There’s no second chance here … you won’t ever report back here you’re wrong … because you’ll be dead … d-e-a-d … it’s your life and it’s a simple cheap install.
Your insurance company may not pay your heirs one dime, because they’ll figure out right quick you don’t have smoke alarms.
… it’s The Law here …
And you probably can’t smell smoke in your sleep at all, no matter where the fire is. The brain doesn’t respond to all senses equally while sleeping. A strong smell doesn’t wake you up like a loud noise does.
Smoke detectors are super cheap; you can get the ionization kind as cheap as $5 each, and the photoelectric ones are only a bit more - $10-12, IIRC.
Unless you have some kind of mansion, you can almost entirely safeguard your house for under $50 bucks very easily, and replacement AA or 9v batteries aren’t very much if you don’t already have them on-hand (you’re supposed to replace the batteries annually).
You can go up from there- the NEST smoke detectors are around $99 bucks each, and you can get 10 year lifetime detectors for like $25, or CO/smoke detectors for a similar price, or even 10 year CO/Smoke detectors for a bit more.
There’s a smoke detector for every budget; saying that it’s not worth the cost is about the stupidest thing ever.
Maybe 100 years ago, when our homes were almost entirely made of wood, smoke from the fires weren’t particularly dangerous. Sure, too much is bad but a few lung-fulls ain’t going to do all that much damage.
Today our homes are full of plastics, glues and God-knows-what-else. Smoke from these materials is itself deadly poisonous, a lung-full and all your bodily systems shut down. There’s none of this “I’ll smell the smoke, wake up and get out” anymore … if you smell smoke, you’re not waking up ever again.
A thought for the folks that have a smoke detector that goes off frequently, like say the one near the kitchen.
Don’t use that fancy piece of plastic that you mount to the wall and you then sorta twist/screw the detector on. Those can kinda be a pain to mount/unmount, particularly when up high and your trying to get that screeching thing down as fast as possible.
Attach a loop to the back of the detector. Make it a loop of something rigid like the wire from a metal coat hanger, or a stiff piece of plastic “string”.
Put screw up where you want to mount the detector. Hang from there. Now easy to take down when needed and easy to put back up.
If you’re willing to climb all the way up there, you’re probably better off getting one with a silencer. It’s better to climb up and shut it off then climb up, take it down and forget to put it back later.
From that POV, you might as well use the shower cap trick. Put a shower cap over it when you’re cooking, BUT attach a string to it so you can yank it down the next time you walk past it (instead of not bothering because you don’t feel like dragging a chair over).
However, I really don’t recommend that. Also, I’ve always had good luck with just waving something at it. The smoke detectors in my college dorm used to go off if you looked at them funny (or burned a pizza). Just waving some books or papers at it shut them up pretty quickly.
Oh yes.
You definitely don’t want to make it easy to take down and forget to put back up.
I place mine somewhere in the kitchen where I’ll notice it when the cooking is done. Or on top of the bed works too.
It isn’t because they’re expensive. It’s because they go off all the damn time when there is no smoke, and I find the racket extremely stressful. Fires don’t start for no reason. Our wiring is good, and we are careful with fire. I’m not concerned that the house is going to spontaneously combust. If it wasn’t for all the false alarms, I’d have more of them in the house. If my seat belt started screaming at me once a month at high volume, I’d stop wearing that, too.
A)Then find a different brand. I’ve never had mine go off for no reason.*
B)Unless you’ve inspected all the wiring by yourself, you have NO way to know that it’s good. Even the inspector didn’t check all the wiring. He didn’t pull each wire nut to make sure that the connections are solid and not arcing. He didn’t pull the drywall off to make sure no screws went through some romex. He hasn’t come back years later to make sure there’s no animals in the attic. Hell, a while back I moved into a brand new apartment building. First one in my unit. One of my outlets didn’t work. Pulled it off and found that only a single strand of the stranded wire was connected. A good draw could have heated that wire up and caused a problem. That building was certainly up to code and had ‘good wiring’ it was just a mistake.
C)You’re right, fires don’t start for no reason, but, luckily, you’re a human smoke detector, so you don’t need to worry about it. I’m not sure why you think you’re so much better than all these people.
*TBH I don’t really care if you get a different brand or just throw yours away, I just wish you wouldn’t suggest that you don’t need them and think it’s a wise idea to go without them. People read this stuff and justify not getting them in their house too.
