Family | Carbon Monoxide Awareness With CORGI Homeplan

Summer is finally here and we’ve finally been granted a few days (hopefully weeks) when we can turn the heating off, abandon all cooking and eat from the BBQ. But with it not ever really lasting round these here parts, before you know it we’ll be wrapped up in the house again. So once you turn the heating back on after it being out of action for a while, you just hope that everything’s in working order. But hope alone won’t save you from ‘The Silent Killer’ – carbon monoxide.

Each year in the UK, in excess of 200 people go to hospital with suspected carbon monoxide poisoning, with around 40 of those people losing their lives. The elderly and small children are most at risk and CORGI Homeplan are campaigning for every home to have fitted, and working, carbon monoxide detector in order to keep families safe. In the last three years, approximately one in six homes inspected by the Gas Safe Register was found to have an unsafe gas appliance, such as a cooker, and as many as one in eleven having an unsafe boiler.

Packed with easy to follow advice and warning signs to look out for, CORGI Homeplan’s microsite is an easy “go to” reference for homeowners who aren’t sure how to protect themselves and their families, and what to do when things go wrong at home.

Carbon monoxide is dubbed ‘The Silent Killer’ because it’s a colourless, odourless and tasteless gas. As such, it’s then difficult to detect and can easily be inhaled without you even realising. Being exposed to high concentration levels can be fatal or cause several other long-term health problems such as brain damage. A good example of just how important it is to protect yourself is the the story of Bobby and Christi Shepherd, two children who died after a broken boiler leaked the deadly gas into their Corfu hotel room in 2006 while they were on holiday.

There are a few things you can keep an eye that may give a tell tale sign that carbon monoxide is leaking into your home:

• The flame on your cooker should be crisp and blue. Yellow or orange flames mean you need to get your cooker checked
• Dark staining around or on appliances
• Sooty marks on the walls around boilers, stoves or the cover of gas fires
• Pilot lights that frequently go out
• Increased condensation inside windows

If, like me, you’ve been meaning to get a carbon monoxide detector for a while, please don’t put off! Thanks to CORGI we now have one ready to be installed in our home – no batteries required and with a 10 year life. For such a small price for a detector, it’s worth getting one before you pay the ultimate price with your life. Make sure you’re protected.

*This post is in collaboration with CORGI Homeplan.