0:01
Hi, this is Andrew Twidwell, owner of abt plumbing electric heat and air, once again with the show You Got This. It’s a show of DIY do’s and don’ts. And I am sitting next to DD and zooming in with Rosalie.
Say hi, DeeDee.
Hi Guys.
DeeDee is the head of our HVAC department.
And Rosalie is our producer and co host. So she’s zooming in. Well, we’re not zooming anymore. We’re FM. Riverside FM knowing right now going. Zooming is becoming a verb, right? It’s a verb or a noun. I did graduate high school, that’s as far as I got. So yeah. And I managed to get most of my English credits from a program called Urban pioneers, which was an outdoor program in San Francisco, where we went backpacking in the car, hence why I moved up to the Sierras. Because I love the outdoors. And yeah, I got it through I got my English and my algebra through that. And I didn’t know algebra or no English, I hadn’t learned how to use the system, my education system, when viewed with San Francisco Unified School District, let me get away with a bunch of stuff like side note. Verb nouns.
1:23
I don’t even know where to start. I don’t, I don’t.
1:26
So yeah, this is the show DIY do’s and don’ts. But we’re here to talk a little bit about don’ts. DeeDee, is head of our HVAC department, I thought I’d bring her in, because we’re gonna be talking about heat exchangers and some of the things that we found. Shoot, we found one. Two days ago, that was pretty scary. And we’ll just kind of dive into that a little bit. So So kind of go back a little bit, people are probably going What the heck is a heat exchanger, what a heat exchanger is the thing inside of a gas furnace that contains the byproducts combustion. So we burn fuel, whether it be propane, or natural gas, causes, you know, forms of fire, which produces heat, but we want to make sure those byproducts are contained and separate from the indoor house because house air because those byproducts combustion can contain carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water vapor and a bunch of other little minor things. But the carbon monoxide is a key one that we want to make sure we keep out of the house, because that’ll put you to sleep and you might not wake up. So it’ll, it’ll really fix you. So that’s one of the things that we do when we go in and do our safety inspections on furnaces are yearly safety inspection furnaces, and they want to stress that you want to have your furnace and AC checked yearly, because things like this do occur. And sometimes they can happen pretty rapidly without you even knowing it. And what happens is that container of the bipartisan budget and the fire old school like when I first started I was working on on going back 3040 years, I was working on furnaces that literally just had a box inside their gravity furnaces in San Francisco and literally just had a square box, with a chimney that came out of the top of it that went straight up, they were like, maybe 30% efficient. So for every dollar of fuel that you put into it, you maybe got about 30 cents of heat coming out and the 70 cents would go up, go up the chimney. Now we’re running minimum of 80%. And most of our installs are more like 95 plus percent. So for every dollar you put in to the to fuel, you’re getting about 95 cents to 98 cents of heat coming out of that unit. They’re a lot more sophisticated now. They unfortunately one of the problems that we see when things become more sophisticated things tend to break a little quicker but because of the efficiencies that makes sense because fuel so expensive, I don’t know if anybody’s looked at their PGE Bill lately. Or their propane Bill lately. It’s pretty outrageous. I know I have and yeah, I don’t like looking at it. We’ve got a few properties and oh my gosh, yeah, some of them were Wow. Five 600 bucks, right. So anyway, I’m gonna let Didi kind of take over on this and kind of inform me a little bit about what we find on these inspections and what what is entailed for us to do these inspections what do we actually do?
4:31
So let me just start out with oh wait
4:36
Rosalie wants to say something sorry I mean, this is local Grass Valley am radio so don’t expect much from us.
4:47
That’s, you know, I don’t mind like backing out and just being like, Hey, have it because you know how I feel about being recorded in general. Yeah, but but DD I was going to ask you So, just to kind of make this before you dive in, I won’t put you on the spot with anything you don’t already know. That’s what I do when we’re not on air. So you reached out and said, Oh my gosh, like you won’t believe what happened. And we talked a little bit before we shared a little bit of the story on social media, just you know, but I just was wandering, having lived in Nevada County, and at one point, going to turn my heater on, and getting nothing like it. There was power at the unit, and the thermostat wasn’t broken. Is this when I would make an assumption maybe when I turn on the furnace, and nothing happens that I might have a cracked heat exchanger? Or how did you figure out that this was something to look for or
5:50
so it’s something that we check on every furnace, no matter what the call is, whether it’s just a safety inspection, this happens to be no heat call, which can be a bajillion different things, but we always check the heat exchanger, once we get the furnace up and running to make sure it’s safe.
