Not only have you radically improved my dishwasher's performance; you have also upgraded my home's fire safety. I very much look forward to the next assistance I didn't know I needed. Thank you most sincerely!
Same, and for anybody anxious about installing a smoke detector you can ask your local fire dept. to do it, just make sure you call the non-emergency number. 💛
I've never experienced ours giving a false alarm 🤔 (It's an ionization alarm called "First Alert") and we have a propane heater not far from it P.S. It has always made noise when there was smoke also it made the other one in the house go off as well
Those "nuisance" alarms almost killed us. I kept taking them down when we cooked. A nightmare I had about a fire caused me to buy one, single photoelectric alarm for the baby's room. Less than a week later, that was the ONLY fire alarm installed when we had an electrical fire at 4 a.m. we lost almost everything we owned but we lived and that's all that matters. I keep that melted smoke detector hung up in my garage. We owe our lives to that one smoke detector.... and that nightmare I had.
I had to run past the fire in the hallway with my 2yo and 13yo autistic son. It was hot. My wife couldn't find the fire extinguisher (she thought we had one). So now every room has a small one. One big tip... don't buy cheap, led night lights. Ours melted and caught fire.
@@JimGordon Thank all of you for showing the love. My little boy just turned 5 and has no memory of it, thankfully. For a little while after, I couldn't smell smoke without getting nervous.
As a Fire Electrical technician I often watch these types of videos to see if the presenter is actually giving out correct information, and also a person has to be open to maybe learning something new regardless of their background. I would therefore like to commend you on a very accurate, informative and knowledgeable video, and would recommend anyone who is interested in Fire Safety in their house (which should be everyone) to spend 25 minutes to watch this video as it will be time very well invested.
I agree with the OP here, I also work in the industry as a tech/installer. There are many videos that we can have disagreements with...some with rolling our eyes. This video stated nothing false or improper. Well done.
Whoa!!!! My DAD was the Donald F. Steele whom you mention up front - he an Bob Enemark had the patent on the photoelectric smoke detector, with their company Electro Signal lab. He could have written your script - I grew up hearing the exact same explanation about how it worked, how it differed from the ionizations, and how the research backed up the fact that many many more people die of smoke inhalation than of actual flames. Great job!!!
Thanks Nina, this is a really cool story! It's kinda rare when after hearing about someone instrumental to something like this, to then get a glimpse into the personal side of that person! My dad worked for Bayer Corp designing the Ascensia blood glucose meters, and I heard the same kinds of stories from him about meters as what you're describing with your dad's stories. Couldn't appreciate it back then, but I do now.
As a 35 year veteran firefighter I want to thank you. And congratulate you on a very well presented report. As you stated, having alarms, maintaining alarms and heeding alarms is vital.
Better to feel the fool being outside in the rain and cold for a false alarm than the smart guy that dies of smoke inhalation if there is an actual fire.
Even though the damn cursed alarm outside my apartment kitchen goes off every time I cook unless I point a fan at it. I still replace the battery when it beeps. It would be so easy to just rip out the battery and rid myself of this constant nuisance but it just seems like that's a bad idea (and against the terms of my rental agreement). I do so wish I could replace it though and throw the damn thing into a fire... It literally goes off if i turn the oven on.... Even with nothing in it. When it goes off I don't run to see what's on fire. I run to turn on the "cooking fan" as we call it.
Funny story, I replaced all my ionization alarms with newer photoelectric ones, within a week I had one that went off on a regular basis, I took it down and opened it up to see what the issue was. Turns out that a small spider had taken up residence in the light chamber. My best guess is that he would pass through the beam occasionally creating a false positive. The other photoelectric ones have never had any such issues
I had the same problem with a spider. Of course it was the one alarm I can't reach without a ladder, and of course it was 3am. By the time I got the light chamber open there was actually a web in there that I had to vacuum out.
After watching this I reached out to Kidde since I have a bunch of the dual sensor alarms in my home (Kidde Dual Sensor Battery Operated Smoke Alarm Pi9010). I asked "Does this product trigger the alarm when ONLY ONE sensor detects smoke, or when BOTH sensors detect smoke?" They replied "Only one of the sensors has to detect smoke to make the unit go into alarm." Might want to add a note about that since your preference away from this detector was based on the possibility that both sensors would need to detect smoke for it to go off.
Sounds like a product I'd buy. But it's worthy to note if your buying a new detector to fix one that regularly puts out false alarms, the dual sensor one would not solve your issue.
@@raviolisauce103 Considering the slightly more complex electronics required for a dual sensor alarm, It would make sense they would also include some implementation of sanity checking both sensors to prevent false alarms.
@@TwistedMe13 rather easy to treat both sensors when only one is needed to trigger the alarm. Basically having two detectors in the same casing. The only necessary overlap is connecting the sensors to the alarm. Having a line that goes high when the alarm is "on" connected to the buzzer, with the other one in parallel is cheap.
