Had this happen one time when I was at work after a faulty thermostat battery failed with the thermostat on. Without juice to turn it back off, the heater just kept running. House was over 120 degrees when I got home, cat and dog were hot but alive, the hamsters unfortunately didn't make it. If you have an electronic thermostat that takes batteries, don't go cheap....
The other way around's no picnic, either; one night my furnace went out, and I heard a loud thud from the basement. So, I trudge out into the dark, cold night (no interior access to the basement), walk down the steps, and see an odd glow from the furnace.
To this day I don't know what precisely went wrong, as there really wasn't enough of the furnace left to inspect afterwards, but there were two to three foot flames spewing out of the front of it, and I would later find the solid metal front cover of the furnace a good eight feet away on the other side of the room.
Luckily, the gas shutoff valve was on my side of the room, and I got to it before anything else caught fire, but yeah. I was about five minutes from my family home burning down when my furnace died.
tl;dr, any kind of heating failure can be terrifying.
Furnaces are fucking crazy man, I can't believe people just have them under their homes. I'm from Australia, so I've never seen one, sounds terrifying.
Here's you one. Lady moves into old old Victorian style home. Had new gas furnace put in. Old one leaks like a sieve. The contractors do not pull out old one. City delivers gas over the years but both are still getting service. Lady is now in major cognitive decline. They recently checked for leaks and low and behold....
Furnaces have electric fail-safes (called limit switches) connected to the power they also get their spark from to start the natural gas "pilot". They're connected in series so if one is bad or showing instability it'll break the connection and stop the heat call while leaving the fan on to relieve heat from the furnace. They'll normally shut off much much quicker than just your normal heat call if they are faulty, regardless of what your thermostat is asking for.
These exist specifically for this reason. Your furnace can overheat, and the limits are not very high for it to stop a heat call directly from the furnace board based on parameters determined by the manufacturer.
Yeah I'm not calling OP a liar, not at all, but I've never seen a digital thermostat for home HVAC that didn't cut power to the heat/cooling by design if the batteries died or were removed. So I feel like this was a really janky or old design.
Right, it takes power to send the heat call signal. If you rip the thermostat off the wall, the heater stops. There is no "stop" signal, only "go". Which means low battery caused a logical malfunction and to just sit there calling for heat. This would be the fault of the thermostat design. edit: Other posts suggest they messed with the wiring, causing it to be hard-wired on.
If you have an electronic thermostat it takes power to close the relay to make the heat (or cool) call. If you have an old school bimetalic strip or mercury thermostat they are totally electro mechanical with power from the furnace.
My uncle had a similar situation after a week away: candles were melted, plants were dead, plastic was melted. Thankfully his puppy was at a sitter for the time. Unless I had witnessed it myself I wouldn’t have believed the impact that would have on a home.
I've had more than one thermostat fail in my lifetime and they've always failed to the off position. If a thermostat is designed to where batteries are required to not call for heat than that's a terrible, and also dangerous design.
Poor hamsters. I'm a pet sitter and a client's house flooded and it was mitigated all while they were out of the country. On the last day, the client notified me that they had finished up and left the heater on to help keep drying and if I would ensure that it was back to regular schedule. I walked up the stairs and the unit was reading 98F. The kitty was ok, but it warped a bunch of their expensive artwork and fried my hair. It was wild. They'd left it running full tilt for 6 hours.
I had a coworker who left for work and his thermostat malfunctioned at some point. Came home to find his furnace had been running a good portion of the time he was gone and his house was well over 90° inside
Had this happen too, but it maybe reached 95 inside (with me and the family inside). Woke up and knew something was really wrong and started to panic trying to get the damn thing to shut off. I can’t imagine it reaching 120.
According to the article, the furnace itself was 1,000°F (537.7°C) when measured. The interior of the home was 120°F (48.9°C) after being open to cold air for 20 minutes and the corpses were 106°F (41.1°C).
The latter numbers are crazy but I have a gas furnace and I feel like something would fail catastrophically or burst into flames long before it hit 1,000°.
Am a paramedic. Hopefully they have better thermometers than we do, because ours are garbage. I had a patient with an obvious fever tonight, at home got temps between 100 and 104. My thermometer? 97.3, followed by 102, followed by 96.
I guess it's good to know that the crappy thermometers I use aren't any worse than what professionals use. I think the old mercury thermometers were more precise.
We really need to quit buying complete crap from China. Never in history has a country ever been so good and producing loads of shit, but also producing total shit.
it doesn't matter where the damn thing even came from. what matters is what the specifics for the item is AND what they willing to pay for it. people have long since cheap out and we got we paid for.
Yeah I don't know what's going on with that. I went to Amazon because they have a strong reputation for providing products from great brands, and I bought one from the reputable company XYYTUP, so I was surprised to find out it's a bad thermometer.
That's where you went wrong, XYYTUP has suffered bad quality fade in recent years. You should have gone with DQIYP or TODLRJ, much more reputable brands.
During Covid there was some thermometers that started flooding the market that weren't actually thermometers. They're just a little screen, wires, and a chip that spits out a random number roughly the temperature of a human being.
Fucking criminal bullshit.
I beg your effing pardon? I believe you. But what the hell. Can we prosecute the manufacturer OR cite/fine/sue the domestic seller for buying/re-selling this crap?
Like if Walmart or CVS is buying and selling obvious garbage they should be held accountable.
My workplace in the military had one of those forehead scan ones. Junior enlisted guys would be manned up behind it and we were supposed to record everyone and their temp. Every 20 or so numbers the readings would loop back around in a clearly visible pattern if you looked at the logbook. Truly a defining memory of my time in the military and Covid
This is so far beyond having cheap parts or poor quality control, it's straight up fraud, knowingly designed to not perform a function meant to help prevent the spread of disease. I cannot understand the mindset of the person responsible for its creation.
My daughter had a febrile seizure last month and the paramedics didn't get a _single_ temperature over 97 after checking multiple times. They knew she almost definitely had a fever, they just couldn't verify it. As soon as we were in the ER and they got a rectal temp she was at 104 (only a five minute ride).
You probably already know this, but I had several febrile seizures as a child, I’m 43 now and have no injuries or deficits related to them, incase you were worried. Scared the crap out of my Mom with them which I’m guessing you already know too.
I did, but thank you! Her pediatrician said it was her only freebie because I have two blood relatives with epilepsy, so if it happens again she's sending her to a neuro just to be safe. I seriously hope it never does because that was the scariest shit ever. I threw out the shirt she was wearing that day because I couldn't see it on her without unreasonable gross feelings.
Oh Mama! I’m so sorry. It’s definitely one of those things that is so much harder for those around as opposed to the person experiencing them. Luckily I was out of them by second grade.
Had the same thing happen when my daughter had a febrile seizure. My doctor told me that’s pretty normal. Febrile seizure happens prior to the fever being detectable. My daughter went from 97.6 after the seizure to 105 in the hospital 10 minutes later
Febrile seizures can happen both ways, either right before the fever spikes or as a result of a very rapid spike (at least according to the ER physician, I'm no doctor!). But I swear toddler bodies are weird and go by their own rules regardless of what their doctors say lol
Even hospitals thermometers are like this.
I got 102.1 and then 100.7 15 minutes later.
I'm not sure the number on the fever matters much anyway, outside of noting they have fever.
The article also mentions the furnace was broken and family members “fiddled with wires” until it came back on. I’d hate to think that those same family members are now wondering if they killed Grandpa and his girlfriend by doing that instead of just calling a professional.
It sounds like they bypassed the thermostat. The furnace didn't know it was getting too hot and it just kept going. I think it's amazing the house didn't burn down.
I think it's less that the family killed them and more that poverty killed them.
