Detecting Smoke Detectors!

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Whether you know it or not the reality is that not all smoke detectors are made equal. Even when you are in a home with all working smoke detectors, you may not be safe. The reason is because not all types of smokes are made equal. For example, food smoke is not the same as furniture smoke and these types of smokes alert different types of smoke detectors differently.

Inexpensive smoke detectors rely on ionization technology and they are excellent at detecting fires with fast flames, but they are very slow at detecting smoldering flames, which can then cause an explosion in seconds and in most cases they go off too late for people to escape the fire or some times they don’t go off at all, which can mean life or death because then it might be too late to escape a fire, for example if they are asleep when toxic smoke fills the room..

Thinking all smoke detectors are made equal and will go off in response to any type of smoke is a reasonable but very wrong assumption to make. Photo electric detectors are best to use. They sound the alarm much earlier and for all types of smokes when compared to ionization technology smoke detectors. So it isn’t advisable to rely on ionization technology smoke detectors.

Photo electric detectors are available and have been around for decades but aren’t as popular because they are more expensive to produce and sell for companies, so it’s a business decision for companies to make less of it and more of the cheaper ionization technology ones.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says both technologies work even though one works better than the other, so they can’t put out an advisory for people to just buy photo electric detectors. Their rep who was interviewed about this issue said families should have an escape plan. The guy had no reasonable answer when he was asked what if people are asleep when the fire occurs. In reality, the CPSC should put out such an advisory because that could have made a difference for someone like Amanda Deputy who had a family of seven, but now has a family of three after four of her family members died in a fire in a house with fully functioning ionization technology smoke detectors that didn’t go off. So, I'd say getting a photo electric is a no-brainer.

However, there’s another option which are dual detectors which comprise of both the photo electric and ionization technology detection technologies. They are also available but more expensive to purchase than the ionization technology smoke detectors, so you just have to figure out how much your loved ones lives are worth to you and make your decision of how much you want to invest in smoke detectors based on that.

A word is enough for the wise…