Unexpected Event

 Adventure Location: Rockport, Texas

Adventure Date: 12-05-2020

It was an unusual event but an important lesson was learned. The Castle is a small trailer by current standards. It is only 148 square feet of interior. The box is 20 feet inside X 7.5 feet inside roughly. We do not have slides. During the course of thirteen years of living in the Castle it has been modified in many ways.

The furnace has been removed since we use electric heat because we did not like the 20+ percent of heat (propane) waste the furnace had. The furnace outside openings have been sealed off.

The vent hood is gone since the vent was always opening and rattling in the winds. That opening is sealed off.

The only unsealed openings we know of are the very small condensation drains to the outside on three of the windows.  Those are quite small.

Since late afternoon yesterday we had been in the closed up Castle with the heat on and the windows closed. This morning the OFM had a headache and thought it was just migraine remnants. By 1100 this morning the OFM was feeling pretty bad and he could not figure out why. So he decided to take a short walk in the campground and see if that helped. 

While he was getting a warm jacket on, the Castle door swung open and let cold air in.  The OFM finished the dressing and started out the open door. Then as he started to step down onto the ground he realized his bad headache was lessening. So he stepped back inside and closed the door to the cold air.  In a couple of minutes his headache started increasing again.

OK let us reason about this. Then he had the thought that those who heat with open flame heating had to be careful about. They have to have openings to let air exchange happen to replace the burned up oxygen. So he slightly opened a window on each side of the Castle to let in fresh air. Within thirty minutes the OFM was doing fine like nothing had been wrong all morning and has been fine the rest of the day.

So it seems that in a small tightly sealed small trailer it may be possible to not naturally have enough air infiltration/ex-filtration to supply enough fresh air for comfortable normal living. We had not even used the stove top even for heating water for the hot chocolate. It seems that we will have to keep a window opened a small amount in the future just to keep breathing. Not breathing could put a serious dent in the trying to have tooooo much fun.