Carbon monoxide alarms are required near all sleeping areas in Ontario homes.
Starting January 1, 2026, additional protection will also be required.
If your home has a fuel-burning appliance, fireplace, or attached garage, a carbon monoxide alarm will be required on every level of the home, in addition to being located near sleeping areas.
Carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless. A working alarm is often the only warning.
Now is a good time to check the age and placement of your CO alarms and plan ahead for the upcoming changes.
For more information, contact the Huntsville/Lake of Bays Fire Department. You can also find changes coming to the Ontario Fire Code HERE.
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As this appears to be a forced requirement from government the manufacturer will jack the price through the roof to take advantage of the situation.
All I can say is I hope the government takes some steps to ensure that these devices actually “work as advertised” because it matters not if it is a fancy wired in alarm with strobe lights on it or the cheapest 9 V battery alarm, I have yet to see one of them last the 10 years they are supposed to and any claim that the “battery is good for 10 years” is, as Trump would say “a Hoax!”
Of course you never have a receipt to match to each detector after the few years it does work and the store you buy it from washes their hands of it the moment it passes their check out scanner and the only solution is for you to ship your short lived, somewhat defective device to some far away service center at your expense and they might send you a pro rated refund, perhaps, maybe,
The net result with all this stuff is you pay for some manufacturer’s failures, every time in one way or another and government mandates just make things worse economically at least.
Set it up with a date stamp on the device for”manufactured date,”another internal tag in the circuitry for “first use” and a final one for “end of life-failed”. Then let someone like the Beer store handle the refunds. Everyone knows how to find a Beer store and the government could do us all a great favor by making our purchases at least be fulfilled to 100% of the advertised time.
Just a thought.
One question that is not really answered or clarified by the article, nor the Fire Code link is “Is one required in an unoccupied basement of a house with a fuel burning furnace located in that basement?”
Obviously, it would be beneficial from a safety perspective, but would anyone hear it on the second floor…..