CO Scare

Well, yesterday, when we got home from grocery shopping, I went downstairs and noticed that it seemed a little too "humid". My first thought was the water heater so I checked the carpet and it was alright, so I didn't think anything more about it. I just figured that it was our kettle because I was boiling water at the time. Well, this morning Spencer went downstairs to get some cereal for the girls for breakfast and he thought the same thing. When he opened the door to the pantry he was blasted in the face with exhaust from our heater. He immediately went to the crawl space and discovered that the exhaust line from the heater had come apart. He rushed upstairs, pail as a ghost, and started to panic. I remained calm while he was in hysterics about carbon monoxide poisoning. We opened our windows all through out the house and called 911. The fire truck came, I wish I had gotten pictures but oh well, while we were all in the car keeping warm and they went through our house testing for carbon monoxide. The test actually came back zero, but we had had our windows open for a while before they got here. We were really lucky to have woken up this morning. Spencer didn't think I was taking any of it seriously, but I reassured him that I was serious, just calm because he wasn't. He felt better after that.

After the firemen left, we called our service people and I went and got four CO detectors for our house. The guy gave us an estimate and I thought that it was reasonable for what it sounded like he was going to do. I thought he was going to be here for a while fixing things, but he wasn't. He was here a whole of, at most , ten minutes. He added a band on the exhaust pipe shown here:
And then he screwed in some screws to keep what had come apart from coming apart again, shown here:

He charged us $200 for this and I didn't think that was right. We had a scary and busy morning and I wasn't about to go to bed tonight feeling like we were robbed, so I gave them a call. I asked if they would accept a kidney as payment and they laughed, but in the end I talked them down a little, to the point that we were happy with the price. The guy gave me some shpeel about running and keeping a business and I came back with how we are trying to stay in our home. The economy affects us too.

We are very lucky that nothing bad happened. We are all OK and are feeling fine. I'm glad that it is fixed, that we have our CO detectors and that it is behind us. I've had enough scares to last me the rest of my life, I hope this is the end.

The girls were really cute with the firemen. One of them just lives a few houses away from us, that was neat. They were really helpful and I'm glad that we called them.