Smoke Detectors and Fire Safety

It seems like every day heart wrench­ing nat­ur­al dis­as­ters dom­i­nate the head­lines and night­ly news­casts.

The real­i­ty how­ev­er, paints a dif­fer­ent pic­ture.  Many fatal­i­ties and tragedies are man-made, and many are pre­ventable.   House­hold fires cause 20 times more fatal­i­ties world­wide than all nat­ur­al dis­as­ters com­bined!

Fire depart­ments con­tin­ue to work to raise aware­ness about where and how fires start. Sta­tis­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, kitchens and bed­rooms are most prone for a fire to start. Oth­er high risks are clothes dry­er vents with lint build up, can­dles, and wood burn­ing fire­places.

It has become tra­di­tion to raise aware­ness twice a year around fire safe­ty.  Every time we change our clocks, from or to day­light sav­ings time, we need to take a few min­utes to go through a fire safe­ty check­list.

Make sure that smoke detec­tors are installed on every storey of your home. (in many juris­dic­tions it’s the law) If you sleep with bed­room doors closed, you should have a smoke detec­tor inside your bed­rooms. Note that young chil­dren are noto­ri­ous­ly deep sleep­ers, they won’t hear a smoke detec­tor on a dif­fer­ent lev­el, espe­cial­ly with doors closed and oth­er white noise present.

Replace bat­ter­ies in all your detec­tors when you change your clocks. Use high qual­i­ty, fresh, alka­line bat­ter­ies, this is not the time to save with cheap dol­lar store bat­ter­ies.

Smoke detec­tors should be replaced at least once every ten years. They are not expen­sive so err on the side of cau­tion. It is also rec­om­mend­ed to clean detec­tors by vac­u­um­ing for dust peri­od­i­cal­ly.

Smoke detec­tor tech­nol­o­gy has improved in the past few years.  You can now buy dual pow­ered  detec­tors that rely on both house pow­er and bat­ter­ies, and detec­tors can be set to trig­ger each oth­er, if 1 detec­tor sens­es smoke, all linked smoke detec­tors will go into alarm.

Avoid detec­tors that require bat­tery removal to qui­et them for false alarms. Choose a detec­tor with a hush but­ton instead.  A detec­tor can’t alert you if it doesn’t have any pow­er!

The bot­tom line is that work­ing smoke detec­tors save lives.   Day­light sav­ings time is the 2^nd Sun­day in March.  Let’s make a com­mit­ment to take a few min­utes to be Fire Safe.