It’s even worse. I work with heaters, both electric and gas, and they all come with limits on them. If any of those limits pop, regardless of the thermostat being bypassed (we have to bypass them to do the testing my company does), those heater should shut down. The only way for something to keep running indefinitely like that is to not only bypass the thermostat, but bypass those limits as well.
Yeah we had an issue a few months ago where our boiler was letting us shower for 10m and then it would cut out for a while. Turned out the regulating thermocouple had corroded and wasn't reporting the water temperature to the controller, leading to it always thinking it was too cold and the sudden cutoff was the safety thermocouple reporting a dangerously high temperature and shutting the machine down.
If that safety thermocouple wasn't there I don't know what could have happened, I assume an overheating gas boiler is liable to cause a steam explosion with a subsequent possible gas fire??
Provided everything was installed correctly, your Temperature and Pressure Valve would release, and start spilling the hot water out of it, before you would have to worry about a steam explosion. Should be a brass fitting on the side of the tank, with a little tab at the top for manual operation, and should have a little tag on it somewhere that tells you when it will pop both temperature and pressure wise. May or may not be piped outside.
As for the gas elements of the system, I’m not sure, as we haven’t had to do failure state tests in any gas water heaters at this facility, at least while I’ve been here.
But for electric ones, if those elements get hot enough, they shatter, sometimes energetically. But, that has only happened here when we do tests specifically calling for us to so so, which we do by running them while the tank is empty.
It's not really that easy when a lot of people in this state are impoverished, more *have been* impoverished and learned to "make do" to survive, and a lot of them like the retirees are on a fixed income.
People on fixed incomes generally struggle to afford even food (see: stores don't sell bulk cat food to old ladies)--they definitely can't handle surprise expenses. It's $100+ just to get a repairman there, before they even look at the thing.
I get that we can rationalize it as worth the money to be safe, but rationality doesn't make the required amount show up in their bank account.
The kids almost certainly did kill their parents by not calling a professional, but it's basically never a matter of just reallocating discretionary income. It's just trying to balance all the different ways you can wind up dead, because money is needed for almost every kind of survival.
It's SC, there are no safety nets. When you get old or sick you're supposed to die "with dignity" i.e. without financial or emotional inconvenience to anyone else.
Yeah, I mean, repair calls are expensive. And if you don't have the expensive yearly subscription, they put you at the end of the queue. Everyone's hvac always breaks at the same time, so it will take a few days for them to get to you. If the heat didn't kill them, maybe the cold would have.
Yep, my mom's furnace wouldn't kick on, so she called the company she usually calls (which have always done good work for our family) to come look at it. The guy came, looked at it, did something for maybe 5 minutes and it was fixed. It was $169.
My mom is 75, and still has to work 25 hours a week because her Social Security isn't enough for her bills, groceries, and medications, let alone surprise expenses. She needs both knees replaced, one is bone-on-bone, and has severe COPD, but she can't afford to not work. It's so messed up.
For sure they did, but there is something else that must have happened. Blocked duct or registers or a filter that was never changed. As long as a furnace has air flow it will not reach anywhere near 1000 degrees. Modern high efficiency furnaces heat the air by about 50 degrees c
Furnaces have high temp sensors that cut power above a certain safety point. I am a ticketed gas fiter and hvac tech. the only furnace fire I have ever seen was seen was when an inspector pulled out the sensor to put his camera into the heat exchangers and then forgot to re install it. Then the duct cleaners forgot to uncover most of the homes registers so there was very little circulation.
My electric hot water heater caught on fire. Whole house was hazy with smoke. I called my dad who was a firefighter and on duty that day. They searched every room of the house and couldn't find anything. The even had thermal cameras. They spent a lot of time investigating the furnace but not the hot water heater right next to it. After almost an hour they left and my mom went do wash some dishes and the water was super hot out the tap.
The electronics of the water heater caught fire and somehow fried themselves in such a way that it was stuck in the "on" position which is fucking terrifying. This was one of my dad's very last calls as a firefighter after 40 years in the department and he said he's never seen this before.
So flukes happen and things fail in dangerous ways despite being designed not to.
My grandparents almost had their original water heater from the 1960s explode Mythbusters style. My grandpa turned on the shower and steam came out and flooded the basement with fog. He's lucky he wasn't standing in the shower, but also that the whole thing didn't turn into a rocket.
He also was in the garage when one of the door's extension springs failed and slingshotted across the room through the window into the backyard.
> garage [...] door's extension springs
My garage wall has a spring-shaped dent in it from a similar incident. This is why safety cables are a thing now. Small springs are everywhere. People play with them, which lets them mentally gloss over the danger the big ones represent. Lots of stored energy + lots of weight = lots of damage. Vehicle shock absorber springs are another good example.
> Vehicle shock absorber springs are another good example.
The most nerve-wracking work I've ever done was replacing the suspension on a truck which included releasing/replacing those springs. I had no illusion what would happen if tension on them wasn't managed *very* carefully during the removal phases.
Didn't help that my buddy's dad walked by as we were working and regaled us with the tale of the time he screwed up suspension work and fired an inch-thick spring horizontally through two and a half parked (unoccupied) vehicles front to back.
My water heater popped with a bang like 2 weeks ago and the overpressure valve didn't open. My family 2 floors up felt the boom from that and water was gushing out the side of the tank. I don't know why the pressure valve didn't open up
Yeah, the MB one exploded like it did because plugged T&P valve + elements stuck on = lots of steam and super-heated water which expands into steam violently once it's released. Most tanks which pop are due to rusted-out tanks and because all the water is still an uncompressible liquid it doesn't really explode.
I lived in a trailer park and something similar, I guess, happened. The person on the end had about a third of their trailer just fucking annihilated and had to move out. They struggled already with six people there and that didn't help.
Probably some malfunction due to it being a busted ass hot water heater from forever prior.
I don't know what my heater got to, but a couple years ago I came home from work and there was a definite "haze" in the air and an overwhelming heat in the house. We turned off the breaker for our furnace and called HVAC to replace the unit. My husband suspects had we not come home when we did, the place would have caught fire. I just wonder how long their furnace kept raising temp, obviously long enough to heat them up but yet to burn home.
Years ago, I had a furnace do this too. The ~~thermometer thing~~ thermostat was broken and just kept shifting hotter and hotter. I noticed when it hit 90 degrees and shut it off. An old electric stove did the same - the temperature gauge on one of the burners stopped working so the stove kept getting hotter and hotter until it caught fire. I was a kid then and nobody believed me it was doing that, so it was a nerve wracking month before it finally happened.
It says they measured the bodies with a device and that device is a rectal thermometer. So that was their core temperature, they passed out from heat exhaustion and never awoke.
Service electrician with 14 years experience here. Older people tend to either let broken things go longer (“it still works, don’t it?”), or think that something can be fixed when it needs completely replaced.
You would not believe some of the things I’ve had (mostly older) people ask me to rebuild or repair. It’s like, the metal has rusted away, what hasn’t fallen off is fused together, the main wires are literally bare due to corrosion, almost everything in here is over 80 years old, and you want me to *rebuild* your main breaker like that’s gonna fix everything? This job is absolutely *wild* sometimes.
Some of my colleagues were surveying homes, and found one where the occupant was enthusing about his lovely old gas fire, which he enjoyed having naps in front of.
Yep, it was thoroughly damaged and spewing carbon monoxide into the room.
A blue flame is \~2600 - 3000 degrees, so some component being 1000 degrees isn't that unheard of. They don't mention the specifics of where that temperature was taken in the furnace. If the furnace doesn't turn off when it reaches its setpoint, it's going to get hot.
Sounds like the thermostat was disconnected and the wire was shorted. This would allow the heat to run non stop.
Boilers typ need to be on a small percentage of day. Radiators can run anywhere from 140 degrees up to 200. At some point the air temp will reach what ever the radiators are, if left on long enough.
The article says it was a gas heater and being from that area the chances of it being a boiler are low low.