@@tommyl3707 that's how big corporations get sued... i hope you are wrong and that a large company, with international exposure/sales of products like Kidde or otherwise, spends a decent amount of time and money or R&D, testing and training their customer service staff (or at the very least providing them with the appropriate training literature for a back up)
That photoelectric alarm that went off every time the dryer was on likely failed due to lint! The microcontroller typically adjusts to the background level of radiant light detected. When dust builds in these detectors, they can sometimes trigger due to the reflectivity of the dust on the far side of the chamber bouncing light around. Sometimes it's because turbulent air will knock dust loose to float through the chamber. I can only imagine that, over time, tiny lint particles built up in the detector, so the air turbulence created by the dryer would knock that lint off the walls to float through the beam. For future reference, you can pop the cover off and clean out the sensor with canned air. Less plastic in the landfill!
I too had thoughts of lint. Though just of active fine lint getting airborne during drying, I'd not thought of the disturbance of residual lint possibility. Could be disturbance of accumulation in parts of the dryer itself in addition to the possibility of accumulation in the detector chamber contributing to the issue presenting over time. IIRC, there are secondary filters available that can be used to reduce particulate when a dryer vents indoors. Also one can improvise such by placing a length of nylon stocking like a sort of windsock over the end of a vent tube. I suppose one could alternately stretch a couple pieces of stocking material over the terminus end and band them in place or some such---but such would need maintenance/cleaning more often than the loose windsock style approach due to surface area and lint accumulation pattern differences. Letting either design become completely clogged might create a fire hazard in and of itself.
I had to do exactly this to the smoke alarm on my boat a few weeks ago, it kept going off for no reason. Pulled it apart, opened the chamber and blew the crap out of it, and so far it's been no more trouble.
I have to say, I used to call my smoke detector the ‘cooking detector’ because it basically went off whenever I did any kind of cooking. I eventually got frustrated and tore it off the wall. It’s great to know there is a better alternative - you might have just saved my life.
I actually work as a fire alarm tech! While we do test the smoke detectors with cans of fake smoke, there are several brands that actually recommend testing it via magnet or pressing a test button. It's because the fake smoke can leave an oily residue on the device if too much is sprayed or if it isnt blown out well enough with compressed air. This residue can then gather dust, making the detector less sensitive or, in severe cases, block it up completely. Personally I prefer using the fake smoke as it tests the sensors as well as the circuit and FACP. But in the event of a desensitized detector, we test the sensitivity of the detectors every other year, so if we find one that has become desensitized, we either clean it out or replace it. As far as home use goes, I think testing your smoke alarm with just the button is more than sufficient. Because you can gunk up the sensor with the fake smoke, I feel it would end up doing more harm than good as many people may over do it and end up clogging up the detector. And unlike commercial fire alarm systems, most/all 120V or battery powered detectors don't have the ability to test the sensitivity of the detector. So if a detector were to become desensitized, you would have no way of knowing.
At my organization, I use the product "Smoke Check" product from HSI when testing our fire alarms on our ships. We get it from grainger and use it to test hundreds of smoke detectors every year. We test yearly. Haven't had any trouble with any sensors after using the stuff. As far as using it at home, the technology isn't massively different so I don't know if it would be that much of a problem. But I've never tried it.
My school has a 3030 system that was prone to false alarms because of some sensitivity issues in the older detectors. This was partially caused because the old detectors’ bases were replaced with new ones after an expansion to allow the full system except for old pull stations to be addressable. We now are using the pre alarm feature which is working great! In the near future I think we could use a system upgrade because we have three generations of alarms and detection equipment in the school. Most recently, we got all new door holders and fan shutdowns which is good, but I think that getting the older portions of the building synchronizing alarms should be prioritized.
Hmm, used some spray smoke to test it. Not sure if I overdid it. Better spray it again to see if it'd desensitized! Hmm, still working. Ah, but what if I desensitized it THIS time? Better test again with more spray.
As a fellow fire alarm tech, I totally agree with this, and would add that having tested many thousands of smoke detectors I could easily count on one hand the number of times one has failed the functional test (testing with canned smoke) for a reason that wouldn't have also failed a button test.
Canned smoke? Are you all too good to just light a rolling paper or some small piece of paper on fire to get a small amount of real smoke that won't leave a nasty residue?
My house hasn't had a smoke alarm in over 10 years. I bought one a few months ago and it's just been sitting in the project room. Because of this video I finally installed it. Thanks for the reminder.
"The half life of americium-241 is over 400 years, so the sensor could easily outlive you." I like that you said 'could easily' instead of 'will definitely.' I admire your optimism.
While the half life being so great could mean a detector could be usable, effectively they become more sensitive with age. My parents house has some fitted ones that are about 20 years old, and some quick number crunching shows it should still have about 95% of the americium, but it has became a lot more sensitive to cooking, making toast, etc... So I wonder how long it'd actually be before the sample doesn't provide adequate current to the detector even without any smoke particles.
@@luketerry8872 I think it is getting more sensitive due to contamination inside the alarm. Like bit of smoke particles and all on the walls of the chamber.
Do your future self a favor: when he says to pause the video and check your alarms, DO IT! My dad was a firefighter, and he always talked about the importance of smoke alarms. I was pretty sure we had them all over the house. It's been a while since I checked on them, but I was sure we had at least 4 or 5. When I went to check them out, however, I was surprised to find that through years of re-decorating rooms, frantic battery hunts, and false alarms from the kitchen, most of them had disappeared. There are now only 2 working alarms in the whole house. I am now getting this problem resolved, but would never have even known about it had he not reminded me. Thank you for helping to bring my fire safety up to scratch!
