This winter you’ll be using your furnace almost constantly to provide heat in your Indiana home. This presents a greater risk of fire, which is why it’s so important to make sure you have a working smoke detector — and preferably several — in your home. Tips for installing and using a smoke detector include:
- Ideally, you will want to have a smoke detector installed on each floor of your home. Although you should have a detector right outside of your bedroom, tests have shown that fires on the ground floor can reach dangerous levels before the smoke reaches the top floor. This is why it’s important to have a smoke detector on the first floor of your home.
- Don’t install any smoke detectors in the kitchen or the garage, as normal cooking fumes and car exhaust can trigger the alarm. You’ll also want to avoid placing them in unheated areas where the detectors may get too cold to work properly.
- Most smoke detectors run on batteries. The battery life of a smoke alarm should last roughly a year. Most smoke alarms will notify you when the batteries need to be changed by beeping every 20 seconds. This can get annoying, especially if it occurs at night while you’re sleeping. Choose a single day out of the year to change all the detector batteries in your home and remember to repeat the process on the same day every year.
- Some detectors are hard-wired to your home’s electricity and don’t need batteries. If your detector uses a 10-year lithium battery and it’s reaching the 10-year point, you will want to replace the whole detector.
- Be sure to test your smoke detectors once a month. They have a test button that you can push to test how well it functions as well as gauge its sensitivity.
If you need new smoke and carbon monoxide detectors installed in your home, or would like a professional technician to come inspect your detectors, contact Mowery Heating, Air Conditioning and Plumbing for quality HVAC service in the Indianapolis area.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Brownsburg, Indiana and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
