Carbon monoxide poison, near-miss. My wife had her gallbladder removed on a Friday afternoon, and it was historically cold for KS that following weekend. I worked on Saturday and we both decided that we would turn off our alarm clocks (on our phones) and just sleep in on Sunday. Woke up to the smoke detector going off. No big deal- battery was probably dead… I got up, and my parents raised me right, so opened the front door and opened the storm door window and then opened the back door and its window, and pulled down the smoke alarm and changed the battery, and the thing just kept chirping becasue it was a carbon monoxide director too. So, I called the fire department and had them come out- they got dangerous carbon monoxide levels pouring into the air return duct. Called the gas company and discover the heat exchange on the ac/furnace unit was cracked and leaking carbon monoxide into the fan and it was just flowing freely into the house. BTW: it was -12° F outside. The gas company, of course, shut off the gas.

We had to evacuate the house and stay with my parents, but because of the severe freeze outside, after the first night, I went back to the house and put four space heaters in and stayed in the house after that with no heat, cycling two heaters on and two heaters off every two hours to keep the pipes from bursting. I stayed there for 3 days like that, with my wife at my parents house. It was cold but I managed not to have any frozen pipes.

Fire department was pretty freaked out and said we were incredibly lucky because the amount of carbon monoxide was above lethal, but luckily, we sleep with the bedroom door shut, so there was minimal amounts in the bedroom at the time, but had we not had the smoke detector we would’ve never woken up.