![]() The national fuel gas code allows for a maximum of 400 parts per million of CO, measured air-free. Furnaces can backdraft, exhaust gas can leak out of appliances into the home, and cracked heat exchangers can allow carbon monoxide to leak into the air stream for the home. Even though all of the exhaust gas for a furnace is supposed to be exhausted to the outside, things happen. And the higher the CO level, the greater the potential danger for people living in the home. If a furnace produces too much carbon monoxide, it’s not burning properly which is a waste of fuel. There’s always some amount of CO generated by a furnace, and that’s acceptable. In the real world, this is also called Theoretical Combustion, because it doesn’t happen. There would be no carbon monoxide generated, and no wasted fuel. If a furnace were to burn all of its available fuel, and I mean 100%, you’d have something called stoichiometric combustion. Today, I’ll share what our policies and procedures are for performing carbon monoxide testing on a furnace, along with some hard and fast rules that I know for certain.Ĭarbon monoxide, also known as CO, is an odorless gas that is produced by fuel-fired equipment. But we still do combustion testing here at Structure Tech, and we’ve been using the same test methods for the last decade or so. ![]() So much so that at one point, I almost decided to stop doing combustion testing on furnaces altogether. I’ve heard a ton of conflicting information from so-called experts in the field. I’ve been doing this home inspection thing for a couple of decades, and I have yet to sit through a single class where the teacher is 100% on-point when it comes to combustion testing of furnaces. ![]()
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