Carbon dioxide puts your lights out

We have a video blog this week, illustrating two classic behaviours of carbon dioxide (or CO2). CO2 can smother anything that requires oxygen. In the video, it smothers candle flames, but it can smother a person just as easily. Any gas other than oxygen would do the same. CO2 is also heavier than air, so, if there is a leak, it fills a confined space from the bottom up. You could be knee-deep in CO2 and you might not know without a detector. This can be seen as the bottom candle goes out first, then the middle and finally the top candle; and again as the CO2 “pours” down over the last candle. Watch the video. It’s illuminating!

Complacency – the biggest sin of all

We recently ran a series of articles under the guise of the Seven Deadly Sins of Gas Detection, which talked about gas detection and common mistakes of different kinds that could cost you your life or someone else’s life. However, the real deadly sin that sits at the root of all is complacency – not taking gases and gas hazards as a serious and present danger.

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Deadly Sin No. 7 – Ignoring your data

Ignoring your data is Crowcon’s seventh in the series of Deadly Sins of Gas Detection. A recent news story about an oil worker found collapsed over an open hatch, dead, highlighted this all too graphically. One of the most tragic aspects of this story (tragedy being properly defined as something that could have been prevented) was that data which could have saved him was logged in his personal gas detector. Continue reading “Deadly Sin No. 7 – Ignoring your data”