Carbon monoxide alarm detect radon?
I'm a 13 yr old girl and every weekend I stay at my dad's house. It's a new house we just had it built for us, but suddenly the carbon monoxide alarm started going off sporadically. It ended up being radon gas but it's gone now. The carbon monoxide alarm also stopped doing off when we had this fixed. I read that carbon monoxide alarms can't detect radon though, so how would this be possible?
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Carbon monoxide detectors do not detect radon. However, the conditions which cause elevated carbon monoxide (back drafting of a gas fueled appliance such as a water heater or furnace) can also cause elevated radon levels. This is because back drafting is caused by a slight reduction in pressure in the room where the gas appliances are located and this reduction in pressure can also cause soil gases to enter the home. A typical fix for a radon problem (active sub-slab depressurization or ASD) would not fix a carbon monoxide problem, in fact, it would tend to make the carbon monoxide problem worse. However, if the back drafting problem is fixed at the same time because the contractor did the appropriate testing after installing the ASD system (shows a responsible contractor did the radon work), then both problems would go away at the same time.
Radon Alarm
They don't. CO detectors detect carbon monoxide and some of them are also detectors for explosive gases like Natural gas that home heaters and dryers run on. These also will pick up something like the gas that is inside aerosol cans like hair spray or room deodorizer and read it as an explosive gas ( which it is in confined spaces). If the alarm stopped it is because the CO is no longer in a detectable range or the detector stopped working.
Most often, you must evacuate and make contact with the fuel company, fireplace division, or 911. Among the alarms for excessive CO stages are false alarms. CO detectors aren't one hundred% riskless - they do malfunction - and customary household chemicals can spoil the sensing mechanism within the detector. The instructional materials will mostly state that the alarm should be removed from the dwelling if painting, paint stripping, or some other recreation that can have an effect on the indoor air great, is being conducted. The CO detector that i use in my trade rate $500 and it's trustworthy. A $20 model is just not of the identical first-class............. Multiple detector per residence is advocated. And they should have an LED readout that suggests the quantity of CO reward.
the alarms are only for CO, some also have alarms for gas.
to detect radon you have to have a radon test kit and then you let the sample sit there for 48 hours and then you mail the test to the laboratory and then they tell you how much radon is in your home.