In most civilised countries virtually no one is installing smoke alarms in their houses and yet it is very rare for someone to die in a fire. I have no idea what is special about the USA, I can only suspect...
@@marcinpietrzak9358 Ehm, I'm from the Civilized world, namely The Netherlands, one of the most developed nations in the world and Smoke alarms are very very common. You won't need it for 99,99% of your life, but it would be ultra sad if you would die in a house fire, when a simple cheap smoke alarm could've alarmed you and saved your life now wouldn't it...
Yep, test those suckers annually (or more), it only take a couple minutes. My apartment building has detectors in each unit. We get the sensors tested every year (mandatory anyway). We recently discovered one owner had wrapped their sensor in tape as it was going off frequently while cooking. Speculations: the owner is an idiot, or burns everything, or needs to clean their stove (inside and out) It is possible an optical sensor would help, though I'd have to check to see what we've got installed to be sure. In MY case, I've had mine go off maybe twice in 8 years due to burning food. I use the hood fan over the stove when cooking anything that might make smoke (like when cooking meat) or generates a lot of steam (like boiling pasta). My understanding is that is what the hood exhaust is for (but gee whiz is mine loud). My apartment has one single detector outside the bedroom door (mostly in the middle of the apartment). Which is probably the minimum spec for a 700sqft apartment built in 2003.
You pronounced "Jaeger" (or Jäger, the "ae" is simply an alternative way to spell the "ä" character) pefectly by the way. As a native german speaker, I am simultaneously very impressed and not at all surprised that you got it spot on.
Until very recently, I was an engineer at a smoke detector company, and your conclusion aligns with my experience lighting different materials on fire and cooking food to see how different smoke detector designs respond. A couple of other things to note: 1. There are a lot of comments from people complaining about nuisance alarms from steam in photoelectric detectors. Both types of smoke detectors are sensitive to steam. One thing that can make a big difference is the chamber design. Some smoke detectors are just better at keeping steam out while still letting smoke in. 2. The photoelectric chambers are designed to reflect some light back to the photodiode so that they can monitor that the LED is working. Over time, the "clean air" level rises as the chamber accumulates dust. Smoke detectors compensate for the changing clean air level so that their sensitivity stays the same. 3. Some companies have started including multiple light sources of different wavelengths or shining from different angles. That can make a big difference for smoke detectors to be able to differentiate from nuisance sources and actual smoke. One company made a version of a smoke detector where they just replaced the IR LED with a blue LED. That alone makes almost no difference and is pretty much pure marketing BS. What does make a difference is having multiple light sources and comparing their signal ratios with an algorithm to determine when to alarm.
Thanks for bringing this up. I love this channel, but I had hoped this would have addressed #1 more directly. Good to know that the design type wouldn't prevent the steam-based false alarms, and only repositioning or choosing a better chamber design would.
Why do you say the wavelength makes no difference? Surely it must affect the sensitivity to different sized particles, no? I was going to suggest a detector design with two different color LED's for exactly this reason.
@@ncdave4life I had a Kidde Duel detector (like the one in the video) that would detect me taking a shower 6 ft down the hall. I had to replace it. The First Alert duel detector (so far) has not given me any false alarms. (First Alert SA320CN Dual-Sensor Smoke and Fire Alarm)
@@susanyoung6579 Wavelength does make a difference, it's just that the difference is small enough that just replacing the IR LED with blue only makes it slightly more sensitive to smaller particles. You really need two light sources (blue and IR for example) so that you can compare the ratio between them to determine how sensitive the algorithm should be.
My grandmother still had in her home an ancient fire alarm that was a literal bell hit by a hammer driven by a wound spring. A piece of wax I believe held the hammer back unless the heat of a fire melted the wax. Needless to say, more modern fire alarms have been installed for decades, but we kept those up also as curiosities. They looked quite nice.
That's pretty much how pressurized spriklers work. Those have a burst tube filled with an expanding liquid that will burst when heated and release a small disk that blocks the water when everything ist fine.
I have one! It has a wound up spring motor similar to an alarm clock. The motor is kept from turning by a piece of special wax. The problem with this kind of alarm is it requires an actual fire to heat the air. Photo alarm will catch the smoldering phase of the fire.
I'm retired from an Australian Govt research organisation. I was in the fire research area. We did full scale house burns and compared the detectors some decades ago. That and other lab testing showed how ineffective the ionization detectors are in most home fires which start with smoldering. They took tens of minutes to respond to typical fires, or not at all as you mentioned. The ionization types are gradually disappearing here but still specified in the UK for use in bedrooms! It is now recommended to use a combination photoelectric and carbon monoxide detector. It is also worth mentioning that commercial smoke detectors are photoelectric. The VESDA (very early smoke detection apparatus) systems were originally a flash tube (xenon) and later a laser type), and developed for use in computer / data centres or labs and so on. They have a pump that draws air into the detection chamber. The beam types you mentioned are also sed for tunnels etc to monitor car exhaust etc and operate jet or extraction fans.
