Humans can be quite callous. A little bit of comfort here and there and they feel like a king or queen, with absolutely no care whatsoever. Eventually, this nature creates a lot of problems in both themselves and the people or living beings around them who care.
Needless to say, this nature does not stop within the living. It even expands to non-living matters as well. You leave your house without turning off your fan, you leave your car with its engines on—these are some forms of callousness. You may argue, though, those are examples of forgetfulness since those are usually done in rush times. Well, then what about keeping your TV or PC or laptop on while going to have lunch or a bath and thinking “it’s just a matter of a few minutes”?
You may think that we are making a big deal out of something quite silly but doing something careless while you are fully conscious of what you are doing can bring drastic consequences. One of this callousness is keeping the gas fireplace on while you go to sleep at night. Do you think it’s safe to do that?
Why do you keep the gas fireplace on overnight sometimes?
One does not do anything without a valid reason. You keeping the fireplace on for the rest of the night should have some reasons too. So based on people’s comments, we have researched human psychology about why some people do not turn off the gas fireplace before going to sleep even if they had it turned on for the whole day.
One reason can be that you have forgotten to turn it off. There are incidents where people forgot to turn off other gas appliances such as gas stoves, which is acceptable in certain cases because it is used daily and does not cover a huge area through its application. But a gas fireplace is placed to warm up the whole house on very cold winters and it is significantly big to go unnoticed. Still, since it is used occasionally, it takes time to get habituated to turning it off and on so forgetting to turn it off for a couple of hours is fine. But for a whole night?
Another reason is the feeling of comfort. The warmth during winter, no matter what is the source, is considered equal to a mother’s love. A gas fireplace’s warmth during a freezing winter is equally loved, especially at night for sleeping. People are easily tempted to keep the fireplace on due to this extreme comfort, assuming no big harm can come from this. Some even believe that a gas fireplace is designed to be able to stay on for several hours. As said before, comfort makes us feel no care for anything at all, we seem to let our guard down towards danger.
And when we say danger, that should give you the answer to your question—it’s not safe at all to sleep with the gas fireplace on even if your fireplace company guaranteed you absolute safety.
Why is it not safe?
There are a million ways where keeping the gas fireplace on overnight is a tremendous risk. The most problematic ones are given below—
1) Possible building up of carbon monoxide- Carbon monoxide releasing or building up is one of the primary risks of any gas appliance. Those who use gas appliances are always advised to keep a carbon monoxide detector in the house because enough concentration of this gas can even cause death. The detector is required due to the troublesome feature of this gas—it’s colorless and odorless.
The more and longer you use a gas appliance such as a fireplace, the higher the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning. Therefore, keeping it on for the rest of the night with the possibility of an odorless gas in the air while you are going to sleep is not an option.
2) Sleeping issues- The activities and works that we do in a day perform on how well we have slept at night. Scientists say that a bedroom that is overly comfortable and warm can interfere with your sleep and that’s an issue even for those people who prefer warmer bedrooms. In the first couple of hours, you feel fine, but after a period you may begin to sweat because a gas fireplace gradually blows hot air into the room. Sweating may cause dampening your clothes and your bedsheets which can cause health issues if not changed soon. Also, if you sleep with a partner, your tossing and fiddling on the bed may disturb that person.
If you want to stay warm at night for a comfortable sleep, there are other alternatives besides keeping the fireplace on. You can use a heavy blanket, or wear thick socks.
3) Unpredictability of a gas appliance- Never take a company’s guarantee for granted, no matter how high quality or expensive appliance you have bought and installed. Anything can happen and you have to stay vigilant all the time. With a gas appliance, several threats are present. One we have already discussed is the carbon monoxide issue. Then there is the possibility of gas leakages which can only be detected through smells and most of us are not able to do that in a deep sleep. What if there is a baby or toddler in the house? Your body might be adapted to situations like this but theirs are not.
That’s how much unpredictable a gas fireplace can be and the best solution to this is keeping it unconscious, i.e., turned off, while you are unconscious yourself.
However, if you accidentally keep the fireplace on for a certain amount of time, you should immediately find ways to ventilate the room as much as possible. Open up the doors and windows. Then check the carbon monoxide detector and if it says danger then leave the house and contact a physician immediately. Before all this, though, always try not to keep the gas fireplace on for your sake.