LAMP OIL, GAS, DIESEL,
COLEMAN FUEL, KEROSENE, ETC.
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I'm not a chemical engineer, but I don't see how you can burn hyrdocarbons and not produce any CO, at least not reliably, in a confined space like our boats...
At the very least, it has to suck O2, which I kinda like having available...
Alcohol combustion makes less CO than Hydrocarbons as the contain oxygen in the alcohol functional group.
The more oxygen rich environment you have the more CO2 you make, vs CO.
I would rank any claims of burning fuels not making CO as dubious. ITs not uncommon to see soot from an ethanol (alcohol) fire under normal conditions - soot is an indicator of extremely poor Oxygen mix so loads of CO is being formed generally.
This is a subject that is typically full of inaccuracies, biases, and strong opinions. While these are often based on real instances, unfortunately, these are seldom correct for any particular case. I'm sure we've all heard about people dying of carbon monoxide poisoning because of improperly vented furnaces or hot water heaters. The problem with this idea is that while hot water heaters and furnaces are vented even if they are gas, stoves are not. Gas stoves, whether propane or natural gas are vented directly into the room. Now, a typical furnace would have more btu capacity than a stove but a hot water heater would not. So, we get to a fact that a lot of people would not believe. Almost all gas burning appliances will do so with almost no carbon monoxide production which is why stoves are vented directly into the room. However, in some rare cases you can have an appliance that is old or malfunctioning and the combustion is not as efficient as it typically is. In these rare cases it would be a threat to health and life. The websites mentioned above don't apply because they are for contained, rapid flame front, internal combustion engines and not for open flame combustion.
I'm not an armchair expert on this. I'm building onto my house which had a chimney along the old kitchen wall. However, I removed this wall and had to remove the chimney as well. This left the main gas furnace vented directly into the house. It still is and now that it is winter my furnace is running all the time and I have no sign ug carbous moxide poisn g ; , .
Just kidding. The reason I know that there is no carbon monoxide is because I tested it with an accurate detector. One of those really good stick on cards that changes color. Just kidding again. My dectector will read out CO levels in parts per million. The only way I was able to get a reading was by putting the detector directly in the exhaust vent and even then the CO was at safe levels. My furnace is not new; it's several decades old in fact. My parents also had a 14,000 BTU kerosene heater that vented directly into the room. It was safe and had been thorougly tested and approved for use indoors. Under normal circumstances it only produced a little bit of fumes when it first started up but would become clean burning as it got to operating temperature in about 10 seconds. However, any water in the kerosene would disrupt this so it had to have a flawless water separator. Even a tiny bit of water in the line would have caused it to burn unevenly and produce CO. Alcohol on the other hand isn't bothered by water like this.
So, what does this mean? Well, basically, it isn't that difficult to have a propane or alchohol lamp or stove that puts off almost no CO. It is more difficult to do this with a stove that burns fuel oil, kerosene, or lamp oil although it can be done. However, the only way to be sure is to test with an accurate CO tester. If the level is safe then it would still be a very good idea to use a CO alarm. My preference would be one that allows you to see the current and high CO levels but these are more expensive. I had a regular CO alarm in my 30' travel trailer in addition to the smoke detector.
However, I'm also going to say that 10,000 BTU's/hr in a small cabin seems like an awful lot to me. It is certainly possible to produce dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide in a confined space even if carbon monoxide levels are low. I should also point out that if oxygen levels get too low then a stove that wasn't producing CO when running normally could start producing it as it slips below its normal operating conditions. It's hard to say beyond this because different cabins could have different amounts of ventilation and varying degrees of how tight the hatches seal. So, what does this mean? Basically, unless you monitor CO2 levels as well as CO levels (or maybe keep a canary on your boat?) there is no way to know how safe your fuel burning heater is in a confined space even if it burns alcohol or propane. So, I guess I mostly agree with the above posters about the potential danger even if I don't agree about the cause. I guess it would be safer to use more blankets and fire up the heater once you are awake in the morning.
However, if you want the numbers I can post them (and all of the math too if you like). This is based on the reaction formula of:
2 CH3OH + 3 O2 --> 2 CO2 + 4 H20
Then you run the bond energy lost and gained on the conversion like 99 Kcals/mol of energy lost for each Carbon/Hydrogen bond that is broken. Then convert Kcals to Btus and moles to grams and grams to lbs. I got 11,900 BTU's per lb of methyl alcohol. Then using required moles of oxygen converting to liters and then cu ft. using the ideal gas law. I calculated the required oxygen at 80 cu. ft. Roughly I'd say that the cabin on a Macgregor 26 is about 4X this so you would need to exchange 1/4 of the cabin air for each lb of alcohol burned. This would be about 1 and 1/4 pints of alcohol per hour. This would be like burning 4 and 1/2 cans of sterno at the same time.
