We’re sleeping peacefully at the Pittsburg SE KOA when around 1 am a piercing shriek awakes us and my first thought is the smoke detector is going off. I groggily grope around the unit looking for a switch to mute it (after seeing and smelling no smoke). After a few minutes of this fruitless searching (in my defense, I’m still half asleep) I realize this aural annoyance is emitting from elsewhere in the motorhome. Lacking the sonar seeking abilities of a bat I’m now looking at everything that could possibility make such a racket, hoping for a blinking red light as a cue. Finally I happen upon the carbon monoxide/propane leak detector that is placed (for good reason) down near the floor. Potential carbon monoxide poisoning is to be taken seriously, so we open the windows, quickly got dressed and stepped outside.
I look up the model of the detector on my phone and find the user manual. After going back inside for a brief look at the status LEDs, I find it’s alerting due to propane leaking and not carbon monoxide, which is somewhat of a better scenario as unlike carbon monoxide, I should be able to smell propane, and I cannot. I decide shutting off the propane at the tank is the best course of action, even though the temperature outside is ~36 degrees. Soon after the detector stops alerting, so perhaps there is a leak somewhere.
Around 3 am guess what happens? That’s right! The propane leak detector goes off again. With still no propane smell I’m guessing the detector is faulty and I pull the fuse. I don’t really like this course of action but I don’t know what else to do. The next morning I’m reading RV forums and finding that, indeed, this model of detector is known for false positive alerts. After returning home our RV dealer replaces the detector with a newer model and it’s never alerted since.
Moral of the story: don’t trust devices that are supposed to save our lives? No, that’s a bad moral. I guess the moral is: question everything.
