FAQ: Are Carbon Monoxide Alarms Sensitive Enough?

 Short Answer: UL 2034 Alarms do not warn of all potentially dangerous poisonings as the preventing a 10% COHb level is not demanding enough as permanent brain damage occurs at nearly a 40% rate when carbon monoxide in the blood reaches a 10% level. The UL 2034 alarm standard does not allow for any margin of error to avoid long term disability from permanent brain damage.

Are carbon monoxide alarms sensitive enough to eliminate all risks of brain damage from carbon monoxide poisonings? No they are not as they leave no margin for error and don’t take into account those who are no adult males living at sea level.

From our carbon monoxide video blog with Attorney Griffith Winthrop and Attorney Gordon Johnson:

Griff Winthrop: You asked me a question a minute ago about whether 10% carboxyhemoglobin was dangerous, and of course I answered it. Yes. What’s the significance of 10% carboxyhemoglobin when we’re talking about Out the typical standard carbon monoxide detector.

Gordon Johnson:  Okay, so there was a discussion, although I suspect with the current change in Washington, this will not happen. But there was discussion about both the CDC and the United States Consumer Product safety organization putting pressure or at least encouraging the UL Laboratories to revise its indoor carbon monoxide alarm standards.

The standard originally was designed to prevent an adult male, someone like you or I, of having their COHb level exceed 10% on the average. The problem with the 10% standard is 10% COHb is the place where we know we start to have significant percentage approaching 40% of the people who get exposed to that and get sick having permanent brain damage.[1] So we’ve designed this standard so that essentially we’ve given people a helmet that will only prevent a, you know, severe brain injury in £220 adult males. But it doesn’t protect the 300 pound guys who are playing in the football game or it won’t, protect the other extreme either, the125 pound kids who are playing.

So the point is, the UL 2034 standard is way, way too permissive in terms of how much carbon monoxide can be there before an alarm goes off.

Griff Winthrop: The United Laboratory 2034 standard was initially made less sensitive, at least the industry said it was, to prevent false alarms But it it is allowing people to get at least to 10%, if not more carboxyhemoglobin, depending upon whether they’re a child or, as you just pointed out, a female. I’m assuming they’re getting higher than that. And again, medical literature tells us that 40% of those people will develop brain damage if they have symptoms.

Gordon Johnson: And it’s not a coincidence that most of the research that’s been done in the United States on carbon monoxide and the places where there’s probably been the greatest understanding of the danger of carbon monoxide is in the mountain states– the Mountain Rime Zone in states where the altitude is 4,000 to 10,000ft and the 10% standard is only good at sea level.

So I live at 500 feet. You live at what, 50 feet? So it’s reasonably close to sea level where you are. 500 feet is still reasonably, but it is nowhere near close enough when you start talking about everybody who lives west of Omaha all the way to San Francisco.

It is just not an adequate standard. But that’s assuming this alarm that I have in my hand would go off when it got to 70. Right? Because the 10% standard is really designed around 70 parts per million for an hour or two.

That’s the theory of it. But reality. You can get 149 parts per million for three hours and 59 minutes before that thing has to go off, and why the alarm is not made to go off as soon as it gets to 70 or 90 or whatever the compromise number in, in, in, in the European Union, I think the number is 50. Why it doesn’t go off when it hits a set amount, instead of waiting until it’s been at that amount for a certain period of time. And if it drops back below that amount at any time during the Alarming period. It resets.

Griff Winthrop: You could be in 70 parts per million, ambient carbon monoxide in the ambient air, and sitting there for a lot longer than what the standard would alarm at, because it keeps dipping its measurement down below 70. And then it goes right back up. So you’re getting hit with carbon monoxide at a dangerous level over and over again. And the alarm is not telling you that there’s anything wrong.

[1] See Chambers, Cognitive and affective outcomes of more severe compared to less severe carbon monoxide poisoning, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699050802008075?scroll=top&needAccess=true

See also a further discussion of this topic by us at https://carbonmonoxide.com/carbon-monoxide-alarms-must-be-improved