Is it normal to smell natural gas near water heater?

Odorant can fool you.

I worked at a place out in the country that had a small motel for new emplo yees until they found a place. There were maybe a dozen rooms. The place smelled so strong of gas I wouldn't have walked near it. Their claim was t hat it was normal. The odorant addition machine only came in one size, and so they had a large unit for that tiny motel. With that much odorant bein g added it was bound to smell.

In hindsight, they were probably lying, but we all did survive. And move o ut quickly.

No "safe amount" of any explosive gas can be detected by human nose. Our noses have not been trained to discriminate between safe and unsafe odours. This is why gas companies ask people to notify them if they ever smell gas.

Natural gas has no detectable odor at all -- it's only the mercaptan oderant added that can be detected by the nose. It's so strong simply so that a tiny amount is detectable by almost everybody (albeit I can often not notice the trace amounts spoken of above when some others claim it smells strongly of it to them; my sniffer ain't so hot as some I gather).

The measurement devices used by the gas co aren't "smelling", they're using active sensing to detect the actual methane/propane/whatever...

This is a farm residence/homestead; the pot is at the tap off the pipeline at the meter location some quarter-mile from the house...which brings up other stories that initially was un-metered tap for farm/house use as part of the right-of-way easement grandfather negotiated in the

Why is it worse when a camper goes boom than when a home does?

I have CO and smoke detectors, but wrt NG and flame, I say, Bring it on!

Getting more common - Co detectors are now MANDATORY in any living space in Ontario, joining smoke detectors. Many Co detectors are combination natural gas detectors. $63 is about the average cost. Likely more like $40 yankee bucks.

At least it is natural gas, which is lighter than air and dissipates, instead of propane which pools on the floor until it reaches an ignition source.

Years ago my brother gave me a CO detector for my birthday. He always finds good things to buy, that I don't even realize would be good**

I don't remember how the problem started. but the loud CO alarm woke me up one night. I opened the window and turned off the oil furnace. It was a cold night, and after a while I was torn whether to shut the window again, so I could go to sleep. But I didn't want the big sleep.

The alarm wasn't alarming, but I think I had a slight headache and didn't want to take chances. But it was getting cold quickly. After 20,

Next day called the furnace guy. He took off the 6" stove pipe leading to the chimney. A two-inch doughnut made of nothing but soot!!!. Leaving only 2 inches in the middle for the exhaust. That's 1/4 the intended cross-section.

BTW, there's a story running around that oil furnaces can't make CO. NOT true.

Wow. The difference has grown. Last I noticed, I think 93c US was a

It's more than the difference in the buck (right now in the 88 cent range).A lot of that type of stuff is just plain cheaper in the USA even taking exchange into consideration. I guess having a market ten times the size of the Canadian market has something to do with it??

Hmmm. I guess there's a lot about marketing and economics that I don't know.

I know a lot of electronics products made in Japan, or at least made by Japanese companies in countries near them, are cheaper in the US than in Japan. But I thought that had to do with Japanese taxes or something.

(I don't know what prices are like in China, or how many Chinese can afford to buy their products, even at US prices.)

I would think one could treat Canada as any 30 million person section of the US. Most chains in the US don't cover the whole country, or if they do like the mail-order catalog, I mean webpage, of Sears, they are still just one of many buyers. .

Does NAFTA only affect things made in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and not how Chinese or Japanese companies exporting here elate to us?

Excellent point!

Given that propane is heavier than air, having a *small* propane leak in a house with a basement or below grade crawl space is an explosion waiting to happen. A *small* propane leak is probably less dangerous in an above grade slab house.

Given that natural gas is lighter than air, a *small* natural gas leak seems far less dangerous.

Campers usually lighter weight material, they burn down FAST. Of couese, now days homes go down fast, also. per goes boom than when a home does?

New York State passed some thing about monoxide detectors, about five to ten years ago. So, it's aparently favored by socialist governments in the US, also.

micky posted for all of us...

You could have called the fire dept (I responded to many of these calls). If you had symptoms (which you seem to allude to) you would have gotten EMS.

Well you can go into any Target store in the USA, then come up to Canada and go to a Target store, and the prices will shock you. Same with book stores. Even when out dollar was up to $1.15, a book that sold for $8.99 in US stores was $14.99 here.

Part of it is taxes, but definitely not all of it.

Part of it is the fact that to sell any product in Canada it MUST have both english and french on the lable, and have all instructions and warnings in both languages - so they can't just toss a box across the border from Detroit to a store in Windsor, or from Buffalo to Niagara Falls.

You don't need to worry about gas leaks or Co poisoning in your drafty trailer.

Well, I'm shocked and I didn't even have to get out of my chair, let alone drive to Target.

What a shame. Other than safety warnings, I don't think products sold in the US have to have any English on them at all. Maybe in some states safety warnings of some sort may have to be in Spanish too.

A lot of instruction manuals etc. inside the box are now in English, Spanish, and French, And the polycarbonate I bought that was made in the US had instructions in English, Spanish, French, and German. (I hope they don't know something about the Western Hemisphere that I don't know.) The polycarbonate made by Saudi Arabia, had almost no text, just graphics. The only text was a web page, which said nothing about how to use polycarbonate.

I presume you're willing to bear the full replacement value and medical expenses, should such occur?