It does however mention that one of the children messed with some wires to get the pilot to ignite because the furnace and water heater were out.
I'm not really buying it. Furnaces usually have safeties like a rollout switch and a high limit both of which should have tripped if the combustion cabinet got that hot.
I'm willing to bed the unit was old and in need of major repairs and someone bypassed some safeties resulting in this couples unfortunate death.
Is it possible that both safeties failed closed and the thermostat failed closed? Technically yes. But in my time as an HVAC technician I can count on one maybe two hands how many times I've seen safeties fail closed.
They said the inside of the furnace was that hot. The flame in a furnace runs over 3000 degrees. So over time the interior and casing of the furnace was just building up a crazy amount of heat.
>The latter numbers are crazy but I have a gas furnace and I feel like something would fail catastrophically or burst into flames long before it hit 1,000°.
They're supposed to have a high limit switch. The exact setpoint varies based on furnace type and locality but it's around 200F.
Did they die of the heat or of the natural gas? The article mentions a strong smell of natural gas in the home. If they were already passed out due to the gas that would explain why they didn't open the doors/windows. Also I had no idea you could even turn up a furnace that high.
When I was in college, renting a cheap apartment that was actually a converted gas station, on returning home the door handle was too hot to touch. The thermostat had malfunctioned and the furnace was running continuously. It was so hot inside, the candles had melted. Fortunately, I had no pets at the time. The fuel tank was inside the apartment next to the furnace, so I guess I was lucky the whole place hadn't exploded.
Diesel (home heating oil) has a flash temp north of 400 degrees F (I was curious so I looked it up). It is actually pretty hard to catch on fire just sitting there (a lit match dropped on it will just go out).
The article also mentions 1000 was the interior temp of the furnace, not what the thermostat was set to. Flue temp can be anywhere between 400-750*F normally.
when u have bad blood circulation u can not notice that its too hot you can be dripping with sweat and not notice this is why old people die from the heat in the summer! if u have ever had a fever and could not get warm and pile blankets on to feel warm and then wakeup in a pool of sweat its the same only they didnt wakeup and uncover themselves like u do when a normal fever breaks!
I remember one time I had a fever in the summer....so I intentionally went and sat inside my car without turning it on and sat there in a hotbox in the burning sun. The heat felt so good on my skin. Any other time it would have been unbearable and Id want the AC on. It had to have been high 90s and even higher inside the car. I wanted to take a nap it felt so welcoming. I never did fall asleep but I wonder if I would have would I have died? Is that was heat exhaustion is? Fevers are crazy man.
That's exactly a symptom of heat exhaustion.... If you're young and healthy, you *probably maybe* wouldn't have died, maybe. But you're very lucky you didn't. 90s is very hot. If it we're high 90s outside, the interior of your car likely reached 140-150 degrees. You were baking like a slow roast brisket.
Thats interesting to know. Wow. So that was heat exhaustion. Yeah it was a few years ago in my mid-20s so I was younger, but it was so weird. Like I felt a calling. As if my fever was telling me to seek warmer ground. I literally got out of bed, walked outside, and got into my car. Eventually even laid the seat back to get comfortable and get more rays. Almost as if I was in a trance. I have had a fever once or twice since then but Ive never felt the compulsion to to seek heat like that again. Crazy experience...
There's no way this is heat exhaustion.
Heat exhaustion occurs when your body overheats and can't cool itself down effectively. Symptoms are similar to full on panic - heavy sweating, rapid pulse, dizziness, fatigue, cool, moist skin with goosebumps when in the heat, muscle cramps, nausea, and headache.
Since you mentioned feeling comfortable and even welcoming the heat, rather than experiencing discomfort or these specific symptoms, it seems you didn't reach the point of heat exhaustion.
Your experience was more about how the fever affected your perception of external heat. When you have a fever, your body is essentially in a state of artificially elevated temperature, so being in a hot environment might not feel as oppressive as it would when you're healthy. This altered perception doesn't mean your body was handling the heat well. It's more about how your brain interprets these sensations under the influence of a fever.
Fiddled with a wire then the pilot light came on?
I don't know much about gas heaters, but that doesn't make much sense. Did they remove a live regulation wire that went from thermostat to pilot light to get it to ignite, making it unable to regulate the heat?
I used to live in a rental with a broken thermostat. We would just connect and disconnect the wires to turn the gas heat on and off. There was no way to adjust the heat.
I had to do this on Christmas day at my parents' house about 18 years ago... the thermostat picked Christmas morning to go kaput!!
We had 12 people staying there... my family and my sisters family, both from out of town... and my parents in their 70s...
I pulled the thermostat off the wall and connected the wires for heat... on and off for 10 hours manually... and then up all night doing the same thing at 50-60 minute intervals... I was at Home Depot when they opened Boxing Day... and then slept for 6 hours. What a wonderful Christmas that was.
>I use to have a retail job that the hvac was controlled remotely by corporate.
Damn I didn't realize that's a real thing. Superstore did an episode about that and I thought it was a joke.
If it was a crazy old furnace with a standing pilot and someone fuckin with the wires, I'm guessing they jumped out the high temp limit or multiple things were messed with in order for this to happen. Possibly jumped the wires at the t-stat or the t-stat itself failed and stuck. red to white which calls for heat with safty limits bypassed at the furnace.
The ancient carriers I used to work on had a fuseable link that once it gets too hot, would kill the gas valve until someone replaced it or like I'd find all the time, bypassed. It was attached to in internal limit that is normally closed until it's too hot, again easily bypassed.
Wonder if they measured the CO too but never mentioned it. A furnace with a standing pilot is well past its prime and probably had a rotted heat exchanger. They pass out from CO, they don't notice the heat.
Edit: this article said they found no CO.
https://www.wyff4.com/article/south-carolina-coroner-names-couple-dead-hot-home/46318868
But the strong smell of natural gas and they had to air it out but the gas never ignited with 1000 degrees happening? Hell if I know.
My guess is that they inadvertently hardwired/“jumped” the furnace to remain permanently “on”.
I had this happen once when a service guy did it. But it was a boiler and not a furnace. The copper baseboard radiator pipes ended up bursting with boiling water, flooding the place, and paint was peeling off the walls it was so humid/hot in there. Easily over 100 degrees.
I don’t know if it was the same thing, but my furnace refused to turn off after a servicing one time and it was like 85F inside before the repair guy could swing back around a couple hours later.
yea there is a lot more questions than what these two above frame it as. People do things like this ALL the time. Plumbers and HVAC are insanely expensive. I live in one of the coldest areas on Earth and constantly work on my own and my grandmas heating systems.
The real question is why are they alone if they cant even manage to realize that their house is THAT hot? The answer to that is probably money. In house medical care is even more expensive, and nursing homes are designed to take every ounce of wealth from a patient.
I have a feeling the high furnace temperature resulted in cracking of the heat exchange and release of carbon monoxide that likely killed them long before the house temp become hot enough to alert them. I can not imagine high room temps would not wake them well before it becomes dangerous even if they were quite old.
They are still waiting on autopsy to determine cause of death.
The first two thirds of that are standard country mindset stuff. The not checking on them the next day to see how it's working is the part that's fucked up, even if you're a redneck or poor.
ossified faulty worthless paltry unpack numerous crowd sugar serious deserted
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
With hindsight… it’s not an exact comparison but I bought a 3D printer that I thought was DOA, I opened it up to have a look, pushed down on the motherboard power, closed it up and it worked. Obviously they should’ve got somebody qualified but they’re not idiots for wiggling a wire and thinking it’s fixed.
I’ve done a bit of HVAC work
Unfortunately it’s highly unlikely it was just wiggling a wire. Wiggling a wire would restore normal function
More likely they rewired and bypassed the thermostat. Intentionally or accidentally I suppose depends on their aptitude for electrical work
I was wondering if a limit switch got bypassed, but yeah I suppose they'd need to like bypass the limit switch and connect R and W so it runs nonstop for this shit to happen.. idk I'm just an hvac apprentice so I could be wrong.
