How Do Smoke Alarms Detect Smoke?

Video Transcript

"Smoke alarms need to be placed in every sleeping area. They also need to be placed in hallways, need to be placed in any type of living area. We do not recommend that you put smoke alarms in kitchens and the reason for that is we get lots of nuisance alarms if we do that. And then people don't respond to them. Because they're like, Oh, it's just the smoke alarm in the kitchen, it goes off all the time. So that's a huge issue. You need to make sure that you're reading your manufacturers instructions that come with your smoke alarms when they're being installed. Because smoke alarm manufacturers will tell you where their smoke alarms will work best, whether it's on the wall, whether it's on the ceiling. So that's very important that you're reading the instructions. Different manufacturers will tell you to install them in different places for them to work optimally. And you can install your smoke alarms, most of the time, twelve inches from the ceiling, either on the ceiling or on the wall. But you never want to install them in a corner. What we found is that when you have a fire and the smoke starts to spread that it's going to go up first. And so you want your smoke alarms in those areas, but it's not going to get to the corners until a room starts to be completely full of smoke. So we don't want to put the smoke alarms in the corners because that's where we're not going to get a reaction from the smoke alarm as fast as we'd like to. So make sure that you're installing them. Lots of people like to install them near the doorways, and that's a good place to install them especially if you're going in to a bedroom. Go in to the doorway and install it just a few feet in to your bedroom because that is going to be a place that smoke will hit and the way that smoke alarms work is that they actually have to have the smoke close enough for them to go off. Unless you have smoke alarms that are interconnected all the way through your house, it's only going to be the smoke alarm where's there's smoke that's going to react. So that's very important that you're placing them in multiple places through the house. If you have more than one floor in your home like a two story house, we recommend that you have a least one on each level. The reason for this is that you might hear a smoke alarm that's going off downstairs and the fire might not have reached upstairs yet. So that's a great way to go ahead and give yourself an alarm ahead of time that you might need to be getting, finding a way to get out."