Safety First: Why It’s So Important to Look After Your Smoke Detector

Guide authored by Pulse Electrical – experienced smoke alarm installers based in London.

If you’re lucky, the only time you ever hear your smoke detector is when you leave you accidentally leave your dinner on the stove for too long. 

As you rush to turn it off by prodding it with the end of your broom handle, it can be tempting to dismiss the whole device as nothing more than an occasional annoyance.

The truth, however, is that this one little device is working round-the-clock to keep you and your loved ones safe, and could well be the one thing that saves your life should the worst happen.

The Truth About Fire Safety

According to the UK government’s Fire Kills campaign, you’re eight times more likely to die in a house fire if your home doesn’t have a working smoke alarm.

What’s even more alarming is that the majority of the 500+ fire-related deaths that occur in the UK every year happen between 12 AM and 6AM. In other words, when most of us are fast asleep and less likely to detect a fire.

For this reason alone, a good quality, fully-working smoke alarm is invaluable. It can take just minutes from the start of a fire before a home is fully engulfed in flames, so without an alarm to wake you up, you’ve little if any opportunity to get your family together and leave the house in time.

Preventing Fire Damage to Your Property

Though we may have made light of how annoying it can be when your smoke alarm is triggered by dinner plans gone awry, the fact is that this is exactly what you’d want that alarm to do.

Figures published by the UK home office show that of the 167,000+ house fires attended to by Fire and Rescue Services, 48% were caused by cooking appliances. The good news is that the majority of these didn’t result in fatalities but did cause other injuries as well as significant property damage that cost thousands of pounds to repair.

It’s for this reason that many insurance companies insist on your home having a working smoke detector, or at least lower your costs if you have one. Yet even if the majority of any fire-related property damage can be covered by your insurance, think about all those mementos, photographs and treasured sentimental items that no amount of money could replace if they were damaged in a house fire.

How to Look After Your Smoke Detector

With all that being said, there’s no doubting the importance of not having a smoke detector installed in your home, but taking good care to ensure that it remains in full working order.

Here are a few quick and simple things you can do to look after your alarm so that it can look after you:

• Test your alarm is working once a week by pressing the test button
• Replace your batteries once a year as well as any time that your alarm begins to “chirp” frequently 
• Regularly clean away any dust from your alarm with a vacuum cleaner attachment.
• Consider replacing your entire smoke alarm once every ten years.

If you’re approaching the time when your smoke alarm needs replacing, Pulse Electrical can help. Contact us online today for your no-obligation quote on all of our smoke and fire alarm installation services. Don’t already have a smoke alarm fitted in your home? Talk to us about your options by calling now on 0203 504 0000.