I’m vigilant with checking smoke detectors in my house.
My best friend Chris had to be ushered out of his house in the middle of the night when his father fell asleep while cooking a meal.
This was in high school and it had a deleterious effect on Chris, in part showing him the vaporous quality of most Earthly possessions. He learned that the things you own can be destroyed and taken away in the blink of an eye. If his father had working smoke detectors, there’s a chance he could have woken up quick enough to put the fire out. When I heard this all of those years ago, I started checking the smoke detectors in my parent’s house. When my college roommates saw me doing it at our house, they were perplexed. I told them they would thank me if anyone started a kitchen fire while cooking, but thankfully that never happened. In all of these years of being vigilant with smoke detectors, I never once bought or inspected a carbon monoxide detector. I was stupidly using gas appliances for years with a single carbon monoxide detector in my house. My HVAC technician asked me about it during an inspection and service call recently, and my mind raced as soon as he said it. I asked him to install one from his truck before I can get half a dozen of them from the hardware store to put in every room and zone of the house. I learned that when gas appliances malfunction, they sometimes fail to combust all of the fuel running through them. The leaking byproduct is colorless and odorless carbon monoxide, which can build to deadly levels quickly without detectors in place.