Those VESDA systems are incredibly sensitive. I used to work in a data center, and the smallest amount of particulate of any kind would set it off including steam. There was a microwave at one point in an adjacent area and it would trigger the VESDA all the time even though it wasn't actually in the same area. Kind of scary since we had to stop it before it flooded the whole DC with Halon.
11:27 I professionally install and service security and life safety in the US. For garages I do heat detectors. Smokes and carbon is pointless in a garage, but heats work great for fires in garages. In the average american household I always recommend heats in kitchen and garages, then smokes and carbons on every floor (including basement). Some older houses have old wood or oil furnaces that can rarely emit puffs of smoke, so heats and CO in old systems is usually recommended to prevent false alarms. Also watch out for smoke detectors outside of bathrooms (typically in the hallway outside of bathroom). Steam can cause plenty of false alarms.
This is why my brother had to use a sensor one where we have our smoke detector. Probably should have one other in the main living area of our small house. Parents when they lived in a similar house, they had to eventually replace the one they had a cheaper Ion type with a light sensor one.
Exactly why this video is so helpful, my second floor alarm went off during EVERY shower, the first floor one went off EVERY time I made toast or cooked, the basement one went off I guess becauae of the water heater/furnace. I replaced them with photo electric and no problens since. Alec is correect, I disconnected them years ago because I wasn't aware of the two types
I can understand for commercial garages, but I feel like having an alarm that sounds when there's car exhaust building up in a home garage is a good thing? You shouldn't be running the car indoors...
You start the video by letting us know that you're not going to set the alarm off. Us headphone users thank you! In the next section you tell us to stop watching you to ensure that we: 1 - have detectors and 2 -test them. Everyone should be thanking you! Just a few more reasons I love this channel!
@@ZSchrink At the start of the video, Alec promised he would not make any alarms activate in the video... to quote you: "us headphone user thank you." But he told everyone to pause the video and do it themselves with their own smoke alarms.
Incidentally, the Nest Protect has dual photoelectric sensors with wavelengths at 880 nm and 450 nm to detect both types of fires. Seems like the perfect solution, except it doesn't meet Midwestern Frugality Regulations.
Trust me once you go Nest Protect sensors you can’t go back, well worth the money just based on the fact that you can silence a nuisance alarm with your phone. So no need to stand under it blowing air on it.
@@NoNameAtAll2 not wanting to spend money unnecessarily. Nest alarms are not cheap, and unless you are in the know, they seem like a frivolous luxury compared to the $10-$20 one off the shelf at the hardware store
The one weakness I’ve seen from photoelectric is false alarms from shower steam. Happened to me in an apartment that had its placement just outside the bathroom in the hall. The bathroom’s vent fan wasn’t able to overcome the steam output and it’d end up going off every single time if I didn’t aim a stand fan directly at the detector to prevent steam from reaching it.
My childhood home had an old ionization alarm on the wall just outside the bathroom that I took showers in. That ionization alarm, later in its life, started giving false alarms when the door was opened and the steam was allowed to hit it. So I think steam can affect ionization alarms as well as photoelectric, at least over time.
@@01100101011100100111 Much like how dust getting into a photoelectric alarm can gunk it up. It just takes much longer for an ion alarm to give false alarms from steam than it does for a photoelectric one to do.
I have been designing and maintaining commercial fire detection systems for over 40 years. Your video is one of the best explanations of this subject I have ever seen. When I started, ionization was the norm. Currently, ionization is not used in commercial applications except for very explicit situations where smokeless and fast fires are anticipated. Very rare situations. I personally have not seen ionization sensors installed commercially in the last two decades. A note, the size of the particle is not really what affects the ionization sensor, it is hot particles of combustion. The best way to explain what an ionization detector is looking for is ask people if they know that smell when they fire up their furnace for the first time in the fall. That nose tingling smell of the dust burning off from the furnace. That is exactly what an ionization sensor is looking for., what we call Hot Smoke. An ionization “smells” particles of combustion, a photoelectric “sees” particles of combustion. Thank you for doing your research.
I used to work in the field. In Germany, ionizing detectors have been banned for many years. We actually mostly use hybrid detectors (optical/thermal) that also measure the temperature and can thus also detect fires that produce no smoke at all. Not sure how fast the thermal part is tbh. The installation of blue LEDs in optical detectors has also made it possible to detect much smaller particles. At least in products in the professional area, no idea if there are those for the home.
I worked in a place with an office in a remote part of the building with poor heat. In winter (-30C here), the room would get cool. Open the door to get something, and the inrush of 20+C air hitting the comfortably cool sensor would trigger an alarm. We speculated the thermal sensor was triggering on a (sudden) rise and not an absolute temperature threshold.
@@eh42 Condensation is a more probable reason for the triggering. When the hot air get into the cold device it will condensate and the small drops will reflect light. Had a similar problem when using the oven for cooking. The damp air triggered the alarm every time so I had to move it to a corner that was not in the path for a hot air.