6:09
And I want to interject really quick with this. Why do we always check the heat exchanger? Because I know in my past experience of doing this, I’ve been doing this for a long time. We didn’t always do that. And we would fix furnaces that had credit cracked heat exchangers and we would charge the customer to fix the crack heat exchanger. It’s kind of like I’m trying to bring an analogy, what would it be like? I mean, you’re literally putting money towards something that should be basically either the heat exchanger needs to be replaced, or the whole unit needs to be thrown into the recycling heap. You shouldn’t be spending money on this thing. It’s dangerous. I mean, it could literally kill you. So I mean, what would be an analogy of that? Like, I want to say like, changing the brakes on a car that the engine is blown, you know, something like that? Why would you change the brakes on a car that where the engine is blown, you got to replace the engine, right? Same sort of thing. It’s, it’s one of those things where a lot of unfortunately, I can’t say that all companies, I don’t want to pull anybody under throwing anybody under the bus. But I know quite a few companies that don’t check for a cracked heat exchanger. And I know he called and some of them don’t even check it on their on their so called tuneups, or safety inspections. That’s one thing that we really drive hard on our technicians to always check it. Because yeah, we don’t want we don’t want to have that liability. But also it’s I think it’s a disservice to our customers. For not to not check it. Yeah. But anyway, so along with that, sorry, I’d throw that in there. That’s okay.
7:37
So yeah, so it was a no heat call, our technician went out, went through our process of elimination as to what was going on with the furnace. And once he was able to get the fresh running, immediately could see because the furnace was open at that point, that there were some telltale signs that sound was not the heat exchanger. And so he did all the testing that we do carbon dioxide test, we have two different types of pieces of equipment that test for carbon dioxide. Within the home, both those sensors went off. And then we also do a smoke test and a visual test. And what was happening and why the furnace went off was it was having flame roll out. Because the heat exchanger was cracked, actually more than cracked, it had a golf ball size hole in it. And there was huge and so he immediately shut it down and called me and said just what we have going on. So once we verify verified all the testing, we gave the homeowner the option to replace the heat exchanger or replace the whole unit. In this particular instance, the unit was almost 20 years old, and not worth really replacing just that one piece because there’s a lot of other things that can fail down the road. So the customer decided to replace it. And once we got the old unit out and we could actually see down into the heat exchanger from the top, you could see the golf ball size hole and then there were two other holes and it started in a crack along one of the weld scenes of the heat exchanger. So how these customers are alive I don’t know. I mean, honestly, I don’t know how they
9:31
well let’s be clear on this too. So you know a couple things I want to kind of go back on that. Yeah, not all when you burn fuel not all fuel. All burning fuel is going to produce carbon dioxide and there’s gonna be different levels depending on on the the efficiency of combustion like we go through when we do an installation our technicians are instructed to test for thermal combustion, so there’s going to be very little carbon monoxide. So we get as we can reap as much heat from that burning fuel as we can If the less efficient you get candling like a yellow fire is, you know, it’s dropping off a lot carbon monoxide, if you get a nice tight blue flame, you may not get any carbon dioxide. But so they may had a really good efficient running, somebody may have actually done something there and done it. The other thing I wanted to go back on is this carbon monoxide detectors. Because the first thing I’m thinking when you say we came in and checked with our carbon monoxide detectors is well why didn’t the homeowners carbon monoxide detectors go off. And I’m sure a couple people out there that are listening to the show probably thought the same thing. One of the things is those the detectors that we’ve that are installed in homes, I can’t remember what amount that they detect, but it is it’s it’s on, it’s really high and it’s on, it’s at that level where it’s deadly. I mean, it’s like if a carbon tax, if your carbon monoxide detector is going off, it says right on there, don’t reset it, evacuate the house and call 911 Get the fire department out to check it. And you know, I’m I’ve been guilty of that myself where I’ll just go in and unplug it, plug it back in, don’t unplug it, plug it back in, it’s probably doing just be safe. I know I’m old school right now, we’re just talking about boomers. I’m almost a boomer but I just missed it, you should really evacuate the house and have somebody have the fire department coming in to determine that it’s safe. But the detectors that we have, you know, it’s not a $49 detector, I mean, the detectors that we have the ones that are guys were on their persons to make sure that they’re not in a dangerous situation that detects a much lower level of carbon dioxide. And those things. Those are relatively inexpensive, but they’re like 250 bucks. And they only last us about a year, we got to replace them better every year. And then our higher tech ones, the ones that we use for testing equipment, they’re more like the 500 to $1,000 range. So they’re much more sensitive to the amount of carbon monoxide that it’s detected in the air, the PPM level on that we can detect point 001 I mean, it’s really down to a point where it’s 1000s of a percentage, or 1000s of a part per million compared to the normal one where they’re detecting parts per million, not percentage of parts per million. So it’s a much different piece of equipment. I just want to get that straight.
