Is It Smart To Have A CO And Smoke Detector In Your Sleeper?

Sorry, Taxman, since you posted information about Underwriters Laboratories standard 2034 with no cite or authority other than your own, I went to check this out.

The official UL standard is here.

This standard includes

These requirements cover electrically operated single and multiple station carbon monoxide (CO) alarms intended for protection in ordinary indoor locations of dwelling units, including recreational vehicles, mobile homes, and recreational boats with enclosed accommodation spaces and coockpit* areas.

What's wrong with that?

*The extra "o" misspells ****pit on purpose.

What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with that is the standard calls for x hours at y concentration before an alarm is allowed. It takes four hours to alarm at 70ppm, for example. Let me tell you, if you see 100+ppm in the flue of a gas furnace, it means there's something seriously wrong with the furnace. But it's OK for the overall level in your entire home to be 70-100ppm for a few hours???

The 2034 standard started out somewhat reasonable, but was raised over the years because idiots were calling the fire department, and the FDs were objecting to getting an emergency call and responding to find that the levels in the home were not life threatening.

Well, I don't buy a safety device to keep me blissfully happy until my life is threatened, so I object to the idea that it's not allowed to tell me anything until the situation is "life threatening". Besides that, what's "life threatening" to a normal healthy adult can be fatal to infants and elderly people with low blood oxygen levels to start with.

Or, to quote the leading combustion gas safety expert on HVAC-Talk, an internet forum for HVAC professionals:

http://hvac-talk.com/vbb/showthread.php?1441901-Selling-CO-Detectors

A CO detector would be used for monitoring such as in an industrial application. A CO alarm is what the code requires. However, the alarm specified in the code is listed to UL 2034. This means these alarms not not designed to alert before occupants suffer from CO poisoning but rather CO death. By design, these alarms will not alert until your COHb (carboxyhemoglobin) level is at least 5%............if its working as designed. I say that because these alarms are notorious for Not working as designed. They in fact have a dismal history not only from anecdotal evidence but from the CPSC and GRI. In a word, they are junk. They fool people into thinking they are protected from CO poisoning when in fact they are not. In a CPSC study where a bunch of these alarms had alerted, people still died. Now, add to this the legislation intended to outlaw unlisted low level CO alarms and you have to shake your head. So what to recommend or sell? Unlisted low level CO monitors. The two on the market, the CO Experts and the NCI 3000 both have similar alert levels but not exactly. To compare, a listed alarm should not alert at 69ppm for 30 days or 70ppm for up to 4hrs. An unlisted monitor will alert at 35ppm after 60 seconds. Listed alarms use unreliable MOS sensors that by design alert to false positives such as hairspray. Unlisted monitors use professional electrochemical sensors that alert only when there is CO present. Which would you want protecting you?

If you want another link, try this, but the numbers are slightly different than I'm used to seeing:

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/building-science/ul-listed-carbon-monoxide-alarm-may-not-protect-you

This forum is not an engineering site, or we could continue. The passage you quoted is from a single writer who then quotes another single writer, and mentions products (meaning there's some sales going on). Nothing there refers to Underwriter Laboratories methods. The actual standards, with the ppm (parts per million of smoke in air) costs beaucoup bucks from UL. But keep this in mind: UL does not set unsafe or deadly standards.

Also, I haven't posted on this topic of "fear" because it's simple to live without fear and I don't waste my time & treasure on over protecting myself.

, leaves thread.

If I understand Errol correctly:

1. Engineering standards for CO detectors are beyond the scope of this forum.

2. He doesn't know anything about engineering standards for CO detectors.

3. He trusts the people who wrote the standards for the CO detectors you buy at Home Depot.

4. He doesn't trust some stranger posting in an internet forum.

Am I summarizing the situation accurately?

Here's where I'm coming from:

1. I believe that CO exposure may be a serious safety issue for truckers. I submit, without proof, that having detectable levels of CO in the blood is a bad thing for members of this forum, just like having detectable levels of ethyl alcohol is.

2. The detectors at Home Depot were designed to do one thing, keep families from waking up dead in their homes. The secondary concern is minimizing 'false alarms'. So anything up to 70ppm is not a design issue, if you can pass a DOT physical today, 70ppm isn't going to kill you tonight.

3. Another official CO exposure standard is put out by OSHA, it's intended to keep workers healthy and safe. That's getting nearer to the issue at hand, but it assumes exposure for 8 hours followed by 16 hours of recovery. OSHA's 8 hour standard is 50ppm. A 20-24 hour standard for truckers should logically be lower than that.

