I woke up this morning to the beautiful sounds of my carbon monoxide alarm. I was certain that I didn’t want to die, so immediately jumped up to investigate. I quickly put some clothes on and opened my front door to make sure that I had good oxygen coming in. The alarm was reading 97, which seemed like a lot. I didn’t have anything on that would actually create CO, but I thought that some below or next to me could be creating a lot. I called my landlord to alert him and ask for help — never heard back from him.

Eventually I read the notices on the back of the detector which said that one chirp every 30 seconds means that there is some kind of error, not an actual emergency. Then I looked up more information online concerning the problem; perhaps it was telling me that error code 97 was occuring. It turns out that I read upside down fairly naturally, and it actually was notifying me of Lb or Low battery. New batteries quickly remedied the problem. Clearly this was better than dying of CO poisoning.