I just want to say thanks for the very first sentence. So many youtube creators seem to rely on yelling and sudden loud noises to keep attention, or inject drama, or for comedy. That's fine. I don't expect the world to change to my preferences. It's just not my cup of tea to get a sudden adrenaline dump and a day of arrhythmia. Right after I clicked this video, in the second while it loaded, I thought, "Oh no, it's gonna have loud alarms." And I hovered my mouse pointer over the back button. It's like you read my mind, man. That's very considerate of you.
When I was growing up, we had like three of those mechanical, clay tab activated fire alarms. They were by no means smoke detectors, but they were loud and built really well. Years after they came to our home, and were forgotten about, the one in the garage had it's clay tab finally fail. You are supposed to replace those clay tabs yearly I believe. And the whole house was instantly drowned in the loudest dinging you can imagine. It was in an uninsulated garage meaning the neighbors heard it too. Needless to say the fire department showed up because someone called about the alarm. Since we didn't have any of the replacement tabs, it kept going off. The pin that activates the wind up spring mechanism was like 100 lbs and you needed a key tool to get the tab on. Tool also wound the spring and would stop the mechanism from rotating, stopping the noise. It was actually fairly complicated. Anyway, we ended up just leaving the key in it, taking it out every once in a while. We made a box stuffed with pillows, and would let it run in that. It didn't make it silent, but the neighbors couldn't hear it. One day the spring finally ran out... Moral, if you are going to buy industrial fire alarms from a traveling sales person, make sure to get some replacement parts up front.
I assume that if a fire started under it the clay tablet would melt and trigger it? Would it be an antique for being so old, I would like to see how it works
I've been a fire alarm engineer for 19 years, you did a great job explaining the differences between the two technologies. I don't know about elsewhere, but here in the UK, the only place you see ionisation detectors these days is in domestic smoke detectors (the ones you show here that are connected to the mains) Most of the commercial fire alarm manufacturers that make the equipment for commercial/industrial/education/hospitals etc moved away from the detectors before I even started. The ONE place you would have seen them still used would have been in server rooms or other areas with an automatic fire suppression system, where they would have been mixed with optical detectors. The one thing you missed is that because of their ability to pick up fast burning fires early, they are very good at detecting electrical fires. The automatic suppression systems require 2 detectors to release the gas/foam, so the mixture of different technologies means that any kind of fire will trigger enough detectors in as fast a time as possible (there are always a minimum of 4 detectors even in the smallest room that is protected by a suppression system) However, even that is moving on with the times and many companies simply don't make ionisation detectors anymore. They can't simply be thrown out, they need to be disposed of by a registered company because they're radioactive. The minor benefits simply don't outweigh the drawbacks anymore.
One type of fire detector I have seen in industrial settings but not in residential are what was described to me as "rate of rise" detectors, which (IIRC) detect how fast the temperature is rising and/or if the temperature rises to a certain level. - Looking them up, the two are different technologies sometimes combined in one protection scheme. Rate of rise being one technology, and fixed temperature detectors. And apparently they are slower to respond than smoke detectors, so are used for the protection of property, not people.
@@MonkeyJedi99 exactly. My alarm company installed them in my house and I found out they will activate when the temperature is 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the room it is in. Well, darn, by that time that means the sofa and other items are in flames and who knows what else is in flames where I may only be able to exit the house by jumping out of a window. So i went to wallyword and installed smoke detectors in every bedroom and hallway. Of course, the one near the kitchen goes off if someone is burning toast or didn’t turn in the hood vent over the stove. Having careless and clueless teenagers in the house, I’ll keep the smoke detectors. Guess I’ll go out and by a few of what Alec talks about in this video. I imagine guests in my home who notice three different devices on my ceilings will assume my children are pyromaniacs. Oh well.
There’s no good reason to worry about disposing the tiny amount of americium via the normal method. The rules were made by idiots. Cat litter is more radioactive than your smoke detector.
Thanks for explaining this! I once had a kitchen full of smoke go completely undetected by an ionization alarm. Afterwards I tested the alarm with a piece of burning paper and it worked fine. It's nice to finally understand the difference between these alarm types.
When you talked about how frequent false alarms will often lead to people disabling or taking down their fire alarms, my partner and I definitely looked at each other bashfully. Thank you for this. Replacing our kitchen ionisation fire alarm with a photoelectric tomorrow, I think.
I thought I'd mention that there's another type of alarm called a "Heat Detector". These aren't meant to replace smoke alarms, but to work alongside them. They are also suitable to use in garages since they aren't affected by dust, fumes or changes in humidity. There are two types: fixed temperature or rate-of-rise. A fixed temperature heat detector gets triggered at a specific temperature (usually around 60°C). The rate-of-rise type gets triggered when it detects a rapid rise in temperature (usually about 8°C per minute).
Heat detectors only detect active fires. They are more for property protection vs life safety, although if they gave you a heads up on your attached garage being on fire, it might help with that as well.
@@timfischer Yes, that's exactly the reason why I said they AREN'T intended to replace smoke alarms, but to work in conjunction with them....especially since they are the only cost-effective/feasible option that will work in garages. It's better to have something that detects active flames in your garage as opposed to nothing at all.
These are commonly used in Condo/Apartment buildings, at least in Canada. My understanding is that the heat alarm also triggers the building alarm to get everyone out immediately.