4. If the FAA has a CO standard for the flight crew in charge getting you to Australia safely, I'm sure it's more useful here than the two standards I mentioned above. Another forum member suggested buying a CO detector from an avionics supplier, I think he might be on the right track.

Errol's right, this goes beyond the scope of this forum. I might be the only one here who knows anything about the subject, and I basically know enough to say "don't buy that $20 unit at Home Depot, buy a $100+ low level CO monitor instead".

I'm moving this discussion to a forum in which it is on point. I tried to summarize the HOS standards and equipment involved, and asked indoor air quality and climate comfort professionals "what should truckers do?".

If you're interested in further discussion of CO safety in your truck cab, you can find that forum thread here:

http://hvac-talk.com/vbb/showthread.php?2164951-CO-Safety-for-Over-the-Road-Trucking&p=25162571#post25162571

Taxman, I'm trying to be real tactful here, but you need to know that you are the personification of the guys in the drivers lounge that succesful content truck drivers try to avoid getting in a conversation with.

For the record, I have never seen nor heard of any driver with a CO2 detector in his truck. Nor have I seen or heard any reports of a truck driver's death due to him lacking such a detector in his truck.

You can take those two statements for whatever you think they're worth. I realize they're probably not worth much, but I give them freely.

What good would any thread that is quibbling over engineering standards be without an anecdote from myself?

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time riding in the back seat of cars with my big brother and big sister. Dad bought a 1969 Impala brand new and we went places in it.

In addition to having a kickass 350 cubic inch motor with a four-barrel carburetor, that year's Impala became famous for being the subject of the first truly massive automobile recall (100,000 units). Why was it recalled? you ask. Because during their manufacture, some number of these cars did not get two tubes from the trunk to the back seat closed off, leading to the introduction of carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment that even Chevrolet's Astro™ Ventilation System (new in '69!) could not clear.

Long story short, Mom noticed kids falling asleep in the back seat on long trips. These kids normally spent most of those kinds of trips fighting and talking. (It was my brother's fault every single time, too.) The kids would wake up when Dad opened the windows.

Dad got a CO (note: not CO2) detector from a pilot friend of his after the dealer said that it could not possibly be carbon monoxide, because Chevrolet's Astro™ Ventilation System would make that impossible. Detectors back then we're basically plastic cards with a white sandy looking substance on them. If the sandy stuff turned brown, there was a problem. Ours turned nearly black in a day. The recall was issued shortly after, and our car was fixed.

Since we kids all passed out from CO exposure, we are all sensitive to exposure now. (By "sensitive," I mean that the doctor told our parents that we would vomit sooner than most people on subsequent exposures.)

So, carbon monoxide can be dangerous. If you are exposed at lethal levels, you will fall asleep before you know anything is wrong. Sure, your poor, cute, loveable cat who trusts you with its very life will die before you, but you'll likely be dead too, and someone will have to write a sad obituary.

So, having literally nearly died due to exposure to carbon monoxide, do I have a carbon monoxide alarm in my truck? Nope, not even now that I don't have an APU and so have to idle when it gets too hot.

Why not? Because the likelihood of dying that way is very remote compared to the likelihood that some dumb driver crashes into me, causing me to die in a rollover accident. I read about those too often. I've never read about a driver who died from CO exposure .... unless the argument is that some of the fatals involving drivers who fell asleep were due to CO exposure. But I would want evidence for that.

Just make sure your truck doesn't have Chevrolet's Astro™ Ventilation System and you'll probably be good to go. But worry away if you like. I just think there are things more worthy of your time, attention, and money if you're trying to mitigate the risks of driving a truck for a living.

DOT:

Department Of Transportation

A department of the federal executive branch responsible for the national highways and for railroad and airline safety. It also manages Amtrak, the national railroad system, and the Coast Guard.

State and Federal DOT Officers are responsible for commercial vehicle enforcement. "The truck police" you could call them.

HOS:

Hours Of Service

HOS refers to the logbook hours of service regulations.

APU:

Auxiliary Power Unit

On tractor trailers, and APU is a small diesel engine that powers a heat and air conditioning unit while charging the truck's main batteries at the same time. This allows the driver to remain comfortable in the cab and have access to electric power without running the main truck engine.

Having an APU helps save money in fuel costs and saves wear and tear on the main engine, though they tend to be expensive to install and maintain. Therefore only a very small percentage of the trucks on the road today come equipped with an APU.