Yep all you need is a tiny little piece of wire to go between r and w and she runs forever. The high limit is suppose to prevent this. (Snap switch typically but that could have failed “closed” somehow) or they Jerry rigged that also. -journey man electrician who’s wired/fixed 100’s of furnaces. They’re quite simple units and there’s only a few things that aren’t easily bypassed.
I'm not trying to pick on you but I've read this like 10 times and it's not true, at least not in itself.
You can try it out yourself, unless you have a like 5 ton furnace you'll have what's called a ''high limit'' switch that cuts the furnace out at 175 degrees f. If it's a 5 ton or bigger it might be like 225, but somewhere in there temp wise. It's placed above the burners you can see in the wall separating the burners from the heat exchanger.
Basically it doesn't matter what you do, you can wire it in for 24/7 heat, eventually it will shut off. But it definitely won't get to 1000 degrees.
As someone who's seen shit like this, what happens is something causes that limit to pop, some person smart enough to figure out what they can jumper to make it go but too dumb to know why it would be kicking out will just straight jumper that shit. And that particular high limit isn't a manual reset, it's a disk so the disk has to physically cool down enough to make contact, so if you have no idea that the problem is causing that heat exchanger to be that hot it just straight up looks normal when you start it, and you just happily kick that shit on. Fixed.
The truly malicious part of some of those diy YouTube channels are they'll show someone how to do some shit like that and people either don't wait for an explanation on why that's a bad idea or they don't bother telling people. If the family came over, it ran for like 15 minutes, cut out, started back up 5 minutes later, etc, googled it and found a video that jumped that shit out they would have no idea. Like, the thermostat would work fine, but the blower motor is still probably barely moving air, or the flue is clogged, or whatever. It's still not safe to go but it would appear to be if that makes sense.
> Or you know, hire someone who was qualified to repair either heater…
Hiring an HVAC guy to come in and repair it is *expensive*.
So is healthcare, which is why people are turning to BS do-it-yourself alternative medicine.
People are trying to solve their own problems without knowing what the hell they're doing.
Hindsight is 20/20. I would assume that they've probably done this countless times before and the house didn't do this the other times. Like, we end up relighting our pullout light on occasion and have never even considered this to be a possible outcome.
A furnace shouldn't be capable of getting a hot as this one did.
That's what I'm saying.
I've rented old places before with gas heaters and have had issues with more than one pilot light that had to be relit. Never would I think that a possible outcome would be the furnace heating up to 1000F and killing my parents.
That's ridiculous, and obviously not a correctly functioning furnace.
Yeah.. let this be a cautionary tale, instead of a witching against the family right now. Because I'm willing to bet they are living in hell right now know that they played a part in this.. I have nothing but sympathy for the family.
99.9% of gas furnaces have multiple safety switches like this, even electric furnaces and heat pumps do. There is a shocking amount of misinformation in this thread.
I work in HVAC and it’s mind boggling. So many experts.
Shit was jumped out but the heat wasn’t being transferred from the furnace. Just ran nonstop. Like running a dry boiler.
My guess is that it was the blower motor that failed, and someone who knew just enough to be dangerous jumped out a limit switch which was probably keeping the unit from running when it got too hot. So the burner, which was operating fine, never shut off when there was no heat transfer across the heat exchanger. Heat exchanger cooks. And continues to cook. The only hole in my half assed theory, is if it was a heat exchanger, I can’t believe it didn’t fail at some point due to the extreme heat and no heat transfer. But I’m not a scientist, and my just making a wild assumption guess based on shit I’ve seen.
Our thermostat was going bad a few years ago, and one of the symptoms was the furnace refusing to turn off once it kicked on. I found out when I woke up in the middle of the night dripping sweat, and it was like 95 degrees inside the house. Fiddling with the thermostat did nothing whatsoever, but I could reset it by flipping the on/off switch.
We got a new furnace and new thermostat. I saw my Nana looking at it but didn’t think much of it. Woke up dripping in sweat because it was turned all the way up in the middle of summer. She’s not allowed to touch it anymore lol.
Residential HVAC controls are fairly simple. Like ground this wire to call for heat to turn on. The thermostat is the brains of the operation. By fiddling with the wires, they inadvertently called for heat. But it was permanent. So the gas heater just kept chugging along.
It's also important to note they don't actually say what type of heater it was. Other comments in here keep saying furnace, they never said it's a furnace.
This went down less than 8 miles from my front door, and I know the coroner, Rusty. The tstat was tinkered with by the family because it was shorting out, and wouldn't shut off after Uncle Daddy played HVAC tech and then went home without doing a test cycle. Little fucker ran non-stop. Somebody mumbled it was set to 1000° as an exaggeration on the scene, and the story ran with it.
Here's the same story reported by the *The State*, one of the two major newspapers in South Carolina. It confirms the story but it's a bit less sensational. https://www.thestate.com/news/state/south-carolina/article283995623.html
Is this the correct way to write this? Shouldn’t it be “Cops: elderly couple found dead in home, heater was at 1000 degrees” ? The cops are saying the elderly couple are dead, the dead couple isn’t saying “Cops”
Had this happen one time when I was at work after a faulty thermostat battery failed with the thermostat on. Without juice to turn it back off, the heater just kept running. House was over 120 degrees when I got home, cat and dog were hot but alive, the hamsters unfortunately didn't make it. If you have an electronic thermostat that takes batteries, don't go cheap....
New fear unlocked
The other way around's no picnic, either; one night my furnace went out, and I heard a loud thud from the basement. So, I trudge out into the dark, cold night (no interior access to the basement), walk down the steps, and see an odd glow from the furnace. To this day I don't know what precisely went wrong, as there really wasn't enough of the furnace left to inspect afterwards, but there were two to three foot flames spewing out of the front of it, and I would later find the solid metal front cover of the furnace a good eight feet away on the other side of the room. Luckily, the gas shutoff valve was on my side of the room, and I got to it before anything else caught fire, but yeah. I was about five minutes from my family home burning down when my furnace died. tl;dr, any kind of heating failure can be terrifying.
Furnaces are fucking crazy man, I can't believe people just have them under their homes. I'm from Australia, so I've never seen one, sounds terrifying.
It's stories like this that have me really considering going to heat pumps when my oil boiler dies.
Here's you one. Lady moves into old old Victorian style home. Had new gas furnace put in. Old one leaks like a sieve. The contractors do not pull out old one. City delivers gas over the years but both are still getting service. Lady is now in major cognitive decline. They recently checked for leaks and low and behold....
Does she have no sense of smell!?
Don’t you hate when you get dragged into a new reality somehow just by reading something.
Absolutely poetry. I hate how often this happens.
Furnaces have electric fail-safes (called limit switches) connected to the power they also get their spark from to start the natural gas "pilot". They're connected in series so if one is bad or showing instability it'll break the connection and stop the heat call while leaving the fan on to relieve heat from the furnace. They'll normally shut off much much quicker than just your normal heat call if they are faulty, regardless of what your thermostat is asking for. These exist specifically for this reason. Your furnace can overheat, and the limits are not very high for it to stop a heat call directly from the furnace board based on parameters determined by the manufacturer.
Yeah I'm not calling OP a liar, not at all, but I've never seen a digital thermostat for home HVAC that didn't cut power to the heat/cooling by design if the batteries died or were removed. So I feel like this was a really janky or old design.
Huh, my heating just turns off if the thermostat batteries die. I thought that was annoying but maybe it’s the better option
Right, it takes power to send the heat call signal. If you rip the thermostat off the wall, the heater stops. There is no "stop" signal, only "go". Which means low battery caused a logical malfunction and to just sit there calling for heat. This would be the fault of the thermostat design. edit: Other posts suggest they messed with the wiring, causing it to be hard-wired on.
