Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
• Disorientation
• Unusually bright red lips (common, but not always)
• May feel like the flu, but you feel better when outside or away from the home
• Often effects pets and elderly, or those with a heart condition, before others
• May effect all household members at same time, rather than passing from one to the
next like a typical flu
Treatment for Carbon Monoxide Poisoning:
• Get victim into fresh air immediately!
• Contact emergency personnel, if available, and perform CPR if necessary.
• Treatment may require supplemental oxygen, either by oxygen mask or hyperbaric
oxygen therapy in a pressurized oxygen tent.
• Find and correct problem leading to CO poisoning.
Heating with Wood
As a backup source of heat for cooking, melting snow, and keeping your home warm and toasty
when the power goes out, it is hard to beat good old-fashioned wood. When Benjamin Franklin
invented the first enclosed woodstove, he felt it was too important an invention to patent, so he
gave the design for his “Franklin Box” to the world. Prior to this time, people kept themselves
warm by standing in front of open fireplaces that send most of their heat up the chimney and
only radiate a small portion of the heat back into the room. An open fireplace constantly sucks
large volumes of cold outside air into the house to replace the hot air that flows out the chim-
ney.
The original Franklin Box probably cut wood consumption by three-quarters and made for
better-heated homes with fewer drafts. Modern EPA-rated woodstoves have considerably im-
proved burning efficiencies beyond that of the simple Franklin Box. Rather than dumping a
significant portion of your energy up the chimney in the form of thick wood smoke, new stoves
encourage secondary-burning processes in different areas of the combustion chamber. In each
of these combustion zones, some of the heat that would have escaped up the chimney of con-
ventional woodstoves is instead captured and transferred to your home. In this way, the maxim-
um heating value is extracted from your fuel with minimal environmental impact. EPA-rated,
highly efficient woodstoves burn roughly one-half the fuel of traditional noncertified wood-
stoves.
