We lost a lovely elderly couple last year because the two of them accidentally left their car running in the garage and forgot to turn it off.
The exhaust fumes leaked into the air handler hanging from the ceiling in the garage and slowly killed them while they were eating their evening meal in the living room.
They were found the following day by their daughter when she went over to visit them. Most of the neighborhood went to their joint funeral and we were all saddened by the event. The old man was one of my favorite people in the area because he showed me how to trim my trees without getting on unsafe ladders. He even lent me his tree trimming tools until I purchased some for myself. After that he showed me how to fix my lawn mower motor because he heard me struggling with it one day. My father was in and out of my life when I was young and I didn’t get a chance to learn a lot of these skills. In some ways the man was a little bit like a surrogate father to me. After that disaster happened, I got extremely paranoid about gas appliances and carbon monoxide. I knew that carbon monoxide is both colorless and odorless so you could get killed by it if you’re not using special electronic carbon monoxide detectors. I owe my life to that lesson because my detector woke me up out of a dead sleep the other night. If I hadn’t gotten paranoid about carbon monoxide following their passing, I probably wouldn’t be alive today to talk about it.
You won’t smell carbon monoxide leaks coming out of your gas furnace