HVAC and Insulation From a Working Tech
Dana Sorensen · June 30, 2026
There’s a photo still sitting in my phone’s camera roll that I pull up every time a homeowner insists their carbon monoxide detector “would have caught it.” It’s a cracked brass fitting on a gas line tucked behind a water heater, my combustible gas analyzer’s readout glowing right next to it, and — just out … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 29, 2026
How many smoke detectors does your house actually need to be safe? If your honest answer is “however many came with the place when I bought it,” you’re not alone — and that’s exactly the assumption that nearly cost a family outside Salt Lake City everything. Nice family, two kids, three-bedroom ranch with a finished … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 27, 2026
I still have a screenshot saved on my phone from last spring — the kind of evidence that sums up an entire argument in a few lines. A homeowner’s neighbor snapped a photo of smoke rolling out of her garage and texted it to her mid-afternoon, while she sat at a desk forty minutes across … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 26, 2026
47 ppm and climbing — that’s what my combustion analyzer read the second I cracked open the burner compartment on Karen’s furnace, and the hairline crack running across the heat exchanger explained the rest. She’d spent the previous night fighting a headache and a queasy stomach, blaming bad takeout, before finally drifting back to sleep … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 24, 2026
Spring thaw always does the same thing to a house: windows crack open after months sealed tight, and that first rush of fresh air has a way of exposing exactly how stagnant everything got while they were shut. I was mid-audit at a house going through that exact transition last spring — blower door test … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 24, 2026
Nearly every homeowner operates on the same unshakable assumption: if carbon monoxide starts building up inside a house, the alarm on the hallway ceiling will sound before anyone gets hurt. Fifteen-plus years of running combustion safety inspections has taught me that assumption is flat wrong, and nothing proved it faster than a family I met … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 22, 2026
Owning a carbon monoxide detector does not automatically mean your family is safe — that’s the myth I want to dismantle right now, and a job from last spring proves exactly why. The house was a tidy 1960s ranch, nothing about it screaming trouble: solid construction, an owner who clearly kept up with maintenance. She’d … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 22, 2026
Thirty minutes — that’s how much longer a smoke alarm relying only on ionization sensing can take to sound compared to a photoelectric unit when a fire is smoldering rather than flaming. In a house full of sleeping people, that gap is the difference between waking up and not waking up. I thought about that … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 20, 2026
Late one February afternoon, I was down in my own basement doing the same furnace tune-up I run on my own system every year — nothing on my personal checklist hinted that anything was wrong. My wife mentioned, almost in passing, that the kids had been dragging all winter — headaches some mornings, tired even … Read more