We Are Alarmed!

Now that I have your attention, this is just a reminder that if you have smoke alarms in your home that use batteries, if you have not replaced the battery in the last year, DO IT.

If your smoke alarm is more than ten years old, replace it. Smoke alarms lose sensitivity with time. All responsible fire safety agencies and organizations in the U.S. recommend changing smoke alarm batteries once a year, and the entire alarm every ten years.

Don't fall for the catchy marketing phrase that a certain battery manufacturer began in the 1980s: "change your clock, change your battery." This phrase was invented to sell more batteries. You only have to replace smoke alarm batteries once each year -- not more frequently. It is environmentally unsound to dispose of perfectly good batteries in the trash more than once a year. Also, since (in the U.S.) the time changes occur in April and November, the difference between the time changes is not half a year. It just doesn't make sense to change batteries when you change your clock (if you are in a state where time changes from daylight to standard time; not all do).

This weekend marks our tenth anniversary in our house. Today, as a present to our house (and to ourselves), my partner and I replaced all of our smoke alarms with new units. All nine of them! We got new alarms that have easy-to-reach battery compartments, but are still hard-wired into the home. The new alarms also have a "hush" feature. That means that if I set off the alarm when I'm cooking, for example, I can press a button on the alarm and it silences it for about 15 minutes. This feature is great, because people who have it will be less likely to take a battery out of an alarm when it goes off for a nuisance situation, such as cooking smoke. The battery back-up feature is great to have in case the power goes out. All of our smoke alarms are interconnected, so if one goes off, all the rest of them do. (This was a code requirement and one that we think was a great idea.)

Almost every day we read stories in the newspaper about people who have died in the place they feel safest: in their home -- because of a fire. I often read that there was no working smoke alarm in those fires. In fact, ongoing studies show that about one-third of smoke alarms in homes don't work on any given day.

Don't let your home be unprotected. Test your smoke alarm once a month by pushing the test button. Replace the battery once a year. Replace the whole unit every ten years.

In a future blog post, I'll explain why we also have residential fire sprinklers in our home. These were not required by law, and we paid extra to have them. But our peace-of-mind was well worth the cost.

Now, I'm off to my aunt's home and several of her friends with new batteries for their smoke alarms.

Life is short: show those you love that you love them -- replace the batteries in their smoke alarms!