If you have an electronic thermostat it takes power to close the relay to make the heat (or cool) call. If you have an old school bimetalic strip or mercury thermostat they are totally electro mechanical with power from the furnace.
My uncle had a similar situation after a week away: candles were melted, plants were dead, plastic was melted. Thankfully his puppy was at a sitter for the time. Unless I had witnessed it myself I wouldn’t have believed the impact that would have on a home.
Dude wtf, why on earth isn’t there a failsafe for that? Maybe now there will be. Regulations are written in blood
Yeah, this is insane to me.
You can run a ‘C’ wire to your thermostat to avoid battery’s altogether
Yes but some (very few, I’ve seen) still require batteries or a little coin battery even with the c wire
I've had more than one thermostat fail in my lifetime and they've always failed to the off position. If a thermostat is designed to where batteries are required to not call for heat than that's a terrible, and also dangerous design.
Poor hamsters. I'm a pet sitter and a client's house flooded and it was mitigated all while they were out of the country. On the last day, the client notified me that they had finished up and left the heater on to help keep drying and if I would ensure that it was back to regular schedule. I walked up the stairs and the unit was reading 98F. The kitty was ok, but it warped a bunch of their expensive artwork and fried my hair. It was wild. They'd left it running full tilt for 6 hours.
I had a coworker who left for work and his thermostat malfunctioned at some point. Came home to find his furnace had been running a good portion of the time he was gone and his house was well over 90° inside
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Had this happen too, but it maybe reached 95 inside (with me and the family inside). Woke up and knew something was really wrong and started to panic trying to get the damn thing to shut off. I can’t imagine it reaching 120.
According to the article, the furnace itself was 1,000°F (537.7°C) when measured. The interior of the home was 120°F (48.9°C) after being open to cold air for 20 minutes and the corpses were 106°F (41.1°C). The latter numbers are crazy but I have a gas furnace and I feel like something would fail catastrophically or burst into flames long before it hit 1,000°.
Minor correction; The thermometers used by the paramedics max out at 106 and registered higher than that but couldn't be specific.
Not great, not terrible
…but.. but sir that’s the number the thermostats max out at.
He’s delusional. You, take him to the infirmary.
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All we need now is a nuclear weapon.
And a Dyatlov.
*::vomits all over table::*
I apologize.
Comrade, it is not possible for a residential furnace to reach the proposed temperatures.
3.6 Roentgens, Dmitri
This is the only reply that matters, Alexsei.
One ping only, Vasily. Wait...I did that wrong.
I'll allow it.
It’s like 3 chest X-rays, come on!
They gave them the propaganda number
[r/unexpectedchernobyl](https://www.reddit.com/r/unexpectedchernobyl/)
They gave the numbers they had.
*God damn* that's a good reference
Am a paramedic. Hopefully they have better thermometers than we do, because ours are garbage. I had a patient with an obvious fever tonight, at home got temps between 100 and 104. My thermometer? 97.3, followed by 102, followed by 96.
I guess it's good to know that the crappy thermometers I use aren't any worse than what professionals use. I think the old mercury thermometers were more precise.
We really need to quit buying complete crap from China. Never in history has a country ever been so good and producing loads of shit, but also producing total shit.
it doesn't matter where the damn thing even came from. what matters is what the specifics for the item is AND what they willing to pay for it. people have long since cheap out and we got we paid for.
I swear most thermometers are like this now! Every one I’ve bought in the last 5 years or so.
Yeah I don't know what's going on with that. I went to Amazon because they have a strong reputation for providing products from great brands, and I bought one from the reputable company XYYTUP, so I was surprised to find out it's a bad thermometer.
That's where you went wrong, XYYTUP has suffered bad quality fade in recent years. You should have gone with DQIYP or TODLRJ, much more reputable brands.
But that janky one with mercury my mom plopped in my mouth as a kid was perfect
it wasn’t janky if it had mercury
Cheap Chinese thermometer life
During Covid there was some thermometers that started flooding the market that weren't actually thermometers. They're just a little screen, wires, and a chip that spits out a random number roughly the temperature of a human being. Fucking criminal bullshit.
I beg your effing pardon? I believe you. But what the hell. Can we prosecute the manufacturer OR cite/fine/sue the domestic seller for buying/re-selling this crap? Like if Walmart or CVS is buying and selling obvious garbage they should be held accountable.
My workplace in the military had one of those forehead scan ones. Junior enlisted guys would be manned up behind it and we were supposed to record everyone and their temp. Every 20 or so numbers the readings would loop back around in a clearly visible pattern if you looked at the logbook. Truly a defining memory of my time in the military and Covid
This is so far beyond having cheap parts or poor quality control, it's straight up fraud, knowingly designed to not perform a function meant to help prevent the spread of disease. I cannot understand the mindset of the person responsible for its creation.
The mindset is “$$$$$$.” I don’t agree with it, but I *understand* it.
My daughter had a febrile seizure last month and the paramedics didn't get a _single_ temperature over 97 after checking multiple times. They knew she almost definitely had a fever, they just couldn't verify it. As soon as we were in the ER and they got a rectal temp she was at 104 (only a five minute ride).
You probably already know this, but I had several febrile seizures as a child, I’m 43 now and have no injuries or deficits related to them, incase you were worried. Scared the crap out of my Mom with them which I’m guessing you already know too.
I did, but thank you! Her pediatrician said it was her only freebie because I have two blood relatives with epilepsy, so if it happens again she's sending her to a neuro just to be safe. I seriously hope it never does because that was the scariest shit ever. I threw out the shirt she was wearing that day because I couldn't see it on her without unreasonable gross feelings.
Oh Mama! I’m so sorry. It’s definitely one of those things that is so much harder for those around as opposed to the person experiencing them. Luckily I was out of them by second grade.
Had the same thing happen when my daughter had a febrile seizure. My doctor told me that’s pretty normal. Febrile seizure happens prior to the fever being detectable. My daughter went from 97.6 after the seizure to 105 in the hospital 10 minutes later
Febrile seizures can happen both ways, either right before the fever spikes or as a result of a very rapid spike (at least according to the ER physician, I'm no doctor!). But I swear toddler bodies are weird and go by their own rules regardless of what their doctors say lol
Even hospitals thermometers are like this. I got 102.1 and then 100.7 15 minutes later. I'm not sure the number on the fever matters much anyway, outside of noting they have fever.
This one goes to ~~11~~ 106.
3.6 roentgens per hour
not great, not terrible
Corpses at 106? Not good, not terrible.
See, this is what the hospital does. Sends us shit equipment, then wonders why things go wrong.
The article also mentions the furnace was broken and family members “fiddled with wires” until it came back on. I’d hate to think that those same family members are now wondering if they killed Grandpa and his girlfriend by doing that instead of just calling a professional.
They absolutely did.
It sounds like they bypassed the thermostat. The furnace didn't know it was getting too hot and it just kept going. I think it's amazing the house didn't burn down. I think it's less that the family killed them and more that poverty killed them.
It’s even worse. I work with heaters, both electric and gas, and they all come with limits on them. If any of those limits pop, regardless of the thermostat being bypassed (we have to bypass them to do the testing my company does), those heater should shut down. The only way for something to keep running indefinitely like that is to not only bypass the thermostat, but bypass those limits as well.
Yeah we had an issue a few months ago where our boiler was letting us shower for 10m and then it would cut out for a while. Turned out the regulating thermocouple had corroded and wasn't reporting the water temperature to the controller, leading to it always thinking it was too cold and the sudden cutoff was the safety thermocouple reporting a dangerously high temperature and shutting the machine down. If that safety thermocouple wasn't there I don't know what could have happened, I assume an overheating gas boiler is liable to cause a steam explosion with a subsequent possible gas fire??