Much more inrestingly in the theater world we have multi alarms, because we use haze an smoke effects, commonly we'll have an alarm that has heat rise, monoxide and a photo electric detector and if two trigger of the three it alarms. We do also have silent alarms to manually reset if we use pyrotechnics so we don't need to switch the off during the performance. We do also have code names where we ask for certain people to alert the crew to fires before the performance. every so often the stage curtains catch alight and the tech crew come in and throw sand on it, because fire extinguisher stain.
They're more appropriate for areas like kitchens because obviously there's smoke and steam present, and (usually) people aren't asleep in there, not requiring an alert before flames are present.
I'm an electrician with a fire alarm certificate, and we were taught one reason for not frequently testing smoke alarms with simulated smoke: it can degrade the device's sensitivity by leaving nearly negligible deposits on the important bits in the chamber. When a monthly is done, only one per zone gets tested that way, and they go through a rotation.
Yes, the smoke simulating spray can leave deposits on the detector. This because the aerosol product is not fine particle "dry smoke." Here's a simple analogy, it's 2022. Countless people use a vape device in their car. Have any of you noticed the fogging of the interior of the windshield? You betcha, that's the oil from the vape. Ionization detectors have the advantage of seeing vapors that are not as visible optically. If you have a fire that is burning bright and clean, notice how little visible smoke there is. This initial fire has to heat the surroundings to the point where they emit visible smoke. There is a third class of detectors, that are descendants of the mining industry, and chemical industry. Devices that sniff for hazardous gases or combustion products. One of these is familiar, carbon monoxide. Homes now have these as required safety equipment. Required in Europe where CO2 refrigeration is commonplace, CO2 detectors are required, as a refrigeration leak can asphyxiate people in the building.
@@robertborchert932 Seems like a CO detector and optical smoke detector make a nice pair. The sorts of 'clean' fires which might happen domestically tend to put out (and often kill with) CO. I think those are the current requirements for California and probably a lot of other places.
@@travcollier yes! A clean fire, one that does not necessarily produce particulates, is quite deadly. It raises heat, is not detected, and once flashover ensues, it is too late. I have monitored evolutions with proper instrumentation, and I saw CO levels rise impressively. This is why I really agree that more sensors is a good thing. Care to guess how many areas in residences are protected by thermal sensors? Easy answer. I know just how fast a fire can evolve, and how long it takes from detection to response. Seconds count, lives count. I've been on the response more times than I could count. This is why I trained my crew differently. I trained to deploy for the possibilities, and attack based upon the situation found. I had standard operating procedures to train for, but I encouraged "playing" with the equipment. You always revert to your training when the rubber hits the road.
13:11 "Many" is a bit of an understatement. The *vast majority* of fire-related tragedies (60-80% according to the NIH) are not from the flames, but from smoke inhalation.
There is a third technology of fire detectors: Heat sensors. They are a perfect solution for the kitchen. They maybe do not detect a smoldering early fire, but once the heat at the ceiling reaches 60°C it goes off. Considering that many sources of electrical house fires are in the kitchen, it is a good investment that can give you a few extra minutes before a smoke detector in another room notices the fire.
There's actually 2 types of heat sensor detectors, so you have to make sure you get the correct one. One is a temperature cutoff detector, the other is a "change of temperature" detection which is horrible for the kitchen.
Retired Home and Commercial fire system tech here, we always put Heat sensors in or near kitchens for this exact reason. We also used them in attics were gas heating was used and in garages with a living space above them . Though this is not code in my area I set it as a company policy, in the mid 2000's Ford had the Cruise Control Switch Recall and it kill several people when the vehicles went up flames in their garages and they had their bedrooms over the garage. Also I made it company policy that CO sensors were to be installed at the point of generation. I had read years ago that a family died when the alarm finally went off and they ran out their rooms to a house filled with CO. The sensor was all the way across the house from the gas hot water in the utility room and the sensor was just outside the master bedroom door.
There is also photoelectric and heat combination. Where it looks for a temp gradient and smoke particles. Not sure if there is much domestic stuff like that but in commercial it's common to have heat and photoelectric. Heat detectors don't nuisance alarm. Technically a heat alarm is not smoke detection.
"Now I can hear you asking, 'Why not both'?" I've never been more terrified of someone preemptively knowing what I was thinking, the second I was thinking it. What a good video.
I had the same experience when I thought I figured out why smoke detectors should be replaced every 10 years (because the radioactive stuff would be depleted of course!) Immediately after that thought he explains why this is not the reason. I love this channel so much!
Yeah.. but I thought about having one ionization detector in the place where it's least likely to trip a false alarm and fitting out the rest of the spots with the photo-electric ones.
This is undoubtedly the best youtube channel where a guy sits and talks in front of a camera. The cadence is perfect, keeps things moving without being too fast to keep up,and the edits are not at all distracting and never feel superfluous. 10/10
There is a third option: Alarm sensors that detect heat above a programmed level. These type of sensor can be used in kitchen areas. I would recommend installation of a smoke alarm about 20 inch from the wall, and away from electrical sources.
Yup, these are commonly used in garages. Depending on where you live, you may not be allowed to use these indoors in place of a smoke alarm. Look up your codes if you plan on doing this.
