My heater is giving off a funny smell in my apartment. It’s a wall-heater, only 400 years old, and I’d sort of like it to work, so that I don’t either asphixiate or freeze this winter.
I’ve contacted the management company, but, in the meantime, I thought I’d write to my Dad and see what he had to say about the matter. He’s pretty handy, and also works for an architecture firm. Anyway, he’s smart.
He wrote back:
Try to put the heat up for a day with the window open and bathroom fan going … There is a carbon monoxide detector on the way to your office address. Should be there by Friday AM.
Underpants from Mom; carbon monoxide detector from Dad. It occurs to me that not much has changed since college.
Jennie Smash 
Carbon monoxide is odorless.
It’s now actually law that your landlord has to provide a carbon moonoxide detector…
it’s illegal for your landlord to have not installed one by late fall of last year.
i love your parents!! they send the greates stuff huh?!
CO is oderless, thus the need for a detector, but if you have other smells of combustion, then you can bet your tuity-fruities that you’ve got CO, too. The stinkers will make you feel sick, but it’s the CO that comes with them that will kill you.
Of course, the smell could just be the dust from the summer or paint on the heater, which in that case, will go away quickly…
AH… Jennie Smash… you are still out there, are you not? Listen to the sound of my voice. How many finger am I holding up?
OK Dad, but I’m still tryin’ to think just how “smells of combustion” could travel from some furnace burried deep in the bowels of Smash Central up a water or steam pipe into Jennie’s wee compartment? I reckon your burning dust theory holds stronger merrit.
You be nice to my Daddy or I’ll SMASH YOU.
Hey the underpants are useful for this problem too. You tie them around your nose and mouth thus saving you from asphyxiation!
Love,
Ma Smash
Hey Anonymous, if you make one more mocking comment to or about my dad, I will find out who you are and where you live, and I will bite you and bite you until you are dead. Toodles!
It’s all OK, just that anonymous doesn’t know that the heater is actually in the apartment, not down in the basement or something. It turned out OK, though was just oil spilled by the burner-service guy, who I guess smells fuel oil so much he doesn’t understand that leaving a mess like that is noxious to everyone else…. kind of like me with tin whistle music. Outside of an Irish bar with 17 musicians and 400 people, the sound is pretty shrill, but I pipe all over the place. Subways, the river walk, Beacon Hill, Columbus Ave., and, especially, in the shower.
yes, he is.