How to get racoons out of a garage?

[ktos]

Out racoons, out!

[mkirsch1]

Yes, but you can't have CO without smoke from the car's exhaust, and that smoke is noxious and unpleasant after a short time. The coughing and watering eyes will tell any animal with a survival instinct to GET OUT long before the CO does any permanent damage.

[Don Bruder]

Erm... In a word, *WRONG*. While it is true that smoke and CO often "come as a set", the presence of one is *TOTALLY* worthless as an indicator of the presence or absence of the other. They can (and frequently do) exist separately - Smoke with no CO, or CO with no smoke. Just because a fire/car exhaust/whatever is putting out a cloud of smoke DOES NOT mean that it's putting out any significant quantity of CO. It's *PROBABLE* that it is, but "probable" doesn't equal "it is".

Hint: Someone could pump your house so full of CO that there's nothing else in the atmosphere, and you'd never have the first clue that they had done so - You'd simply die, quite probably without ever noticing anything beyond "Damn, this headache I've got really sucks". Likewise, that same someone could pump your house so full of smoke that you can't see your hand in front of your face, yet not put so much as a single molecule of CO into your atmosphere.

Smoke is nothing more or less than particulates (whose chemical composition could be almost anything) fine enough to remain at least temporarily suspended in the air.

CO *MIGHT* be a component of smoke, but the presence of smoke *DOES NOT* imply that CO is present.

CO, on the other hand, is a very clearly defined chemical compound that can (and all too frequently does) exist without the slightest trace of smoke.

[Grizzly]

not put so much as a single

Absolutely right on. CO is an odorless gas..that headache and perhaps a bit of nausea are the only indicators that something is amiss. Our furnace at the old house had a cracked heat exchanger..it was a gas furnace, so no odor was emitted and if the house had been airtight we would have been dead, but it was poorly insulated and the crack where the threshold met the back door was a full two inches without any weatherstripping..we replaced the furnace, and no more headache/nausea. There was never any smoke involved in that situation.