I'd like to preface this comment by stating that my experience and knowledge comes from previously being a Firefighter for QFRS/QFES in Australia. Now with that out of the way, it makes me extremely happy to see one of my favourite channels tackle the interesting subject of fire safety. Here in Australia (at least in Queensland), we have been rolling out LEGAL requirements for ALL homes to be fitted with a minimum required number of alarms, they MUST be of a photoelectric type, hardwired and interconnected. Their recommended/required positions on walls and ceilings relative to things like fans, lights, exposed beams are also outlined. The reason this has happened is we had a number of house fires where large families were lost due to ineffective, inoperable or just plain non-existent smoke alarms. I am unable to provide you with hard stats on how many fires bypass the incipient (smouldering) stage and go directly to active, however, every structural fire I responded to during my tenure had an incipient stage where either occupants or neighbours were alerted by smoke alarms or smoke itself. Unfortunately, due to "modern" manufacturing and heavy use of synthetics in homes, the time it takes for a home to go from an incipient stage to fully involved (smouldering to the whole house on fire) has dramatically decreased. Back in the 80s/90s, it was normal for a house to take 30 minutes to reach fully involved. The average time now? Around 4 minutes. So when you say seconds matter, I cannot stress enough how correct you are, and that specific point must be stressed. If even a single 3-seater couch/sofa/lounge in your home is alight, it carries enough thermal energy itself to burn your entire house down and it will progress VERY quickly. If there's a fire, save yourself and your loved ones and GET OUT FAST. Have a plan in place.
Those laws are in place now, but they are not retrospective. They only apply for new builds and new installs for rentals, IIRC, and if your landlord replaces one smoke alarm there is no requirement to interconnect to existing alarms. Sadly there will be a long tail of house fires where occupants have obsolete smoke alarms but at least it is a start.
Oh my god you have solved an old puzzle I've had rolling around my head for almost a decade now! Years ago my apartment burned down. Not my fault, my neighbor was stupid. But anyways, it happened during the night and I woke up to someone banging on the door to warn me of the fire. When I woke up I saw the room was filled with smoke. I quickly got out but while I watched the building burn down I thought it was odd that the smoke alarms had never gone off. Especially considering that the damn things would go off pretty much every time I cooked on the stove. I told many people this story and could never explain why. At one point I wondered if I had imagined it. But now I know it was true and why it happened! I currently live in a house and have had issues with my smoke alarm above my stove going off. I figured it was just something I had deal with for the sake of having smoke alarms, but now I know that I need to replace all ionization alarms around the kitchen. For some reason I have about half of each in the house. Thanks again!
I can't help but wonder how many people you may have saved with this video. I have been avoiding replacing my alarms because of the nuisance beeps. It's only having watched this that I realize how long its actually been since I unhooked them. I'll be going out in the morning to buy the photoelectric style and hooking them up right away. I don't think I'm all that unusual in my attitude about them which brings me back to the original question. How many people like me are going to watch this and learn how easy it is to solve the false alarm hassle. I don't know for sure but this is one subscriber you did get through to. Thanks.
Just wanted to say I really appreciated the statement up front that you're not going to be including any alarms being triggered in this video. As someone with sensory sensitivities, it really put me at ease that I didn't have to worry about a sudden loud noise.
Agreed! I'm prone to sensory over-stimulation _(especially piercing sounds),_ and on the tail-end of recovering from c-ptsd*. Little warnings or statements about sudden loud noises make life so much more bearable. Its nice, knowing all my sirens won't be screaming. xD * _Fun fact:_ feeling relaxed and safe _can be triggers for panic attacks. Those are a real curve ball of the mind._
As someone with sensory issues, and chronic migraines, knowing this video wasn't going to trigger a sudden migraine was a huge relief. Sometimes loud ads will do it still but this video had no midrolls thankfully.
*73 adult-babies liked Aaron Bower's comment + counting* "sensory sensitivities" *=translation=* "adult-babies" *y'all need to grow some balls you’d be useless if WW3 happens* 🤣
As someone without those sensitivities, I was still put at ease, and still appreciated it. The noise from those things (both in volume and just the sound) is god-awful.
I also really appreciated that, thank you! I don't mind it but my dog has panic attacks at alarm sounds so it's useful to know I don't need to carefully manage how I watch the video with her in the room.
I just want to say how impressed I am by your videos -- especially by how well they hold my attention. I generally click on them "just to check it out" (fully expecting to switch to something "more interesting" within two or three minutes) but then I end up watching the whole thing (and even replaying parts to make sure I caught everything). I don't quite get how you manage this, but please keep it up -- your videos are well worth the time.
Oh my goodness! I appreciate this video soooooo much! We have an alarm in our kitchen that goes off when our oven is on, when our toaster oven is on, and sometimes when the stove is on. It drives me nuts. Plus our hallway alarm goes off if too much steam comes out of the bathroom. I am now pretty sure I know which alarm we have and can replace them. Hallelujah!
20 years ago I bought a wireless home alarm integratred smoke alarm that worked fine when pressing the test button. But I got the idea to test if it detected smoke or fire, and it didn't. I got it replaced at the store, and the replacement was just as bad. I really went overboard and charred it before returning it to the store. So yeah, good advice to test for smoke, the test button just tests the battery.