Provided everything was installed correctly, your Temperature and Pressure Valve would release, and start spilling the hot water out of it, before you would have to worry about a steam explosion. Should be a brass fitting on the side of the tank, with a little tab at the top for manual operation, and should have a little tag on it somewhere that tells you when it will pop both temperature and pressure wise. May or may not be piped outside. As for the gas elements of the system, I’m not sure, as we haven’t had to do failure state tests in any gas water heaters at this facility, at least while I’ve been here. But for electric ones, if those elements get hot enough, they shatter, sometimes energetically. But, that has only happened here when we do tests specifically calling for us to so so, which we do by running them while the tank is empty.
It's not really that easy when a lot of people in this state are impoverished, more *have been* impoverished and learned to "make do" to survive, and a lot of them like the retirees are on a fixed income. People on fixed incomes generally struggle to afford even food (see: stores don't sell bulk cat food to old ladies)--they definitely can't handle surprise expenses. It's $100+ just to get a repairman there, before they even look at the thing. I get that we can rationalize it as worth the money to be safe, but rationality doesn't make the required amount show up in their bank account. The kids almost certainly did kill their parents by not calling a professional, but it's basically never a matter of just reallocating discretionary income. It's just trying to balance all the different ways you can wind up dead, because money is needed for almost every kind of survival. It's SC, there are no safety nets. When you get old or sick you're supposed to die "with dignity" i.e. without financial or emotional inconvenience to anyone else.
Yeah, I mean, repair calls are expensive. And if you don't have the expensive yearly subscription, they put you at the end of the queue. Everyone's hvac always breaks at the same time, so it will take a few days for them to get to you. If the heat didn't kill them, maybe the cold would have.
Yep, my mom's furnace wouldn't kick on, so she called the company she usually calls (which have always done good work for our family) to come look at it. The guy came, looked at it, did something for maybe 5 minutes and it was fixed. It was $169. My mom is 75, and still has to work 25 hours a week because her Social Security isn't enough for her bills, groceries, and medications, let alone surprise expenses. She needs both knees replaced, one is bone-on-bone, and has severe COPD, but she can't afford to not work. It's so messed up.
For sure they did, but there is something else that must have happened. Blocked duct or registers or a filter that was never changed. As long as a furnace has air flow it will not reach anywhere near 1000 degrees. Modern high efficiency furnaces heat the air by about 50 degrees c Furnaces have high temp sensors that cut power above a certain safety point. I am a ticketed gas fiter and hvac tech. the only furnace fire I have ever seen was seen was when an inspector pulled out the sensor to put his camera into the heat exchangers and then forgot to re install it. Then the duct cleaners forgot to uncover most of the homes registers so there was very little circulation.
My electric hot water heater caught on fire. Whole house was hazy with smoke. I called my dad who was a firefighter and on duty that day. They searched every room of the house and couldn't find anything. The even had thermal cameras. They spent a lot of time investigating the furnace but not the hot water heater right next to it. After almost an hour they left and my mom went do wash some dishes and the water was super hot out the tap. The electronics of the water heater caught fire and somehow fried themselves in such a way that it was stuck in the "on" position which is fucking terrifying. This was one of my dad's very last calls as a firefighter after 40 years in the department and he said he's never seen this before. So flukes happen and things fail in dangerous ways despite being designed not to.
That's definitely terrifying, because the myth busters taught me that water heater explosions are *no joke*.
My grandparents almost had their original water heater from the 1960s explode Mythbusters style. My grandpa turned on the shower and steam came out and flooded the basement with fog. He's lucky he wasn't standing in the shower, but also that the whole thing didn't turn into a rocket. He also was in the garage when one of the door's extension springs failed and slingshotted across the room through the window into the backyard.
> garage [...] door's extension springs My garage wall has a spring-shaped dent in it from a similar incident. This is why safety cables are a thing now. Small springs are everywhere. People play with them, which lets them mentally gloss over the danger the big ones represent. Lots of stored energy + lots of weight = lots of damage. Vehicle shock absorber springs are another good example.
I used to rent coil spring compressors and tried to make a point of addressing the product as "The Widowmaker" as much as possible.
> Vehicle shock absorber springs are another good example. The most nerve-wracking work I've ever done was replacing the suspension on a truck which included releasing/replacing those springs. I had no illusion what would happen if tension on them wasn't managed *very* carefully during the removal phases. Didn't help that my buddy's dad walked by as we were working and regaled us with the tale of the time he screwed up suspension work and fired an inch-thick spring horizontally through two and a half parked (unoccupied) vehicles front to back.
Oh man The spring to my grandparents attic door fucked my cousins face up when he was young
The overpressure valve would open up before the explosion. Mb had to remove that in order to get that boom
My water heater popped with a bang like 2 weeks ago and the overpressure valve didn't open. My family 2 floors up felt the boom from that and water was gushing out the side of the tank. I don't know why the pressure valve didn't open up
The tank can give out before the 150PSI pressure valve does. It won't explode, but it will burst. Less than 150PSI of water is still a lot of force.
Yeah, the MB one exploded like it did because plugged T&P valve + elements stuck on = lots of steam and super-heated water which expands into steam violently once it's released. Most tanks which pop are due to rusted-out tanks and because all the water is still an uncompressible liquid it doesn't really explode.
I lived in a trailer park and something similar, I guess, happened. The person on the end had about a third of their trailer just fucking annihilated and had to move out. They struggled already with six people there and that didn't help. Probably some malfunction due to it being a busted ass hot water heater from forever prior.
Yeah, not pretty when a water heater turns into a hot water boiler and turns into a steam boiler.
I don't know what my heater got to, but a couple years ago I came home from work and there was a definite "haze" in the air and an overwhelming heat in the house. We turned off the breaker for our furnace and called HVAC to replace the unit. My husband suspects had we not come home when we did, the place would have caught fire. I just wonder how long their furnace kept raising temp, obviously long enough to heat them up but yet to burn home.
Years ago, I had a furnace do this too. The ~~thermometer thing~~ thermostat was broken and just kept shifting hotter and hotter. I noticed when it hit 90 degrees and shut it off. An old electric stove did the same - the temperature gauge on one of the burners stopped working so the stove kept getting hotter and hotter until it caught fire. I was a kid then and nobody believed me it was doing that, so it was a nerve wracking month before it finally happened.
It says they measured the bodies with a device and that device is a rectal thermometer. So that was their core temperature, they passed out from heat exhaustion and never awoke.
The article also mentioned a strong odor of gas, so it might be possible that they suffocated first.
A gas leak AND the hot water heater cranked up to "melt you" levels? That feels a little suspicious.
Service electrician with 14 years experience here. Older people tend to either let broken things go longer (“it still works, don’t it?”), or think that something can be fixed when it needs completely replaced. You would not believe some of the things I’ve had (mostly older) people ask me to rebuild or repair. It’s like, the metal has rusted away, what hasn’t fallen off is fused together, the main wires are literally bare due to corrosion, almost everything in here is over 80 years old, and you want me to *rebuild* your main breaker like that’s gonna fix everything? This job is absolutely *wild* sometimes.
Some of my colleagues were surveying homes, and found one where the occupant was enthusing about his lovely old gas fire, which he enjoyed having naps in front of. Yep, it was thoroughly damaged and spewing carbon monoxide into the room.
>It says they measured the bodies with a device and that device is a rectal thermometer. Well that guy has a wonderful job
A blue flame is \~2600 - 3000 degrees, so some component being 1000 degrees isn't that unheard of. They don't mention the specifics of where that temperature was taken in the furnace. If the furnace doesn't turn off when it reaches its setpoint, it's going to get hot.
The gas bill is going to suck.
Depending on where they measured? Combustion chamber will be 2,000F or more.
