Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

I EMPLORE everyone to check your fire extinguishers and smoke alarms today.

Not tomorrow.

Not "in the morning".

Today if you work from home, tonight if you are not home.

My family has been saved a few times by fire alarms.

It can happen to you. Yes, it can.

I have a fire plan in my home. Every time someone sleeps over I go over the fire plan. Where we meet if we can get to the front of the house. Or if that's blocked, where we meet OUTSIDE. My Dh and I know he grabs the dog. That's his job. That is the ONLY thing we grab because nothing is worth our lives.

Get a fire plan. Do a fire drill with your kids. Make sure ANYONE sleeping over knows your fire plan.

Make sure you have working smoke alarms (and Co2) on every floor. Change the batteries EVERY 6 months.

And MAKE SURE you check you fire extinguishers. Make sure they are up to date. They are full. They are NOT over 10 years old.

All of these things can save your lives.

Message edited 3/23/2015 10:01:10 AM.

Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

I dont even have one :(

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Edit to say I haven't stopped thinking about that tragedy in BK

Message edited 3/23/2015 10:05:55 AM.

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Also, please read this. There are differences in smoke detectors. DH and I saw a report on 20/20 once and after that we went out and bought all new smoke detectors.

Photoeletric vs Ionization Smoke Detectors

To sum it up, you should have a mix of both types in your home because they both detect different types of fires (smoldering vs fast flame):

In tests, ionization alarms will typically respond about 30 to 90 seconds faster to “fast-flame” fires than photoelectric smoke alarms. However, in smoldering fires ionization alarms respond an average of 15 to 50 minutes slower than photoelectric alarms. Several studies indicate that they will outright fail to activate up to 20-25% of the time. The vast majority of residential fire fatalities are due to smoke inhalation, not from the actual flames and almost two-thirds of fire fatalities occur at night while we sleep.

Message edited 3/23/2015 10:15:50 AM.

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You should also have escape ladders for every 2nd floor bedroom. All of our bedrooms upstairs have them. If the stairwell is blocked, that's you're only way out of the house.

Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

While you're at it. Know where the fire extinguishers and exits are in your office.

We had a fire here and I had to nearly shove my coworker out. It was a small fire but still. We took our stairs all the way to the 2nd floor before we noticed the smoke on the 1st floor. Stupidly the other floors have locks that prevent us from going to the second stair case. Still it was just a tiny fire we could walk around.

The stupid thing was the security guard stood there with a phone saying "I don't know what to do" I said fire extinguisher? "I don't know" well there's one on every floor in every kitchen as well. GET ONE! ugh!

Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

Thank you for the heads up, and thank you for the link to that article. I am convinced. I will check mine today.

I brought a new toaster once, put some toast in it for the first time and walked away to my computer in another room, fully expecting the toast to pop up when done. A while later one of my kids sounded the alarm and I ran into the hall to find my house had filled with black smoke as the toast smoldered and actually began to burn. I unplugged the toaster and threw the flaming thing into the sink where I sprayed it with water. You never know.

NONE of my house alarms went off, in spite of there being about a foot of black smoke along our ceilings and almost another foot of grey smoke under it. I was shocked. Not even our hard wired house fire alarm connected to our security system had gone off.

Message edited 3/23/2015 1:21:42 PM.

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..

Message edited 3/23/2015 2:58:13 PM.

Re: Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

have to check to see if my extinguisher is still good

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Great post.

People don't realize how important this really is until its too late.


We have ours hard wired into our alarm system which is battery backed. It cost us a little more $$ to do, but to us, it's worth it.

Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

I got the nest fire/Co2 alarms. If one goes off they ALL go off.

This is good because if there is a fire in the basement I will kow immediately.

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Thanks for sharing!

Also I didn't read through the replies but have multiple Fire extinguishers.
One in the kitchen, garage, basement, shed etc

dh had a gas can for the snow blower literally blow up in flames and it took 3 extinguishers to get it out. We used our 2 and thankfully a neighbor brought his over and it got it out. Dh was extremely lucky that he only got burned on his forehead and we only had to replace part of our fence.

It could have been much worse and I was surprised how long it took the fire dept to get to our house.

Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

Thank you for the reminder. We recently renovated and we used to have a fire extinguisher under the sink but reading this made me realize that it is no longer there. It somehow must have been thrown out while they were gutting the kitchen. I am going to buy 2 today. When I was little we had a grease fire in the kitchen when my mom was cooking French fries. We were standing right there but it went up in an instant. Her instinct was to grab the pot and run outside. The grease splashed and suffered really bad burns on her hand.

PS - I took dc to the fire museum in Nassau county last year and they gave us a free smoke detector just for visiting!

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Check your smoke detectors- check your fire extinguishers

This post made me order 2 new smoke detectors. It's not so crazy to not have one. It's just easy for life to get in the way and you always forget etc. and it's the type of thing that you think is never going to happen to you. Same deal in my house, it kept kept going off when cooking, I think I ended up accidentally breaking it when I was trying to take it down one day, and then time just flies.