Did I make a mistake? Floor Registers.

LLigetfa said:

I don't see any connection between floor registers and CO production. If you do have CO, it will spread faster through the vents but it won't make CO where none was before unless you have badly managed stack effect and pressure deficit. A central air furnace would spread CO as well.

You should however consider firestop fusible dampers.

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I was only praising the virtues of CO detectors in general.. If you have a CO problem via a gas, oil or wood burning system you definitely want to know about it ASAP.. Many families have died due to a blocked chimney or some other mishap.. In my mind CO detectors along with smoke detectors not to mention GFCI outlets have saved many lives for very low cost... My Dad's house has floor registers above his woodstove to get the heat upstairs.. I think if properly installed they aren't a hazard..

Ray

btuser said:

I also wouln't worry about carbon monoxide unless I had a gas appliance. That's been a very lucrative little gem driven by a product-driven electrical code.

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Would you elaborate on this? I heard someone else say something similar recently, but I didn't have the opportunity to ask them to clarify. They were saying that carbon monoxide isn't a concern with wood burning stoves.

sugarloafer said:

btuser said:

I also wouln't worry about carbon monoxide unless I had a gas appliance. That's been a very lucrative little gem driven by a product-driven electrical code.

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Would you elaborate on this? I heard someone else say something similar recently, but I didn't have the opportunity to ask them to clarify. They were saying that carbon monoxide isn't a concern with wood burning stoves.

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The reason people say that is because if your wood appliance is putting CO into your house, it is usually accompanied by smoke, which is easily detectable by you or your regular smoke detectors, thus the assumption that they are unneeded.

With a gas appliance, the CO coming in will be odorless and impossible to detect without a proper detector.

I would still want CO detectors in my house.... just to be safe. After all, both are capable of putting CO into your house and I wouldnt want to take the one-in-a-million chance of my woodstove leaking super-clean CO, and possibly be "caught dead" without a detector.

LLigetfa said:

albertj03 said:

What is the connection with a stove in the basement and CO?

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Two issues...

A stove without an OAK can suck air out of a space and if that space is a basement with a gas furnace or water heater, unless they are closed systems, can have their flues reversed.

Heat rising from a wood stove can magnify stack effect and if not properly balanced, create a pressure deficit in the basement, again reversing flues.

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I had this problem after i sealed up my house so tight. To fix it i have a 6inch pipe connect to the outside running down into a 5 gallon bucket, the pipe is about 1 inch from bottom of the bucket . so my orphaned hot water tank could vent properly.

mgh-pa said:

So, if you read my other post I made, I have a woodstove in the basement of our home. We placed a floor register about 7 ft away from the stove through the main living floor. There is no damper in place. We then placed two returns on the other end of the room (42ft away). Now, I'm reading on here about the spread of CO gases, and the fact that fire will spread very quickly with holes in the floor. My insurance company gave me the go ahead to do this (the home is listed as having a woodstove as primary heat), but now of course, I'm concerned.

I have smoke detectors in every room and in hallways, but I don't have any CO detectors. What's my next movie/option here?

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I've been in literally hundreds of homes that have open registers in the floors WHERE YOU CAN SEE RIGHT DOWN THROUGH TO THE FLOOR BELOW. Granted, these are old 2 story homes, but fact is, most were built in the late 1800's right up through the 1950's and even later.

These homes are still standing and have not burned to the ground.

Many of these homes do not even have heat to the upper floor, it only gets there by natural rising.

The most dangerous thing you'll do each day is crawl in your car and drive somewhere, chances of dying doing that are better than most anything else. Do ya lie awake at night and worry about the danger of driving to work in the morning????

Just to add, I just built a new home in PA, and we had to use firestop caulk around every pipe and seal every hole that passed from floor to floor. It's the current building code in our region.

Look, a biker in PA doesn't have to wear a helmet but ya gotta buckle in a car? Whaaaaa? All code doesn't always make sense now does it?

My challenge is for anyone to show where a register cut through a floor as was done here actually either caused a fire or contributed directly to the spread of a house fire, and in fact that it contributed to such rapid spread of fire that it is listed as a contributing cause of personal death.

An actual register, meant to facilitate air flow through levels in a home, or an unsealed penetration through a level which alows smoke and flame to travel? Both are the same thing.

