Change your clocks, Check your smoke detectors

Daylight Savings Time comes early this year on Sunday, March 9th . Please remember to "spring forward" the hands on your clocks one hour when you go to bed this coming Saturday night.
In addition to the time change, make sure to check on the condition of all of the smoke detectors in your home.

• Determine what type of technology makes your detectors work by carefully reading the label on the back of the dector. Fire Departments across the country have recently been alerted to the need for households to have a mix of IONIZATION (quicker response in fast, flaming fires) and PHOTOELECTRIC (quicker response in slow-burning, smoldering fires). You can't predict whether a home fire will be quick burning or whether it will smolder for a long period of time before flashing into flame. Many tests are now showing that ionization detectors can be 10 to 30 minutes slower than photoelectric detectors in alarming to a smoldering fire.
• It is also important to know how old your detectors are. Every detector, whether hardwired into your electrical system or simply screwed into the ceiling, needs to be replaced by the time it is 10 years old. The components wear out over time and, with an average 3% failure rate of detectors per year, the risk is too high to have more than a 30% risk of detector failure after 10 years. You can determine the age of your detectors by looking for the manufacture date on the back of the detector.
• If you have problems with nuisance alarms, replace the ionization detector with a photoelectric detector or move the ionization detector 20 feet from the kitchen. Ionization detectors which quickly detect the extremely small particles in a hot burning fire can over-respond to very small particles from toasters or steam from showers. Photoelectric detectors typically do not have the same rate of nuisance alarms. If you do have a nuisance alarm, either use the "hush button" feature on the alarm or quickly fan the smoke or steam away from the detector. Do not remove the batteries!

• Make sure that the batteries are working in all of your smoke alarms. Hardwired smoke detectors require back-up batteries in the event of a power failure. Regular 9-volt alkaline batteries should be replaced at least once a year or whenever the detector begins to make a "chirping" sound. Longer life lithium batteries are a little more expensive but they can last up to 10 years.
  
• Have enough smoke detectors for the size and shape of your home. You should have at least one smoke detector on every level of the home. Smoke detectors are required in the hallways outside sleeping areas and they are recommended in each bedroom as well. If your home was built after 1993, it should have interconnected hardwired smoke detectors in the hallways and in the bedrooms. Hardwired smoke detectors need the "head" replaced every 10 years, just like the ones that depend on batteries.
• If residents cannot hear the common smoke detector, they should be protected with strobe light smoke detectors that can be ordered through fire protection equipment and supplies stores (in the Yellow Pages) or online. The additional cost of a strobe detector pales in comparison with the loss of life and property in a house fire.
• After your clocks are changed and your smoke detectors are checked out, please take time to review your family fire escape plan. Plan on a home fire drill in the next couple of weeks. Approximately 80% of the persons who die in a fire, die in their home. Please do your part to make sure that your family is protected with both ionization AND photoelectric smoke detectors as well as the working knowledge of how to respond safely to a real alarm. For more information on smoke detectors or home fire escape plans, please call 625-7058.