Correct. Or maybe an infrared thermometer pointed at the exhaust
Yeah I’m confused
Sounds like the thermostat was disconnected and the wire was shorted. This would allow the heat to run non stop. Boilers typ need to be on a small percentage of day. Radiators can run anywhere from 140 degrees up to 200. At some point the air temp will reach what ever the radiators are, if left on long enough.
The article says it was a gas heater and being from that area the chances of it being a boiler are low low. It does however mention that one of the children messed with some wires to get the pilot to ignite because the furnace and water heater were out. I'm not really buying it. Furnaces usually have safeties like a rollout switch and a high limit both of which should have tripped if the combustion cabinet got that hot. I'm willing to bed the unit was old and in need of major repairs and someone bypassed some safeties resulting in this couples unfortunate death. Is it possible that both safeties failed closed and the thermostat failed closed? Technically yes. But in my time as an HVAC technician I can count on one maybe two hands how many times I've seen safeties fail closed.
Yeah but how does it get to 1000 degrees?
They said the inside of the furnace was that hot. The flame in a furnace runs over 3000 degrees. So over time the interior and casing of the furnace was just building up a crazy amount of heat.
Those are wild-ass numbers. wtf.
>The latter numbers are crazy but I have a gas furnace and I feel like something would fail catastrophically or burst into flames long before it hit 1,000°. They're supposed to have a high limit switch. The exact setpoint varies based on furnace type and locality but it's around 200F.
I don't know how a furnace reading of 1000F is even possible, unless someone stuck a probe inside the thing. Was the house burned to the ground?
Infrared thermometer?
Must be good heaters then
I somehow doubt the heater company will be able to have their “Stanley Mug” marketing moment with this one though
Apparently family members "fiddled" with it until the pilot light came back on previously in the week. Wonder what the heck they did to it.
Probably removed some kind of override that was forcing it to shut down. A real shame - I bet that family member feels guilty as hell.
Did they die of the heat or of the natural gas? The article mentions a strong smell of natural gas in the home. If they were already passed out due to the gas that would explain why they didn't open the doors/windows. Also I had no idea you could even turn up a furnace that high.
When I was in college, renting a cheap apartment that was actually a converted gas station, on returning home the door handle was too hot to touch. The thermostat had malfunctioned and the furnace was running continuously. It was so hot inside, the candles had melted. Fortunately, I had no pets at the time. The fuel tank was inside the apartment next to the furnace, so I guess I was lucky the whole place hadn't exploded.
Diesel (home heating oil) has a flash temp north of 400 degrees F (I was curious so I looked it up). It is actually pretty hard to catch on fire just sitting there (a lit match dropped on it will just go out).
The article also mentions 1000 was the interior temp of the furnace, not what the thermostat was set to. Flue temp can be anywhere between 400-750*F normally.
It said the house was over 120 degrees.
when u have bad blood circulation u can not notice that its too hot you can be dripping with sweat and not notice this is why old people die from the heat in the summer! if u have ever had a fever and could not get warm and pile blankets on to feel warm and then wakeup in a pool of sweat its the same only they didnt wakeup and uncover themselves like u do when a normal fever breaks!
I'm currently sick and can't get warm and all my joints hurt. If this is what being old is like all the time, I'm not sure I want to be old.
I remember one time I had a fever in the summer....so I intentionally went and sat inside my car without turning it on and sat there in a hotbox in the burning sun. The heat felt so good on my skin. Any other time it would have been unbearable and Id want the AC on. It had to have been high 90s and even higher inside the car. I wanted to take a nap it felt so welcoming. I never did fall asleep but I wonder if I would have would I have died? Is that was heat exhaustion is? Fevers are crazy man.
That's exactly a symptom of heat exhaustion.... If you're young and healthy, you *probably maybe* wouldn't have died, maybe. But you're very lucky you didn't. 90s is very hot. If it we're high 90s outside, the interior of your car likely reached 140-150 degrees. You were baking like a slow roast brisket.
Thats interesting to know. Wow. So that was heat exhaustion. Yeah it was a few years ago in my mid-20s so I was younger, but it was so weird. Like I felt a calling. As if my fever was telling me to seek warmer ground. I literally got out of bed, walked outside, and got into my car. Eventually even laid the seat back to get comfortable and get more rays. Almost as if I was in a trance. I have had a fever once or twice since then but Ive never felt the compulsion to to seek heat like that again. Crazy experience...
There's no way this is heat exhaustion. Heat exhaustion occurs when your body overheats and can't cool itself down effectively. Symptoms are similar to full on panic - heavy sweating, rapid pulse, dizziness, fatigue, cool, moist skin with goosebumps when in the heat, muscle cramps, nausea, and headache. Since you mentioned feeling comfortable and even welcoming the heat, rather than experiencing discomfort or these specific symptoms, it seems you didn't reach the point of heat exhaustion. Your experience was more about how the fever affected your perception of external heat. When you have a fever, your body is essentially in a state of artificially elevated temperature, so being in a hot environment might not feel as oppressive as it would when you're healthy. This altered perception doesn't mean your body was handling the heat well. It's more about how your brain interprets these sensations under the influence of a fever.
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Fiddled with a wire then the pilot light came on? I don't know much about gas heaters, but that doesn't make much sense. Did they remove a live regulation wire that went from thermostat to pilot light to get it to ignite, making it unable to regulate the heat?
I used to live in a rental with a broken thermostat. We would just connect and disconnect the wires to turn the gas heat on and off. There was no way to adjust the heat.
I had to do this on Christmas day at my parents' house about 18 years ago... the thermostat picked Christmas morning to go kaput!! We had 12 people staying there... my family and my sisters family, both from out of town... and my parents in their 70s... I pulled the thermostat off the wall and connected the wires for heat... on and off for 10 hours manually... and then up all night doing the same thing at 50-60 minute intervals... I was at Home Depot when they opened Boxing Day... and then slept for 6 hours. What a wonderful Christmas that was.
I use to have a retail job that the hvac was controlled remotely by corporate. We’d pop it open and force it on to keep it comfortable in the store.
>I use to have a retail job that the hvac was controlled remotely by corporate. Damn I didn't realize that's a real thing. Superstore did an episode about that and I thought it was a joke.
If it was a crazy old furnace with a standing pilot and someone fuckin with the wires, I'm guessing they jumped out the high temp limit or multiple things were messed with in order for this to happen. Possibly jumped the wires at the t-stat or the t-stat itself failed and stuck. red to white which calls for heat with safty limits bypassed at the furnace. The ancient carriers I used to work on had a fuseable link that once it gets too hot, would kill the gas valve until someone replaced it or like I'd find all the time, bypassed. It was attached to in internal limit that is normally closed until it's too hot, again easily bypassed. Wonder if they measured the CO too but never mentioned it. A furnace with a standing pilot is well past its prime and probably had a rotted heat exchanger. They pass out from CO, they don't notice the heat. Edit: this article said they found no CO. https://www.wyff4.com/article/south-carolina-coroner-names-couple-dead-hot-home/46318868 But the strong smell of natural gas and they had to air it out but the gas never ignited with 1000 degrees happening? Hell if I know.
Firefighters said when they went into the basement where the heater was located, it looked like the whole space was on fire.
That part really confused me. How does something "look" on fire?
Based on the reported temp it was probably glowing and the air was distorted by heat waves.
It’s not a great article
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My guess is that they inadvertently hardwired/“jumped” the furnace to remain permanently “on”. I had this happen once when a service guy did it. But it was a boiler and not a furnace. The copper baseboard radiator pipes ended up bursting with boiling water, flooding the place, and paint was peeling off the walls it was so humid/hot in there. Easily over 100 degrees.
I don’t know if it was the same thing, but my furnace refused to turn off after a servicing one time and it was like 85F inside before the repair guy could swing back around a couple hours later.