By itself I don't think a grate causes a fire, but there are less and less of those good ol' sturdy homes built back in the day with the holes in the floors. Fires happen, and when they do these homes don't make it. Hopefully you can make it out in less than a minute. Here's a nice little vid of a Christmas tree fire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2dNN2waoSw&feature=related

Notice how the room starts to flash over at aroud 30 seconds, and it takes me about 10 minutes to get my secondary burn tubes glowing!. Now that's cool. Boy, what an idiot to let that tree get so dry. How 'bout a phone call or bathroom break while you fry some chicken? Or the constant plugging and unplugging of an apliance on a circuit that's been extended to feed something else. How about a nail for a picture?

Firestopping works.

sugarloafer said:

Would you elaborate on this? I heard someone else say something similar recently, but I didn't have the opportunity to ask them to clarify. They were saying that carbon monoxide isn't a concern with wood burning stoves.

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Carbon Monixide builds up in your blood, because for some unfortunate reason a little protien in you red blood cells called hemoglobin REALLY likes it, and will chose CO over O2 if given the chance. The kind of accidents people are having are not the kind where they walk into a room and pass out, but ones where the buildup is gradual. The reason why I think CO is less of a concern with a wood burning appliance is a fire producing CO has multiple combustion products that will probably set off a smoke detector. No, it would definately set off a smoke detector. Why not install its-really-hot-now-I-think-there-might-be-a fire detectors? Wait, those are heat detectors, and I actually have those peppered through my house. I put one above my stove and wired it in series with the hot leg on my circulating fan, so if it pops the fan shuts off. Poor man's duct detector.

I'm not against CO detectors, but the NEC 70 and nfpa 72 is a "product driven" code. Some measures have more merit than others. Arc-fault breakers are the new kid on the block. Soon they'll be coming out with something else for us us buy in order to protect the public, as a replacement for quality workmanship. Its another thing to sell people. Notice how they have to be hard-wired now in the home. The inspector wants them within 5' from any burning appliance, and the UL listing of the device excludes that location. Catch 22. It took them 10 years to decide whether to mount them at floor level or ceiling height! I'm sure these bad actors are on the same page by now. Its been two years since I was in electrical school, and the pros in the class were bragging about the money they were making scaring the crap out of Suzie Homemaker.

btuser said:

You shouldn't cut holes in your floors. Not because you have a wood-burning appliance, but because fires start by accident.

As a licensed fire alarm installer I wouldn't do it in my home. My next door neighbor used to have a fan mounted right in the floor above his wood stove in the basement. He tied it to a dimmer switch on the wall so he could control the speed of the fan. It worked "pissar", but after a couple of fires you realize how crazy it gets when things are NORMAL. Personally I think all residential air handlers should be equiped with duct smokes, and set up to drop out on fire/smoke alarm.

Your floor is a fire-rated system, which now has a rating of zero. Even just covering the holes will not bring back the original rating. If you've alread cut the holes I'd leave it the way it is and add smokes in every room (CO with wood?) of the house except the bathrooms, and especially inside/outside the bedrooms. I also wouln't worry about carbon monoxide unless I had a gas appliance. That's been a very lucrative little gem driven by a product-driven electrical code.

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After reading this entire thread I would listen to this guy...

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/fire-and-smoke-dampers/heating-equipment/hvacr/ecatalog/N-8yw?itemsPerPage=60&op=search


and specifically:

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/items/2TGD7?Pid=search

Will probably be my choice when I do this

Those look pretty cool. I'm guessing they have a spring and are being held open by something akin to a sprinkler head. Now, if you can give me a vent that will toggle on a 24vac trigger I can wire that to a thermostat to zone my heating.

Firm believer in both smoke and CO detectors . . . for nearly any home or situation except for a home only with all-electric heating/appliances. That said, I have to agree with one poster and say that the majority (OK, all) CO calls I have been on have involved gas-equipment (gas oven, gas heater, etc.)

CO deaths have always been with us. We just never knew what they were! The blood remains red. I remember reading about early industrial age mining, and how men were routinely carted out dead. Cause of death: Exhaustion. Man complained of headache and sleepiness. It was CO from the trucks/engines they were running in the shafts but you couldn't prove it.

kind of off topic but sort of on,
NH is flirting with requiring houses to have sprinklers installed, put those with the houses with floor grates, does that fix the problem?