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Hackney Council have been active in alerting their council housing tenants to the dangers of CO (Carbon Monoxide) and have supplied and fitted carbon monoxide alarms to safeguard their tenants from the silent killer. They have also followed up at each home fitted with the alarm with regular inspections and servicing, however when they had a high amount of alarms being triggered, the inspection team wanted to know if they had a faulty batch of CO detectors or something more sinister was going on in people’s homes.
It transpired to be a more common cause than anticipated. Certain forms of cooking were in fact triggering the alarms to go off as Carbon monoxide is produced when fossil fuels are burnt – i.e. charcoal, gas or oil – in an area without the correct amount of ventilation. This can cause a build up of carbon monoxide, which in turn can result in feelings of illness and even death. The council carried out an investigation and they found that the problems was caused by cooking oil in pans in badly ventilated kitchen areas starving the area of oxygen in turn creating a dangerous level of CO.
The CIPHE (The Chartered Institute of Plumbing and Heating Engineering) and Carbon Monoxide Awareness Ltd recommend that areas are well ventilated and suggest not using aluminium foil inside trays under grill pans, as this stops the air flow in the cooking, despite it being a popular method of keeping drip trays clean.
If you have concerns about inadequate ventilation in your home, or would like a carbon monoxide detector installed in your kitchen, please speak with one of the local handymen in London featured in our Tradesmen’s Directory and attract competitive quotes from handymen in London with our “Post-a-Job” facility at the top of this page.