Carbon monoxide and carpet cleaning

A brief note here to remind you all to ensure that there are working carbon monoxide detectors within your houses.  Go and test them now if you have them.

One of ours.

The reason this comes to mind at this very moment is as follows:  One of my neighbors has a carpet cleaning service at their home.  I'm sitting here listening to that godawful deafening drone of noise that all those service truck engines make.

The key phrase there is service truck engine.  As I understand it, the carpet cleaning machines often operate via a power take-off (PTO) from the truck engines.  The trucks have to remain running in order for the carpet cleaning machines to operate.  And the truck engines produce carbon monoxide (CO) in their exhaust as they are running. 

• As I was getting my previous house polished for sale prior to moving into Centerpointe, I had my carpets cleaned. 
• The cleaning company parked their truck in my driveway, as such services usually do. 
• The service personnel left my garage door open as they worked. 
• My attached garage faced south. 
• The prevailing winds in Houston usually blow from the south. 
• The wind blew the truck exhaust into my garage, where it accumulated.
• The carbon monoxide in the truck exhaust seeped upward into the two children's bedrooms that were directly above my garage. 
• My carbon monoxide alarms (including the one pictured above) went off in those children's bedrooms, indicating that it was not safe to be in there because of elevated carbon monoxide.  CO levels got surprisingly high within a very short period of time. 

I had to stop the servicemen from working and get them to move their truck farther away from my house, and then I had to get everybody out of the house and then air out my entire house until the detectors showed that the CO was gone.

Watch out for this type of situation developing - I didn't know this type of thing could happen simply from a vehicle parked in the driveway (most of us know not to run our vehicles in our attached garages, but simply by it being outside?) and someone could get hurt by it.  NO amount of inhaled carbon monoxide is good for your health.