We had a visit from our local Fire and Rescue Service yesterday. They checked our fire alarms and found them wanting, so they replaced them with new ones with batteries that will last ten years. The CO alarm in the kitchen was okay, though.
They checked that we would be able to get out if there was a fire and ticked a lot of boxes on a form. We thought that it is a pretty good idea for them to do this.
This may be a British-ism, but fire alarms are usually connected with sprinkler systems. The alarms in a home are smoke alarms - they do not detect heat, just particulate matter in the air. With CO there are multiple sensing technologies, but nearly all of them have a limited lifetime and should be replaced annually. Having survived a devastating fire in my home 10 years ago (during which I was able to rescue both of my dogs), both smoke alarms and CO detectors are very important to me. My smoke alarms are now hard-wired into the electric, with backup batteries that get changed yearly. I think it’s wonderful that your fire service performs these inspections for you. I think that in America it would be seen as a privacy violation and people would resent it, but every week I read of some poor soul that died in a house fire. I’m determined never to be one of them.
Most homes in the US don’t have sprinklers. That’s usually reserved for apartment buildings. Homes are generally required to have to have smoke/CO detectors in all rooms and a fire detector in the kitchen. Also - and it may vary from state to state - when you sell your home, your detectors must be less than ten years old.
In general, yes, but there are heat alarms. I have one in my garage so that I’ll be alerted to a fire, but not smoke from a welder.
But they do carry a different risk. I asked a fire fighter acquaintance about them once and he made the comment that the problem with heat alarms is that, by the time they’re going off, you already have a pretty good sized fire going. They’re not going to alert you to a smoldering pile of lumber you didn’t know a spark landed on.
That was my point - in the US we call them smoke alarms, not fire alarms. It may be different in the UK (which I think is where OP lives).
Ah, I see. From your post, it seemed that you were posting from the UK.
I’m an American, on my 50s, lived in several widely separated places in the US, and I and the people around me have always used “fire alarm” and “smoke alarm” more or less interchangeably, though it’s true the home versions almost always detect smoke.
I say “almost,” because really we tend to say “smoke detector” a lot.
Sorry for the confusion - too late to edit it to rephrase.
Same here. In my experience, “fire alarms” are associated with businesses and public facilities (office buildings, grocery stores, movie theaters, etc.). Residential systems are almost always called “smoke alarms” (for hard-wired systems like I have at home - if one goes off they all go off) or “smoke detectors” (battery operated stand alone units). I was a bit confused by the OP using the term “fire alarm”, but when I realized they were from the UK I figured it was probably just a regional difference.
To further muddy US practice in terminology, large buildings have a “fire alarm” system. Which will contain both heat & particulate (“smoke”) detectors. And if the building has sprinklers, a pressure drop sensor in the sprinkler plumbing to trigger the “fire alarm” for the sprinkler discharging, even if it did that because someone whacked a sprinkler head and broke it.
@LH75 spent a career in fire alarm system management and might usefully chime in.
Going back to the OP, IIRC it wasn’t uncommon for the local fire departments to offer homeowners a courtesy home inspection. And mandatory periodic fire inspections of commercial buildings or the public areas of multi-family residential buildings are nigh universal. But mandatory inspections of detached houses or even the interiors of individual apartments would raise a lot of hackles in the USA.
Amazingly, they sell electric ones without battery backup; when I moved into my home, it had interconnected electric ones; such that if one went off they all went off; however, if there was no power for any reason, including an electrical fire, a lightning strike, or just a car crash a couple of blocks away taking out a pole I had no working smoke detectors. One of the very first upgrades was to replace them with ones that had battery backup.
Many local fire departments will install/replace smoke detectors for free; call your local FD non-emergency phone #. We do at our department; however, we have to install them rather than just give them to you to ensure they are used & not turned around & sold on ebay or wherever.
My 2016 house fire started in the same room as my breaker panel is, and power went out almost immediately. When the house was rebuilt the contractor installed a wired system with no battery backup and I demanded that they replace it with one with batteries, for precisely that reason.
That is awesome. In my town our local FD is all volunteer, so they will refer you to the Fire Marshall for the town. He’ll do an inspection, but his recommendations are the homeowner’s responsibility.
Our apartment has both smoke/CO detectors for the bedrooms and a sprinkler system for fire.
I live in a townhouse. We have both smoke detectors, supplied and maintained by the homeowner, and heat detectors, supplied and maintained by the complex. Smoke detectors sound an alarm within the unit itself; heat detectors sound a complex-wide fire alarm.
We are mostly volunteer but have some paid guys during the weekdays. They handle it so I don’t know the details. Kidde (I believe it Kidde) makes thousands of free ones available to FDs across the country every year. We get so many & I do believe the request might go to the fire marshall’s office who then assigns us out to do the physical install. I don’t know when we get them other than it’s not Jan 1st but if you call too late in some years we are out of them until the replacement year begins again.
Only if the apartments were actually being inspected by a government agency - it doesn’t seem to raise hackles if the landlord is actually arranging/conducting the inspection, even if it’s due to a government mandate.
This is true. My company sold household smoke detectors but we did not service or install them.
My job was working with wired in systems covering whole buildings and in some cases whole campuses.
We have two of those upstairs, but the one in the kitchen is a heat detector, so it won’t go off if I burn the cakes.
If it senses a fire it sounds an alarm…
No doubt, some in the UK would as well. They didn’t just turn up at the door but called to ask if we would like a visit a week earlier.
Homes with more than two floors have to have hard-wired alarms/detectors on each floor. Our daughter had her loft converted into a fourth bedroom and the builders, for some unknown reason, threw their old battery alarms into a void under the roof. A year or so later, they started chirping because the batteries were going flat. It took them ages to track them down.
My home is all electric. We have electric water heaters and use two heat pumps for heating and cooling (one upstairs and one downstairs). The stove and clothes dryer are also electric.We do have two fireplaces which are only used when we are awake and in the room. (I once neglected to open the flue and the smoke detector in that room sounded an alarm very quickly after the fire was lit. I didn’t even see smoke in the room.) Nothing in the house except the fireplaces burn fuel.
Do we need a CO detector?
If you have a fireplace you need a CO detector.