A Lower Hutt family is urging every household with a wood burner to fit a carbon monoxide alarm after one woke them in the small hours of Wednesday morning to a fire that had already burned through a structural joist beneath their deck, with the family’s smoke detectors still silent.
Annemarie van der Slot-Verhoeven, her husband and their son live in Kelson, in the hills above Lower Hutt. They had noticed a faint smoky odour during the evening but put it down to the wood burner, which is normal enough for a Kelson home in mid-May. They went to bed. At about 2am the carbon monoxide alarm went off.
When they got up to check, the wood burner was out and the rest of the house looked fine. They opened the windows. Then they noticed smoke coming out from under the deck. Her husband and their son started hosing the area down while van der Slot-Verhoeven called 111. Fire crews were on the property within 15 minutes.
What firefighters found underneath the deck was a smouldering fire running directly below the floor of the lounge. The temperature beneath the boards was around 200 degrees. One joist had already been eaten right through and the fire was working into the next one. None of that smoke ever reached the inside of the house, which is why the smoke alarms above had not made a sound. The carbon monoxide given off by the smouldering wood found its way up through the floor first, and that is what set off the CO alarm.
“It’s basically saved our lives, and also made it less worse because we detected it early,” van der Slot-Verhoeven told 1News.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand was careful to note this is an unusual outcome. “While a CO detector did provide an early warning in this case, this is rare, and we would usually see smoke present even when a fire is smouldering,” the agency said. A working smoke alarm in every bedroom, every living space and every hallway remains the single most important line of defence.
What this house had though, which most New Zealand homes still do not have, was a second sensor reading a completely different signal. The smouldering started in a cavity that vented to the outside rather than to the lounge ceiling. Smoke alarms had no chance. The CO alarm, which was indoors, picked up the only thing that did make it inside.
Carbon monoxide alarms are not compulsory in New Zealand homes, and most households do not have one. Gas fitters, plumbers and the makers of the alarms have spent years pointing out that any home with a wood burner, a gas heater, a gas hob, an open fire or an attached garage is a household where a CO alarm makes sense, as covered by industry resource GasNet. A CO alarm costs less than a tank of petrol and runs for about a decade on its battery. It does not replace a smoke alarm. It listens for something a smoke alarm cannot hear.
The timing of the Kelson incident sits at the front edge of New Zealand’s worst stretch of the year for house fires. Insurance industry figures reported by Insurance Business show fire claim volumes climb from May, peak in August, and stay elevated through October. House fires linked to heating sources make up close to 16 percent of winter claims, against 6 percent for the rest of the year. The biggest single contributors are portable heaters, chimneys, electric blankets and solid fuel burners. The average claim for a house fire runs at about 116,000 dollars, and a full loss pushes past 680,000 dollars.
The human cost is heavier still. FENZ has said more than half of the people killed in house fires over the past five years were over 60, a pattern that has held for years and has not been shifted by smoke alarm campaigns alone. Older Kiwis are more likely to be living alone, more likely to be on the ground floor near the heating source, and less likely to react quickly to an alarm at 3am. The fire under the van der Slot-Verhoeven deck is the kind of slow burn that would have given an older resident no warning at all without a second sensor.
The practical takeaways from Kelson are short and unglamorous. Fit a smoke alarm in every bedroom, every living space and every hallway, and test it. Fit a carbon monoxide alarm if the house has any wood, gas or fuel-burning appliance, and put it near the appliance and near where you sleep. Get the chimney swept before winter. Service the wood burner. Keep anything that can burn at least a metre from the heat source. And if there is a smoky smell that does not have an obvious explanation, do not go back to bed.
If your house has a wood burner, when was the last time the chimney was swept and does the family have a CO alarm? Tell us in the comments how you’ve set your home up for winter.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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