also, call a professional at least once a year to perform basic furnace maintenance on your appliance. Not only will this keep your family from suffering the effects of carbon monoxide, but it will also save you money by making sure your furnace doesn’t get to the point where it needs major repairs and by making your furnace run more efficiently all winter.