I understand completely, false alarms are a total nuisance. Several posters up-thread touched on which type of detector is best for the location, and your local Fire Marshall would be glad to help in every way possible getting you the right coverage. Even if I grant you perfect house wiring, the things you plug in may well catch fire. There was a time when drip coffee-makers would do this, I still unplug the fool thing when I leave on vacation.
If your seat belt started screaming at you, you’d take your car to the mechanic … if your smoke alarms are screaming at you, call the non-emergency phone number for your local fire department.
I wired the house, so I have looked at it all. Anyway, I’m glad some people seem to have good luck with them. Obviously some do not. When we had smoke alarms in the recommended places, they went off about once a month for some reason or another, but never because it was smoky.
I’m not recommending anything to anyone else, just relaying my experience. I may be more sensitive to the noise than most… The idea posited upthread to just wait the two minutes for the alarm to stop is unfathomable to me- the noise is excruciating.
And with that, I’m out. If I never return, you will know the house spontaneously combusted in the night and neither we nor our 4 dogs noticed.
I don’t know… I have six smoke detectors in my house - several ionization models, and at least one photoelectric one, maybe two.
Not a single one goes off unintentionally. Maybe if I forget a detector at annual battery-changing time (Halloween), it might start chirping as the battery goes down, but that’s my fault, not something wrong with the detector.
And nowhere else I’ve ever lived has had that problem, unless something inconvenient was done, like putting a smoke detector in the kitchen, above the stove, or in the next room at the highest point in the house.
As I said, if it goes off for no reason, ie NOT burning the toast, you have a crummy detector and should replace it. If the steam from your shower is able to activate a smoke detector in your bedroom it is due to the detector in your bedroom being an ionization type…change it to a photoelectric and no more “false” alarms.
Bottom line is you can make all the explanations you want for why you don’t feel smoke detection is effective but me, as a professional in the life safety field with decades of experience know that it saves lives and, when properly implemented, offers little to no inconvenience to occupants of the building.
As far as personal property, hey, as long as I or none of my loved ones are your houseguests I guess it doesn’t really matter but you have to realize a lot of people live in apartments etc. and just one person bypassing safety measures can result in a lot of innocent people being at the least, displaced and at the worst, well, you know.
Goofus and Gallant was a illustrated series (comic) in a religious magazine that allowed them to easily translate parables into something that might be understood by children. Sorry, was my admittedly amateurish attempt at humor.
As far as cost/benefit…sorry, doesn’t really apply to my line of work. The benefit here, although remote you would ever utilize it, is that you would be alive vs. dead so you can’t really put a price on that.
RE: You not noticing a fire has broken out. Let me just state that there is basically one type of building I feel really good about installing smoke/co detection in and that is any building people sleep in. I feel smoke detectors are there for one reason and one reason only, to wake you up. Alternately, in multi family dwellings, if you are not home, at least one of your neighbors would likely hear it.
So, to summarize, unless you have some paranormal abilities, you, at the very least need smoke detection in the vicinity of your sleeping areas and if these sleeping areas are on the second floor, you should also have detection near the base of the stairs as if the fire starts on the first, by the time the second floor smokes go off, you may find the first floor inaccessible.
I find that a yardstick works nicely to shut off alarms created by cooking spills on burners (yes, I can be a slightly messy cook).
I do think having two bracketing each bedroom doorway less than six feet apart is excessive for the size of my apartment, though.
I know the distance between them makes it seem odd, but it’s because of the doors. If you close the door to your bedroom and the smoke detector is in there, it won’t go off if something flares up in the main living space. Similarly, if you fall asleep with a cigarette and set the bed on fire the hallway smoke detector won’t go off until the entire room is so full of smoke that it starts billowing under the door (or the HVAC system carries it away).
IOW, you (technically) should have one in each area that can be closed off.
That can be closed off, or that will be closed off? My bedroom has a door, but the only time I ever close it is… when the alarm goes off from cooking something. Then again, my place only has one smoke detector, so maybe they take that into account in single-occupant apartments.
That can be. When they’re (whoever they are) are telling people where to put them, they’re going to say ‘put one in each bedroom and one in the living area (etc)’. Not ‘put one in each bedroom…unless you never close the door’.
Eitherway, I was just saying that’s the reasoning behind having one in a hallway and one a few feet away in a bedroom. It might seem redundant, but if the door is closed smoke on one side won’t be detected on the other side of the door.