Top Tips for Staying Safe Around Your Furnace
You rely on your furnace to heat your home during those colder days of the year. While your furnace is a necessity for your house, it can also be dangerous when proper safety procedures aren’t followed. By following the safety tips that we’re going to share below, you can ensure that your family stays safe around your furnace.
Vacuum Regularly
Dust, lint, and other debris are the perfect kindling for your furnace. Whenever this loose debris gets too close, it’s susceptible to catching on fire. To help significantly reduce the amount of loose debris around your heating system, it’s best to vacuum once a month. Be sure to clean the entire room and all the crevices around your furnace for the best results.
Explain the Dangers and Set Rules
As a logical adult, it can be easy to take for granted the safety knowledge that you have about your home’s furnace. Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn’t always come naturally to children, especially young ones. As a parent, it’s crucial that you explain the dangers of being around your heater, and you should set rules about how close your children can come to it. It’s best to address this issue head-on instead of just assuming your children know the dangers.
Keep the Area Open
As a homeowner, it can be very tempting to try and store objects like boxes in the open space around your furnace. While they may not be touching the heater, that doesn’t mean they’re not affecting it. Rather, just having objects in close vicinity to the furnace can restrict the free flow of air around it. Without adequate airflow, your furnace can overhead and consume unsafe levels of oxygen. It’s best to leave the area around your heater free from any objects.
Have a Fire Extinguisher Handy
In the event of a fire in your furnace, you need to be able to respond quickly. Having a fire extinguisher close to your heater is a necessity. While you may want to put it on or right next to your furnace, you need to think twice. If your furnace catches fire, you need your fire extinguisher to be somewhere you can easily grab it without being in flames.
Know Where Your Fuel Shut-Off Is
When it comes to furnace safety, you need to think about worst-case scenarios. If you end up having a fire or fuel leak, you need to be able to stop the free flow of fuel. Everyone in your home should know exactly where the fuel shut-off valve is at. If necessary, make a sign or paint it a bright color so that it can be easily identified in an emergency.
Have Adequate Room Lighting
Since you likely don’t go to your furnace too often, it can be easy to live with having poor lighting near it. However, this isn’t acceptable. You need to have adequate lighting at your furnace to ensure that you’re able to identify any leaks or locate any components, like the fuel shut-off valve, with ease.
Keep Odor Products Far Away
If your house is set up like most other properties, your furnace is in your basement. A basement is also a place where you’re likely to store your leftover products like bleach, paint thinner, paints, and laundry detergent. The problem is that storing these items within a close distance to your heating system can allow their fumes to get sucked into your ducting. This will redistribute the odor throughout your entire residence.
Always Have Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detectors
A key to staying safe in your home while the furnace is operating is having working smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. These detectors will alert you with loud beeping in the event that either smoke or carbon monoxide is present within the air inside of your house.
Due to the fact that these alarms tend to go off when their batteries are getting low, it can be very easy to simply remove the battery and forget to replace it. It’s best to set up a schedule to replace the batteries in all of your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors every six months. You should be testing them once per month to ensure they’re working correctly, too.
Expert Heating Service
Vastola Heating & Cooling is your heating service expert for the Orchard Park area. We also provide quality cooling, generator, indoor air quality, ducting, snow melt, water heater, heat pump, humidifier, and dehumidifier services. Call us today to get the expert help that you need!
