Smoke alarms play a crucial role in the early detection of fires. Smoke can become apparent long before there is obvious heat or flames. Whether you are asleep or awake, the addition of smoke alarms throughout your home can significantly ad to the safety and security of everyone that resides within the perimeters of your house and yard. Smoke alarms save lives.
A good rule of thumb is to include a smoke alarm in every different room. For very small rooms, this can be stretched to include one smoke alarm for every two rooms. If a room is greater than a couple hundred square feet though, it should really have its own smoke alarm of some kind. Only smoke alarms can detect the finest traces of smoke and alert you to the danger before a fire can get out of control.
Smoke alarms should be tested once each month. Though any of us have heard this common rule, very few of us check our smoke alarms with any kind of frequency. By shooting for checking your smoke alarms at least once per month, you can be sure that at least they are not going for six months or a year at a time without being checked.
By checking the smoke alarms’ batteries you can be certain that the units are still in working order. Of course most smoke alarms now come with a built in low battery alarm that will begin making a loud beeping sound. While annoying, these low battery alerts can be life saving and should be heeded as quickly as possible.
You may wish to place a smoke alarm just outside of your bathroom(s), rather than inside the rooms themselves. Sometimes the steam created by a hot shower can trigger smoke alarms. Most bathrooms are small enough that placing a smoke alarm just outside the door is enough smoke detection security, at the same time such placement decreases the chance of tripping the alarm inadvertently with steam.
For even more advanced fire safety, you can pair smoke alarms with an emergency fire sprinkler system. If you think there is a chance that you will eventually expand your home fire safety system to include sprinklers, be sure that your choice of smoke alarm systems will allow you to expand in that way in the future.
Even before you can smell it, the more sensitive smoke alarms can alert you to smoke being in the vicinity of one of the smoke alarms guarding your home. Even those with very sensitive senses of smell must sleep sometime. The smoke alarms installed in your home will alert you to fire danger before it is too late. Smoke alarms play a huge role in making it possible for people to escape their homes with ease and within a safe period of time.
For more information on smoke alarms, why not check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_alarm where you can learn more about the history of the smoke alarm, as well as other interesting facts and figures about this life saving invention.