12:23
Yeah. And you know, when we test equipment, we want the equipment to read zero. So in her case, when he called me it was at 36 and climbing coaches and to earn 50 You’re pretty much dead. Yeah. So you know, at at 170 You can pretty much be asleep, it can put you to sleep. So it’s the unfortunate thing is which now this has changed since we were there. The homeowner did not have any carbon monoxide detectors in the home. So that has since changed. She had those installed, as well as we replace the furnace. So you know, I somebody was watching over that family. That’s all I can say no carbon monoxide detectors in the home and it was spewing carbon dioxide into the house. So, and we do you know tuneups all year round, and we check heat exchangers whether it’s 120 degrees outside or two degrees outside. I mean, we always always check heat exchangers it can kill you.
13:32
Yeah, so I’m doing a quick Google search because that’s what I do. Right and I have a little time when I’ve got somebody here helping me you know how much is too much? 50 ppm is occupational hate health and safety limit. That’s a lot. Something’s you know, what does carbon dioxide poison carbon monoxide poisoning is it’s colorless, odorless, tasteless, deadly gas. And that’s one thing I really want to point out. You can’t smell this stuff. Some people we’ve had calls like, I think I smell carbon monoxide. No, you’re you’re smelling aldehydes you’re smelling the byproducts combustion. You’re not smelling the carbon monoxide itself. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t taste it. Carbon monoxide is slightly lighter than air and quickly spreads throughout an entire house. What produces carbon dioxide? Anytime you burn anything can produce carbon dioxide, whether that’s wood, gas, oil, whatever you happen to be burning, it can produce anything you type rubber, it can produce carbon monoxide, right? What are the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning? Carbon monoxide symptoms mimic the flu. And we’ve had this situation where we’ve had customers that have have once we fixed something, they’re like, Oh my God, I feel so much better. I don’t have headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, confusion, irritability. Those are those kinds of things like you may just not feel great and not know why. But you know, when you leave the house and you suddenly feel better when you go outside, you suddenly feel better. You might be getting carbon monoxide poisoning, it’s one of those things where, you know, you don’t really know what’s happening because it can be very subtle, right, you just chalk it off to chalk it off to a, I’ve just, you know, it’s the same year, um, you know, a little headache eats is probably just fighting a bug, right. But it could be carbon dioxide poisoning. So, you know, I want to stress this, if you have any appliances inside your house that burns natural gas, or would really, really, really get a carbon monoxide detector in your house have multiples by code, you’re required to have one now, outside of every bedroom, and on every floor, right? So if you’ve got the bedrooms upstairs, you’re gonna have one downstairs, just in general living area, and then outside of each door of every bedroom. As Rosalie’s looking around like a detector, you live in an apartment building, they should theoretically have it because you’re a landlord supposed to provide these things. So yeah, if you’re a renter, if some of our some of our audience may be renters, and you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector, ring up your landlord, they should put one in I know I own some property and we make sure there’s carbon dioxide detectors in the house because we don’t want anybody falling asleep. We could be liable for that caught your, your Well, I won’t get into that. Kind of jump in please because I’m gonna read some more.
16:20
Also, we had another customer a few years ago, who again had a cracked heat exchanger. She had caught we did not know her this time she called in another company. They just told her her furnace was old, and she needed to replace it. And then she used it two more days, and ended up calling us out there. And her car. The night before we got there after she’d made her appointment with us. She wants to take a nap on our couch. And her smoke her carbon dioxide detector did go off. Thankfully, she called the fire department fire department came out her levels were up towards 300. And she had been having some neurological issues. And once she went to her doctor the next day to get checked out because she’d been exposed. He felt that some of the neurological issues she was having was because she was slowly poising herself every day for who knows how long that heat exchanger had been crack. And that’s also something important to know is that your alarm may not go off. But you still could be having exposure to carbon monoxide on smaller amounts, and it’s causing issues for your health. So even though, you know, you don’t want any carbon monoxide, if you had a small crack, your furnace may run without tripping any sensors or safety switches. And you’re just poisoning yourself slowly. Yeah. One thing you know people say well how to cracks happen. Maintenance is a huge thing, not changing your filters, letting excess heat buildup back at the unit closing registers, people think that if you close registers and rooms you don’t go in your kids are off to college. So you close the registers off in their bedrooms, that you’re saving money, you’re using the same amount of fuel, you’re spending the same amount of money to run your system, whether or not all the registers are open or not. And all you’re doing is causing back pressure to your unit and damage. So all your registers need to be open and you change your filters. Often. You know, if you’re doing
18:36
Tresa net, we stress that pretty much every other show change your filters, change your filters, change your filters. It will extend the life of your of your system, you’ll save money on your heating, you’ll save money on your cooling, and you’re going to make your your equipment lasts longer. And you potentially could save yourself from carbon monoxide poisoning.
