5 Ways to Get Carbon Monoxide Poisoning in an All-Electric Home
Carbon monoxide poisoning can be deadly. Even if it’s not deadly, it can make you ill. Maybe it’s just a headache that won’t go away. Or flu-like symptoms. How about brain fog and lethargy? You can’t see or smell carbon monoxide (CO). If it’s in the air in your home, you’re breathing it and it could be making you ill. And yes, this can happen even in an all-electric home. I knew about four of the five methods below, but one of them was a surprise to me when I learned about it this weekend.
The problem with carbon monoxide
The reason CO is so dangerous lies in its similarity to the oxygen molecule, O2. They’re close to the same size and weight, so when you inhale air with carbon monoxide, those CO molecules replace some of the oxygen that forms hemoglobin in your red blood cells. The result is something called carboxyhemoglobin, and it’s not good. Oxygen is essential for the proper functioning of your body. If you’ve ever felt short of breath when you’re at a high altitude, you know what it’s like for your body to be short of oxygen. Carbon monoxide poisoning is worse.
Carbon monoxide is a product of incomplete combustion. There are some non-combustion pathways that result in CO, but it’s almost certainly combustion that produced it if you have CO in your house. So, how the heck can you get CO in an all-electric home? Here are 5 ways.
1. Generator
There are only about 400 to 500 accidental deaths due to CO poisoning in the US each year.† (That figure doesn’t include house fires or suicides.) Generators are the single leading consumer product cause of CO deaths, and total around 80 to 100 deaths per year in the US. So if you have an all-electric home and the power goes out, be extra careful with that generator in the garage. Definitely don’t run it in the garage. Most homes have too many air leakage pathways between the garage and the indoors. And of course, never, ever run it in the house.
![Generators should always be operated outdoors. [by insomnix CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/generator-gasoline-powered-carbon-monoxide-co.jpg)
2. Attached garage
You may have an all-electric home, but do you drive only electric cars? Is all your lawn equipment powered by electricity? Do you keep all kinds of combustion out of the garage? If you answered yes to those three questions, you’re probably safe here. If there’s any kind of combustion going on in your garage, though, you almost certainly are getting some of the carbon monoxide from the exhaust into your home’s air.
3. Grilling close to the house
Who doesn’t love cooking food on the grill in the backyard on a nice day! It’s hard to beat hanging out with friends and family, eating tasty food from grill. Whether you’re burning charcoal, fossil gas, or propane, you’re generating carbon monoxide. But you’re outdoors where the exhaust gases are immediately diluted.
The problem comes when you’re too close to the house…or worse, in the garage because it’s raining. This one’s similar to the generator in the garage hazard. Weather patterns or proximity to air leaks can send CO into the house. Another way to send CO indoors is through a intake vent for a whole-house ventilation system. So, keep a good distance between the grill and the house.
4. Pool heater
If you’re of a certain age and paid any attention to men’s professional tennis, you may have heard the name Vitas Gerulaitis. He won the 1977 Australian Open and ranked as high as number 3 in the world. Sadly, he died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994 while he was sleeping in the guesthouse at a friend’s home. The culprit was an improperly installed pool heater.
One of my building science friends, Paul Raymer, writes murder mystery novels that draw on his building science knowledge. In one of them, he chose a pool heater that was deliberately installed incorrectly as the murder weapon.
5. Self-cleaning electric oven
Finally, we have the one I just learned about. When you use the self-cleaning feature of your oven (if it is so equipped), it heats up the inside to over 900 °F (~500 °C). Wow! That’s hot. That’s apparently what you need to burn off the crud that can coat the inside of the oven.
Did you catch relevant part of that last sentence? If not, it was “burn off.” That means you’ve got combustion inside your electric oven. And that kind of combustion will almost always be incomplete, meaning that it will make carbon monoxide.
I’ve been reading the book, My House Is Killing Me!* by Jeffrey and Connie May lately, and that’s where I found out about the self-cleaning oven connection to CO poisoning. It’s a great book, and if you want to live in a healthy home, you should read it. I’ve learned a bunch from it so far, and I’m not even halfway through.
How to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning in the home
If you have any combustion appliances, get them tested for proper operation. Or eliminate them and go all-electric. For an attached garage, improve the airtightness between the garage and the living space. You can go even further by changing the pressure dynamics with an exhaust fan and the GarageVent controller.
Regarding the self-cleaning feature of an electric oven, always use the range hood when you run it, preferably with a nearby window open, too. Also, choose times to do it when no one is in the kitchen.
Then, of course, I have to give my longstanding recommendation that you buy and install a low-level carbon monoxide monitor. Please read my article on that topic to understand why.
The crux
Carbon monoxide poisoning is a serious risk. It’s obvious this can happen in homes with combustion appliances. A backdrafting natural draft water heater is one of the most common ways you can get CO in a home. But don’t rest easy just because you have an all-electric house. And be aware of the potential for self-cleaning ovens to cause carbon monoxide poisoning.
