Brent Lawson Facebook ad: “CO Poisoning: What I missed as an HVAC Tech”

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1528882768968657

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I found out last Tuesday that someone I've shaken hands with over the years is dead from something I work around every single day. I need to say that again because I still don't fully believe it. I'm an HVAC technician in South Georgia. Been doing this over twelve years. My whole job… the thing I wake up and drive to somebody's house to do… is keep families safe and comfortable, especially in our summers down here where the heat'll take your breath away by nine in the morning. I work on AC systems, gas appliances, stoves, furnaces, and water heaters. I know what these machines do when they're running right, and I know what they do when they're not. Last Tuesday night I was on the couch scrolling my phone after a long day. Twelve-hour shift, three service calls, all of them summer AC work. My wife was already in bed. The house was quiet. I was about to put the phone down and call it a night when I saw a post in a community group. An obituary, actually. Shared by a family asking for prayers. I recognized the last name before I even opened it. The person who died was related to a buddy of mine. Someone I've known for years. I won't say his name because that's his business, but he's the one who told me I could share this, and he asked me to, because he wants other people to hear it before it's too late. He said that to me directly. "Tell people, man. Just tell people." That obituary you see in this post was part of his family. He permitted me to share it publicly because he doesn't want what happened to them to happen to yours. So I'm telling you. The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning. In the summer. Not winter. Not from a furnace running in January. Not from some ancient heating system in an old farmhouse. It happened in the summer, with the air conditioning running, in a home that looked perfectly normal from the outside. That's the part that made me set my phone down and just sit there for a minute. Because I've been in homes like that. I've been in hundreds of homes like that. Homes where the AC is running all day and all night, every window shut tight, every door sealed up because nobody in their right mind opens a window in South Georgia in July. Homes where families are cooking dinner on gas stoves while the central air recirculates the same air through the same ducts over and over and over. Homes where a water heater or a gas dryer is tucked away in a closet or a utility room with barely any ventilation, running quietly while the family sleeps. I've been in those homes and checked the AC and said, "You're all good" and walked out the door. And I never once, not one time in twelve-something years, thought to myself: what if something in this sealed-up house is producing carbon monoxide right now and the AC is just circulating it from room to room to room? That thought didn't hit me until 1:52 in the morning last Tuesday. I know the exact time because I looked at my phone right before I typed the first search. I sat in my living room in the dark with the blue light of my phone on my face and I searched "carbon monoxide summer air conditioning." And what I found made me feel something I haven't felt in a long time doing this work. I felt afraid. Everything I thought I knew was either incomplete or flat-out wrong. I always assumed you'd smell it. You can't. Carbon monoxide has no smell. Zero. The thing people think they're smelling is mercaptan, which is added to natural gas, but CO itself is completely odorless. If a gas appliance is producing CO through incomplete combustion, which can happen with something as minor as a slightly misaligned burner or a cracked heat exchanger, there is nothing for your nose to catch. I always assumed it was a winter problem. It isn't. In the summer, people seal up their homes more tightly than at any other time of year because the AC is running nonstop. That means less fresh air coming in. Less dilution. If there's a source producing even small amounts of CO, a gas stove cooking supper, a water heater cycling on and off, a dryer running in a closed laundry room, that gas has nowhere to go. The AC doesn't filter it out. The AC just moves it. Into the bedroom. Into the nursery. Into the hallway where your kids are sleeping on the floor because it's cooler down there. By 2:18 AM, I had read enough to feel physically sick. Not because I'd learned something new in some abstract, textbook way. But because I understood, maybe for the first time, that the exact conditions I help create in people's homes every single day, a tight seal, a well-functioning AC system, a comfortable indoor temperature, those are the same conditions that allow carbon monoxide to accumulate silently. The better the AC works, the less air exchange there is with the outside. The less air exchange, the more anything produced inside the house stays inside the house. And if one of those gas appliances has even a small, invisible malfunction, something you'd never see, never hear, never smell, the CO just builds. Slowly. Quietly. While everyone sleeps. I sat there staring at my phone and I thought about the call I'd finished that afternoon. A family in Valdosta. Mom, dad, two little kids. Their AC had been acting up and they'd been running it hard because the humidity was brutal. I fixed the compressor. They thanked me. I left. And it didn't even cross my mind to ask if they had a working CO detector in the house. Not once. I actually got up off the couch and walked into the hallway where our own CO detector is plugged in. It's one of those basic ones from the hardware store with the little green light. It was glowing. I stood there and looked at it and I realized I had no idea when I'd bought it, whether it had expired, or whether it could even detect the kind of low-level CO buildup that happens in a sealed summer home before it's too late. That green light used to mean everything was fine. Now I'm not so sure what it means. I don't really know how to end this because I'm not trying to sell you anything or make some big dramatic point. I'm just a guy who works on AC systems and gas appliances for a living, and last week I found out that the thing I never thought about is the thing that can kill a family in their sleep during the safest-feeling season of the year. And I keep looking at that obituary and thinking about how normal everything must have felt in that house the night before. If your AC is running right now and your windows are closed, you're living in a sealed environment. If anything in your home runs on gas, stove, water heater, dryer, anything, you need to know whether you'd actually be warned if something went wrong. Not "I think so." Not "the green light's on." Actually warned. With real numbers. Before it's too late. I'm writing this at the kitchen table at a quarter past five in the morning because I couldn't sleep again. My wife asked me what was wrong and I told her I'd explain later. I don't know how to explain it to her yet because I'm still working through what it means that I've spent twelve years doing this job and I missed this. I ended up spending most of that night reading everything I could find about how carbon monoxide actually behaves in summer homes and what kind of detection actually works versus what just sits on the wall and gives you a green light that doesn't mean much. I put together what I learned because I figured if a guy who's been doing this for twelve years didn't know, most homeowners probably don't either. If you want to see what I found, it's below. No sales pitch. Just what I wish someone had shown me before last Tuesday. 👉 https://truststeadfast.com/pages/ac

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truststeadfast.com

CO Poisoning: What I missed as an HVAC Tech

Steadfast