18:54
And it’s healthier for you. I mean, you just you know, your once a filter gets clogged anyway, I mean, you’re just recirculating that, that dust and you know grind through your house. So if you’re doing like the inexpensive filters, I tell people once a month, I mean, they generally run five to $8 Depending on where you buy them. That’s an inexpensive expense to, you know, for the health of you and your equipment.
19:21
Can I just say real quick. I’m gonna make a big point of putting this on our social media about the registers being open, because maybe it’s my age, but honestly, I hear this all the time. I mean, I know people that do it all the time. They close the register, because they don’t want to keep an empty room. And when you’re saying about the load on the system, I was like, I mean I can almost visualize like all this pressure building.
19:53
No idea,
19:53
because the air goes through the ductwork. It hits the bottom of the register that isn’t open and now it has it has to go somewhere. So now it’s being pushed back into the system. So it’s a huge, huge issue. And if you’re sitting there going, oh my god, you know, I’m alone in that you’re not i without exaggerating, one in every three houses I go into into has a minimum of 20% of their registers closed. Yeah. Yeah. And they just don’t know, they literally think they’re just saving money. And they’re not.
20:28
I mean, I think I think maybe it’s because I grew up in a really big house. And my dad was a cheapskate, about a lot of things, and was definitely in charge of the thermostat. But I remember like, my brother moved out all the vents in his room. And my dad was a building contractor, like, should know stuff, you know,
20:49
we didn’t I mean, I, I’m learning all this stuff in my, my fifth, 40s and 50s, right. I’m just gonna go back to what, what does a carbon monoxide detector to tech, so I’ve been frantically googling here, because I couldn’t remember all the real numbers. So the seal alarm will sound if the sensor detects a buildup of carbon dioxide in your home, usually, before you start seeing sensing symptoms, usually, with a low level of 50 parts per million, which is still pretty high, it may take up to eight hours for the alarm to go off, higher levels of carbon dioxide is up, over 150 parts per million can trigger an alarm within minutes. So it will take a while at those lower levels. But if you go back to this one night, if you have a PPM reading of nine parts per million for more than eight hours is suspected to produce adverse health effects and persons at risk. So if you’re at all at risk, you like our client that was having neurological damage or logical issues, she was at risk, right? So it won’t take as much and you know, we live in Nevada County, and the majority of you guys are listening to us live in Nevada County. We’re an older population of your work, you know, if you’re over 50, if you’re over 50, you’re at risk, I’m sorry, I’m like, I’m 50. I’ll be 56 this year, like oh my god, I’m like, I’m over 55, I can go to this RV parks that are 55 or over a proud AARP member. But in any of it, you got to take those things into account. Yeah, and with that, so sorry to you know, we just really wanted this kind of a PSA. But it was also a marketing thing for us as well, you know, give us a call, we’ll come out and take a look at this for you. If you don’t want to use us. There are other companies that do this. But make sure that if you do get an HVAC technician out there, make sure ask them pointedly Are you going to check the heat exchanger for a break? Are you going to check for carbon monoxide? Make sure they do that because I know a lot of companies don’t necessarily do that. They just do a cursory look at the filter. See how old the system is? If it’s over 20 years old, years old, they’re gonna recommend a new one. We don’t do that. It was
23:00
sorry. If they say they don’t do that. Or you know, that’s not part of their thing. Or it’s newer, and it should be fine. Call on another company.
23:08
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So with that, if you do need HVAC help, plumbing, electrical help, you can give us a call at 530-272-3090 Nope. 530 you do it? Are you muted? five threes? I can’t remember a phone number now. 23090925302309092 Well, you told me that I was doing it wrong. But anyway, I don’t know why I did rock. She’s mouthing stuff. Anyway, you can call us on that. Or you can find us on the web at easiest abc.com or ABC plumbing.com Find us on Facebook. Please like our page. We share all this stuff. Most of our stuff on Facebook and social media, on YouTube and on Instagram is just informational and entertaining. It’s not trying to sell you stuff. So like us, like our pages. And with that, we’ll catch you guys next week. Thanks for listening. Bye