† That’s a small fraction of the more than 58 thousand total poisoning deaths in 2024. That is not, however, a reason to discount its importance.
* This is an Amazon Associate link. You pay the same price you would pay normally, but Energy Vanguard may make a small commission if you buy after using the link.
Allison A. Bailes III, PhD is a speaker, writer, building science consultant, and the founder of Energy Vanguard in Decatur, Georgia. He has a doctorate in physics and is the author of a bestselling book on building science. He also writes the Energy Vanguard Blog. For more updates, you can follow Allison on LinkedIn and subscribe to Energy Vanguard’s weekly newsletter and YouTube channel.
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Combustion Safety 101: Three Types of Problems
Don’t Compromise — Get a Low-Level Carbon Monoxide Monitor
The #1 Reason to Have an All-Electric Home
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When the electric resistance backup is engaged for the first time of the season, the HVAC tech told me that it’s burning off the dust. Does that imply indoor combustion and CO generation as well?
Stacy: Yeah, I’ve heard that many times, too. They even have a name for it: “dirty sock syndrome.” I never thought about the possibility of it creating CO, but I suppose it’s possible. Maybe someone who’s measured it will chime in here.
Great article outlining the reasons why occupants of aren’t necessarily safe from the potential of carbon monoxide poisoning. A question I get a lot when people are electrifying, “Do I still need a CO detector?” Aside from fire code compliance, there are reasons to keep those monitors! Thanks for raising this awareness.
Marcy: Yeah, it’s easy to assume you don’t need a CO monitor in an all-electric home. I hope enough people get the message that you still need them even when you don’t have combustion appliances in the house.
One more: kerosene heaters. I worked as an ER doctor 27 years. A man came home and found his pregnant wife comatose, with their kerosene heater malfunctioning. Wife was in a coma, fetus dead due to CO poisoning (the smaller the creature and higher the metabolism the faster affected by carbon monoxide – why they kept canaries in coal mines).
Another tip: a symptom of early CO poisoning is headache. Suspect carbon monoxide in anyone with a persistent unusual headache they never had before, especially in winter when people use heaters.
One more source than is not residential, but interesting…roasting coffee beans. Stumbled across this one while looking for diacetyl in a coffee processing plant (yep, the carcinogenic compound once used as butter flavoring). Walked into the plant and encountered CO levels of over 100ppm! Thinking about it; roasting = incomplete combustion = CO, which is then generated/loosed when the roasted beans are ground! I learn something very day!
Range hoods only work (for both cooking and cleaning) if they are vented to outside. I’ve seen way, way more unvented range hoods than vented (cheaper install, stoves on a wall where venting is not available/too cumbersome). Saw one above a stove where the wall was common with the garage and the kitchen was 1/2-way back in the building – and the gas oven was emitting over 500 ppm. But the appliance store said it was ok.
David: A lot of Passive House homes have recirculating range hoods, but they have ERV extract vents in the kitchen. They’re far enough from the range to avoid pulling in grease, so they can help some. But I’m with you. I like range hoods to vent the kitchen to the outdoors.
North Carolina home inspectors are required to write up missing CO detectors as a safety issue if:
there are any combustion devices inside
there is an attached garage
We should also write up a portable generator that can be positioned to let CO inside.
Richard: That’s a great requirement! Are you allowed to recommend low-level CO monitors as well? Or only the UL listed devices that alarm only at very high levels?
I’m not allowed to recommend anything other than explaining the risk and an electrical contractor inspect and resolve.
Excellent post.
I have a new, almost 100 percent electric house. The only exception to 100 percent electric is a wood-burning stove that, in hindsight, I would have been much better off without.
I basically made every possible mistake I could have made when installing this stove. But the main mistake, and one that is impossible to rectify, is the choice of the location of the stove: the chimney exits through a one-story section of what is mostly a two-story house. Adding to the problem is that most of the stove pipe is outside the envelope of the house, so it cools quickly when the fire dies down.
When the stove is cold, the stack effect in the house creates a very strong pressure differential between the inside of the stove and the room. The pressure in the room is lower than the pressure in the stove, so air from the stove is pulled into the room.
When the fire is going strong, there is a good draw up the chimney. The problem arises when the fire starts to die down, say at around 1 or 2 AM. At that point, the draw reverses direction. But there are still hot coals in the stove, producing CO. So CO is pulled into the house. Fortunately, we have CO alarms (which would wake the dead). Subsequent to these alarms going off, I purchased a CO logger that allowed me to quantify the problem and to run experiments.
The solution to this problem, and I think the only reliable solution in my situation, was to install a chimney fan. This creates an artificial updraft regardless of the temperature of the stove or the flue gas.
None of these possible problems were flagged by the stove installer, which I find somewhat troubling, and it took me some time to understand what was going on exactly. My advice is that if you are building an energy-efficient house, skip any wood-burning appliances. If you absolutely must have a wood-burning stove or fireplace, be very, very careful about where it is placed to ensure that it will function properly.