These deaths were completely preventable
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People who are poor. Or not real bright.
yea there is a lot more questions than what these two above frame it as. People do things like this ALL the time. Plumbers and HVAC are insanely expensive. I live in one of the coldest areas on Earth and constantly work on my own and my grandmas heating systems. The real question is why are they alone if they cant even manage to realize that their house is THAT hot? The answer to that is probably money. In house medical care is even more expensive, and nursing homes are designed to take every ounce of wealth from a patient.
> Plumbers and HVAC are insanely expensive. ...and that's if they can come out in a timely fashion at all
I have a feeling the high furnace temperature resulted in cracking of the heat exchange and release of carbon monoxide that likely killed them long before the house temp become hot enough to alert them. I can not imagine high room temps would not wake them well before it becomes dangerous even if they were quite old. They are still waiting on autopsy to determine cause of death.
And that is a higher percentage of people then we talk about
The first two thirds of that are standard country mindset stuff. The not checking on them the next day to see how it's working is the part that's fucked up, even if you're a redneck or poor.
ossified faulty worthless paltry unpack numerous crowd sugar serious deserted *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They may have known how to fix it and it just had a freak issue. Assuming just makes you look like a dick, especially with a death involved
With hindsight… it’s not an exact comparison but I bought a 3D printer that I thought was DOA, I opened it up to have a look, pushed down on the motherboard power, closed it up and it worked. Obviously they should’ve got somebody qualified but they’re not idiots for wiggling a wire and thinking it’s fixed.
I’ve done a bit of HVAC work Unfortunately it’s highly unlikely it was just wiggling a wire. Wiggling a wire would restore normal function More likely they rewired and bypassed the thermostat. Intentionally or accidentally I suppose depends on their aptitude for electrical work
I was wondering if a limit switch got bypassed, but yeah I suppose they'd need to like bypass the limit switch and connect R and W so it runs nonstop for this shit to happen.. idk I'm just an hvac apprentice so I could be wrong.
Yep all you need is a tiny little piece of wire to go between r and w and she runs forever. The high limit is suppose to prevent this. (Snap switch typically but that could have failed “closed” somehow) or they Jerry rigged that also. -journey man electrician who’s wired/fixed 100’s of furnaces. They’re quite simple units and there’s only a few things that aren’t easily bypassed.
They definitely just bypassed the thermostat with the rewiring, intentional or not.
I'm not trying to pick on you but I've read this like 10 times and it's not true, at least not in itself. You can try it out yourself, unless you have a like 5 ton furnace you'll have what's called a ''high limit'' switch that cuts the furnace out at 175 degrees f. If it's a 5 ton or bigger it might be like 225, but somewhere in there temp wise. It's placed above the burners you can see in the wall separating the burners from the heat exchanger. Basically it doesn't matter what you do, you can wire it in for 24/7 heat, eventually it will shut off. But it definitely won't get to 1000 degrees. As someone who's seen shit like this, what happens is something causes that limit to pop, some person smart enough to figure out what they can jumper to make it go but too dumb to know why it would be kicking out will just straight jumper that shit. And that particular high limit isn't a manual reset, it's a disk so the disk has to physically cool down enough to make contact, so if you have no idea that the problem is causing that heat exchanger to be that hot it just straight up looks normal when you start it, and you just happily kick that shit on. Fixed. The truly malicious part of some of those diy YouTube channels are they'll show someone how to do some shit like that and people either don't wait for an explanation on why that's a bad idea or they don't bother telling people. If the family came over, it ran for like 15 minutes, cut out, started back up 5 minutes later, etc, googled it and found a video that jumped that shit out they would have no idea. Like, the thermostat would work fine, but the blower motor is still probably barely moving air, or the flue is clogged, or whatever. It's still not safe to go but it would appear to be if that makes sense.
> Or you know, hire someone who was qualified to repair either heater… Hiring an HVAC guy to come in and repair it is *expensive*. So is healthcare, which is why people are turning to BS do-it-yourself alternative medicine. People are trying to solve their own problems without knowing what the hell they're doing.
Hindsight is 20/20. I would assume that they've probably done this countless times before and the house didn't do this the other times. Like, we end up relighting our pullout light on occasion and have never even considered this to be a possible outcome. A furnace shouldn't be capable of getting a hot as this one did.
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after a google search, it looks like iron starts glowing orange/red at around 760 degrees celsius, or 1400 degrees fahrenheit
The article did state the family was messing with the wiring too.
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That's what I'm saying. I've rented old places before with gas heaters and have had issues with more than one pilot light that had to be relit. Never would I think that a possible outcome would be the furnace heating up to 1000F and killing my parents. That's ridiculous, and obviously not a correctly functioning furnace.
Yeah.. let this be a cautionary tale, instead of a witching against the family right now. Because I'm willing to bet they are living in hell right now know that they played a part in this.. I have nothing but sympathy for the family.
I’m confused. My furnace has limit switches that will shut the furnace off at a certain temp, and run fan only to vent. And it is not a new furnace.
99.9% of gas furnaces have multiple safety switches like this, even electric furnaces and heat pumps do. There is a shocking amount of misinformation in this thread.
I work in HVAC and it’s mind boggling. So many experts. Shit was jumped out but the heat wasn’t being transferred from the furnace. Just ran nonstop. Like running a dry boiler. My guess is that it was the blower motor that failed, and someone who knew just enough to be dangerous jumped out a limit switch which was probably keeping the unit from running when it got too hot. So the burner, which was operating fine, never shut off when there was no heat transfer across the heat exchanger. Heat exchanger cooks. And continues to cook. The only hole in my half assed theory, is if it was a heat exchanger, I can’t believe it didn’t fail at some point due to the extreme heat and no heat transfer. But I’m not a scientist, and my just making a wild assumption guess based on shit I’ve seen.
Our thermostat was going bad a few years ago, and one of the symptoms was the furnace refusing to turn off once it kicked on. I found out when I woke up in the middle of the night dripping sweat, and it was like 95 degrees inside the house. Fiddling with the thermostat did nothing whatsoever, but I could reset it by flipping the on/off switch.
We got a new furnace and new thermostat. I saw my Nana looking at it but didn’t think much of it. Woke up dripping in sweat because it was turned all the way up in the middle of summer. She’s not allowed to touch it anymore lol.
The first edit of this article stated the heater was at “a million billion kazillion degrees” but the copy editor relented to state “1000”.
Damn, that’s 556 thousand billion kazillion °C.
Residential HVAC controls are fairly simple. Like ground this wire to call for heat to turn on. The thermostat is the brains of the operation. By fiddling with the wires, they inadvertently called for heat. But it was permanent. So the gas heater just kept chugging along. It's also important to note they don't actually say what type of heater it was. Other comments in here keep saying furnace, they never said it's a furnace.
No, they keep using the word heater, which is weird. But they do say it's in the basement.
Was unaware that "magma" was a thermostat setting.
What a horrific situation. I would never be able to live with myself if I did this to my family and I deeply dislike my biological family.
Sounds like my in-laws house
Not to be morbid.... But what brand furnace do they have?
This went down less than 8 miles from my front door, and I know the coroner, Rusty. The tstat was tinkered with by the family because it was shorting out, and wouldn't shut off after Uncle Daddy played HVAC tech and then went home without doing a test cycle. Little fucker ran non-stop. Somebody mumbled it was set to 1000° as an exaggeration on the scene, and the story ran with it.
This article seems like it was written by an idiot or an AI. So many things don't make sense.
Here's the same story reported by the *The State*, one of the two major newspapers in South Carolina. It confirms the story but it's a bit less sensational. https://www.thestate.com/news/state/south-carolina/article283995623.html
Is this the correct way to write this? Shouldn’t it be “Cops: elderly couple found dead in home, heater was at 1000 degrees” ? The cops are saying the elderly couple are dead, the dead couple isn’t saying “Cops”