Carbon monoxide alarms, and the rooms that actually need one

Over the next three or four weeks, heating systems across the country come back on. Boilers that have not fired since spring run for the first time. Gas fires that were decorative all summer get lit. Wood burners get their first load. In a portfolio of any size, that happens in hundreds of rooms in the same fortnight, and mostly without anybody watching.

Carbon monoxide is the risk that comes with it, and it has a season.

The season is the point

A study of coroners' narrative verdicts by the UK Health Security Agency, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2022, looked at fatal unintentional non-fire-related carbon monoxide poisoning in England and Wales between 1998 and 2019. It counted 750 deaths over that period.

Two of the findings matter for anyone managing homes. Two thirds of the deaths, 68%, happened in autumn or winter. And 59% of them happened inside a dwelling.

The sources line up with that. Domestic piped gas was the single most common source at 36%. The most frequent underlying factor was not a dramatic failure but inadequate ventilation of exhaust gases, at 39%. A flue that is blocked, a vent that has been boarded over, an appliance in a room that has been sealed up since it was installed. None of those announce themselves.

What the regulations ask for

The Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015 were amended with effect from 1 October 2022. Two things changed on that date, and both are still catching people out four years later.

First, the duties were extended to the social rented sector. Before the amendment they applied to private landlords. They now apply to registered providers as well, so a housing association or a council landlord is covered on the same terms.

Second, the carbon monoxide duty was widened. The test is now the appliance, not the fuel. A carbon monoxide alarm is required in any room used as living accommodation that contains a fixed combustion appliance, with one exception: a gas cooker.

That wording does more work than it looks like it does. A gas boiler needs an alarm in the room it sits in. So does an oil-fired boiler, a gas fire, a wood burning stove, a solid fuel stove and a back boiler. Before October 2022 a gas boiler did not require one at all, which is why so many properties that were compliant in 2021 were not compliant in 2023 and nobody had touched anything.

The smoke alarm duty runs alongside it: at least one smoke alarm on each storey of the home where there is a room used as living accommodation. A storey with only a bathroom and a landing on it does not trigger it. A converted loft room does.

The gas cooker exception

The exception for gas cookers is the part that generates the most arguments, and it is worth being precise about it, because the exception is narrow.

It covers gas cookers. It does not cover a gas hob with a separate fixed appliance nearby, and it does not turn a kitchen into an exempt room. If the kitchen also contains the boiler, which in a great many flats it does, the kitchen needs a carbon monoxide alarm. The cooker is irrelevant at that point, because the boiler is the appliance that triggers the duty.

The practical consequence for a block of flats is simple. If the layout puts a combi boiler in every kitchen, then every kitchen in that block needs an alarm, and the question is not whether the duty applies but whether you can show it has been met in all of them.

Testing, and the clock on a fault

Two obligations sit on top of the installation duty, and they are the ones that generate the evidence.

The first is that the landlord must check that each alarm is in working order on the day the tenancy begins. Not the week before. Not at the inventory the following Monday. On the first day of the tenancy.

The second is the repair duty. Where a tenant reports that an alarm may not be working, and the alarm is found not to be in proper working order, the landlord has to repair or replace it. The trigger is the report, so the report needs to reach somebody who can act on it and it needs to be written down when it arrives, not when it is resolved.

Between tenancies, the person holding the risk is the landlord, and an empty property with a boiler in it is still a property with an appliance in it.

What enforcement looks like

Enforcement sits with local housing authorities. Where an authority has reasonable grounds to believe a landlord is in breach, it serves a remedial notice. If the landlord fails to comply with that notice, the authority may impose a civil penalty of up to £5,000.

The penalty is per breach, and the notice is the thing that starts the clock. What an authority asks for at that point is not an opinion about the building. It is dates. When was the alarm installed, when was it tested, what was reported, what was done, who did it.

The record is the part that gets forgotten

The alarms themselves are cheap and the rule is not complicated. The difficulty in a portfolio is proving the rule was followed in a specific flat on a specific day, eighteen months after the fact, when the person who did the check has left.

That is a records problem rather than a safety problem, which is why it usually goes unnoticed until it matters. The useful version looks like this. Every appliance is listed against the room it is in, so the rooms that need an alarm are a query and not a memory. Every alarm has an install date and a test date attached to the property, not to a clipboard. Every tenant report of a fault is logged the day it comes in, with the date it was closed out. And the whole set comes up on a calendar before the heating season rather than after it.

SAMRISK holds the building and the land it sits on across thirty connected systems, twenty for the building and ten for the land.

Boilers, fires, stoves and the alarms that cover them are recorded against the property in items, each with the room it sits in and its install date, so the rooms that trigger the duty can be listed rather than remembered. Gas safety records and alarm test records sit in documents with the dates attached to them. A tenant report of a faulty alarm goes through maintenance with the date it arrived, the work done and sign-off, and anything that turns into an exposure goes into incidents against the property it happened in. The pre-season check and the alarm replacement dates go on the compliance calendar with a name against them.

The work is small. The window for doing it before the boilers fire is about a fortnight.

Sources: UK Health Security Agency, Fatal Unintentional Non-Fire Related Carbon Monoxide Poisoning: Data from Narrative Verdicts in England and Wales, 1998 to 2019, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022; The Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015 as amended by The Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (Amendment) Regulations 2022; GOV.UK, Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (Amendment) Regulations 2022, guidance for landlords and tenants, and guidance for local authorities.