Flashing Lights

Hello people! I am sleepy. See, I woke up at 6:00 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, because my body thought it was noon. Oh, silly body.

So we are back! From an awesome 12 day vacation! In London! And Paris! And many more exclamation points!!! It was a fantastic trip and I will post many photos soon. But I didn’t get a chance to look through them last night because we had other exciting things to attend to, as you shall see.

We got off the plane shortly before 4:00 and after clearing Customs in record time, we finally got back to the house around 6:30. I pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the car.

beep beep beep beep!

“Jose, is that beeping coming from OUR house?”

We walked in the front door and it was silent, so I thought it must have been coming from somewhere else. But then, about 5 minutes later:

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP! (pause) BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!

The beeping was most definitely inside our house and without the walls to muffle it, it was now quite LOUD. And since four of the alarms in our house are wired together (in our bedroom, corner of the living room, front hallway, and bonus room), if one goes off — they ALL go off. We quickly identified the bonus room alarm as the source and unplugged it, which stopped the other three from sounding. But the alarm that Jose now held in his hand kept going off. Further inspection showed that it wasn’t just the “my batteries are low” sound either — it was the “I’ve detected a concerning amount of carbon monoxide” alarm.

Well. Lovely.

Jose took the alarm into the backyard, where it quickly stopped beeping in the fresh air. We spent the next hour eating dinner, googling carbon monoxide detectors, and debating what do. Since we were past business hours, the only phone number we could find was 911 — and I had a strong suspicion that calling 911 would result in sirens, lights, and a lot of people at our house. We considered just sleeping with the bedroom windows open that night and dealing with the alarm today during business hours. (I should also note that we did the smart thing and opened some windows, along with closely monitoring ourselves for any symptoms of CO poisoning! The symptoms of CO poisoning are unfortunately somewhat similar to jetlag.)

Still, carbon monoxide is odorless, colorless, and tasteless so even though I suspected a false alarm — how can you ever really know for sure? One of my coworkers is also a League City firefighter so I traded a bunch of text messages with him. On his direction, we checked the water heater pilot lights, since the alarm that went off was the one closest to those, but they looked healthy. I asked if it could have been set off by dust — because we had turned off the air conditioning up in the bonus room, so there’d been no real airflow up there for almost 2 full weeks — but he said no. (And upon further thought later, I realized that while lack of airflow means dust accumulation, lack of airflow could also mean CO was accumulating.) He offered to come over with his carbon monoxide sniffer, because he is a very nice guy, but he lives all the way on the other side of League City and I just didn’t feel right inconveniencing him like that.

Our neighbor rang the doorbell at one point because she’d seen our car back in the driveway. She knew we were out of town and had been watering our plants in the backyard — and she heard the alarm going off yesterday. It just started yesterday, so at least it hadn’t been going off all week!

Two hours had now passed since we’d gotten home, and the alarm hadn’t gone off again. But neither one of us was totally comfortable with going to bed in the face of a possible carbon monoxide leak. So finally I called 911.

“League City 911, what’s your emergency?”

“Ok, I don’t have an immediate life-and-death emergency, but I have a question about carbon monoxide detectors and what to do if they go off.”

“Is yours sounding an alarm?”

“Yes. See, we’ve been out of town for almost 2 weeks and when we came home it was going off. We really don’t need the full fire department but is there someone who can check –”

“Have everyone leave the house. The fire department is on the way.”

Like I suspected, you can’t call 911 and NOT end up with the fire department at your house. Oh well. As soon as I hung up the phone, I got another text message from my coworker, who was obviously listening to the radio: “You should have just asked me to come over. Now you’re gonna have 10 people at your door.”

Jose and I went out into the front yard to wait, and soon I heard the distant wail of a siren. It’s definitely a weird feeling to hear a siren in the distance and know they’re coming to YOUR house. Sure enough, a couple minutes later this came down the street:

They turned the siren off before the entered the neighborhood, but all the lights were flashing. It was like the sun driving down our street. It was cool, funny, and slightly embarrassing — but I know they were just doing their job. If you get a call from someone who says their CO alarm is going off, you have to assume that there truly is CO building up in their house.

All told, two fire trucks and one other fire department vehicle showed up. Four guys in full fire gear went inside for a while and tested everything while a couple other guys stood outside talking to us. The neighbors all came out. The kids gawked at the fire truck. Good times.

In the end, they didn’t find any traces of carbon monoxide. It could have been a false alarm, or it could be that by turning on the AC again and opening the windows, we flushed it out of the house. Today we get to go buy a new detector just in case the old one got saturated with actual CO, and hopefully we won’t have any recurring alarms and thus no actual CO problem.

And I hope I never have a fire engine at my house again!