We're having a little cold spell right now in northern FL. Temperatures in the mid to high thirties in the morning. We use heat pumps, which are electric, and sort of run the air conditioning backwards. They're pretty efficient when it's chilly, but become much less so when it gets cold.
We use the fake log propane fireplace to huddle up to with our morning coffee. This one was one of the first where you completely close off the flue. I notice that it generates a dank smelling 'stink' that has to be put up with. I've never been concerned of danger because the house, although nice, is hardly air tight. The curtains move when the wind comes up, etc.
So, I'm wondering if I should get some kind of detector, and if so, where would I go and what would I ask for?
An interesting point - How much FRESH air per person is needed in a Mac to be "healthy"?
I remember seeing these figures somewhere. I have also heard of people having trouble with the boat closed up.
I'm not sure what I can say about your propane fireplace. You can get a CO alarm at home improvement stores and even places like Walmart and Kmart. But, CO2 and CO are both odorless so that can't be causing a stink. I believe most propane and natural gas sources are tagged with an odorant (like rotten eggs) so that you can detect a leak. But I assume this isn't the kind of smell that you are talking about.
The canary was of course tongue in cheek. The only practical way I can see to test with a live canary would be to leave the canary in the cabin by itself and check on its health in the morning.
Okay, if you want to talk about human respiration we can. Human respiration is actually pretty complex with sugar getting changed first to lactic acid but let's say we skip that and the whole citric acid cycle and just look at the start and finish. People metabolize sugar which combined with oxygen makes carbon dioxide and water, so:
This means that for each sugar molecule we'll need 6 oxygen molecules. It's easy to find out how many calories are in sugar. Sugar has 4 Kcals per gram. Now we just need to know how many moles that is. Carbon weighs 12, Hydrogen weighs 1, and Oxygen weighs 16. So 6x12 + 12x1 + 6x16 = 180. One molecule of sugar weighs 180 grams per mole.
Now, an adult may burn up about 3,500 Kcals/day so let's say you burn about 800 Kcals while you are sleeping. BTW, when you talk about calories for people these are actually KiloCalories or 1000 calorie units rather than real calorie units. But you have to be clear when you do math so that's why I keep saying Kcals. The Calorie unit you read on, say, a box of cereal is actually a Kcal. So, anyway, if we burn up 800 Kcals and sugar has 4 Kcals per gram then 800 Kcals /4 = 200 grams of sugar. We've already said that one mole of sugar weighs 180 grams so we have just a tiny bit over one mole. Let's just round that down and call it one mole even. From the reaction above we know that we need 6 moles of O2 for each mole of sugar so we need 6 moles of O2.
According to the Ideal Gas Law one mole of any gas occupies 22.414 Liters at Standard Temperature and Pressure. We are close enough to STP to ignore the difference. 22.4 liters would be .79 cu ft. So, our O2 will take up 6 x .79 = 4.74 cu ft. However, the atmosphere is only about 21% O2 so dividing by .21 we get 22.6 cubic feet. Divide this by 8 hours and you get almost 3. So, it would take about 6 adults to use up as much oxygen as 1 can of sterno.
Brent's posts above are almost an exact quote on what I was going to say, except I was going to use a parrot, instead of a canary, but I wasn't sure how to spell parott, because I didn't know if parot had one r or two, as in parrott.
Nah ... a parrot is much, much messier than a canary.
And he eats to much, and s#its too much too!
Also, they're frequently nasty - might even terrorize the dogs.
Finally, the parrot increases parasitic losses - with his much bigger-than-necessary size of body, he consumes too much of the Oxygen that he's hired to test!
OTOH, at least his bigger body would awaken me when he hits the deck!
Frank C wrote:Nah ... a parrot is much, much messier than a canary.
And he eats to much, and s#its too much too!
Also, they're frequently nasty - might even terrorize the dogs.
Finally, the parrot increases parasitic losses - with his much bigger-than-necessary size of body, he consumes too much of the Oxygen that he's hired to test!
OTOH, at least his bigger body would awaken me when he hits the deck!