Eh, no. The test button creates internal conditions that should start an alarm condition. For residential smoke alarms, it is also usually the only way of testing consistent with the UL listing. Your alarm just sucked.
I have a rather interesting anecdote regarding the "across-the-room laser" type smoke detectors. I learned about their existence relatively recently in a maker space on my university campus when my rocketry team was doing a test-fitting of our newest L2 rocket. As we rose it up vertically, the nose broke the beam and triggered the alarm, resulting in us having to explain what happened to campus security and the fire department. Not exactly the best way to kick off launch day...
I learned about them in college when planning a large event in our campus theater. The event management & planning team informed us that no guests could bring anything that becomes airborne (like balloons) since it would trigger the fire alarms.
It would be a pretty easy fix to install the laser line of sight somewhere where it’s virtually impossible to impede the beam. Across a structural beam, for example, or right above hanging light fixtures.
@@davidconner-shover51 Yeah it's also evidence for why these types of sensor (or any critical sensor really) should also never be used alone, both as a system and also in a numerical sense that one sensor doesn't give a good picture. Smoke will fill a room roughly evenly given time. If one or two sensors report a zero reading suddenly, that's a blockage. If a cluster reports flickering and then maybe total blockage, that's probably a fire.
I once was ripping out the ceiling at the place I worked at the time. There were cables everywhere and most were not needed anymore. This made it a nice job to get some agression out, as it was mainly just pulling cables like there was no tomorrow, cutting things up and just throwing stuff around you'd usually had to be carefull with. Some of th cables had gotten tangled up with wires leading to the smoke detectors, so badly that the only way to get the ceiling out was by removing the detector first. But yeah... removing a smoke detector in a commercial building... I asked my chief about it, who was being honest by saying he didn't know if it could be removed or not. I said I would walk down to the reception to notify them I was about to remove a smoke detector, which could lead to an alarm. The director of the building overheard me saying this and said I didn't have to worry. He was very tall and could reach up to the ceiling easily, where I had to use a small ladder. 'Ofcourse you can remove it.' He grabbed the detector, turned it 45 degrees clockwise to detach it from it's base and put it on the table and continued his conversation with a few co-workers. I didn't say anything, turned around and only thought like 'yeah right...' I had just got back up on my ladder when the door to the department flew open. 'Did you guys hit a cable or something?' It was the receptionist lady who was already on the phone with the fire department as her panel had suddenly reported an alarm. I only pointed to the director...
You had a dryer vented into your hallway? Don't do that. A dryer must be vented outside. Period. The lint dust can cause white lung disease like people who worked in cotton mills would get. I live in Ottawa, Canada, a climate similar to yours in Illinois. It's really tempting to want to save that warmth and humidity to make your indoor air better, but you will never filter out the finest lint particles enough. Also, you will slam your home with humidity and end up with condensation everywhere, possibly causing mold and other issues. Find a way to vent the dryer outside even if it means hanging the (metal, not vinyl!) dryer duct outside the window. Vinyl ducts are for bathroom fans only. Dryers do occasionally catch fire (ever forgotten a Bic lighter in your workpants?) and metal ducting is not going to ignite, while the vinyl will.
I just love your videos, you seem to be such a chill, clever and sensitive (thanks for not having any alarms in the video) guy. Thanks for your content and keep up the good work.
Awesome video, with just a couple of notes... I work for an Alarm Monitoring Company, and those photo-electric smoke detectors are great... so long as they are maintained. Those chambers do need to be cleaned at least once a year, otherwise, they start to accumulate dust bunnies that can make them more or less sensitive. In fact, most of the commercial level sensors have two photo sensors, as you mentioned, and if the line-of-sight detector is blocked, the sensor will send a "Maintenance Alert" to remind you to remind the customer to clean the chamber, or have a technician dispatched to do the same. This is especially true in humid environments like the PNW. The second thing is don't put a photo-electric smoke detector anywhere near a bathroom. Steam from showers and baths are our number 2 cause of false alarms. Even with a fan running, the steam will leak into the hallway, set off the alarm, then because the person is the only one home and in the shower, they can't hear the alarm nor the calls to contact them, and they only know it is an issue when the fire department shows up.
that explains our smoke detector in our last apartment. I'd have to pull it down every single time I took a shower otherwise it would go off constantly. I wish there was a "disable for 30 minutes" button so I wouldn't have to be in danger of forgetting the hang the thing back up.
That PSA at the beginning... is exactly why I love your channel. You do a lot to make sure everyone is going to be entertained and maybe learn something rather than annoyed.
As someone who is very sensitive to noises and by extension of that has anxiety over fire alarm sounds, that warning at the start made the difference of whether I was going to continue watching. I'm so glad I did because guess who doesn't have to worry about nuisance alarms as much!!!
genuinely agreed; i said "thank you" out loud to an empty room just knowing that i wouldn't have to ride the mute button to prevent my dog from panicking
I designed several smoke detectors back in the 80's . Various familiar brand names. Also designed calibrated smoke boxes for UL testing. I'd say you did a good job explaining things. Ionization for hot fires, photoelectric for cold fires. We experimented with alternate ionization sources too, besides americium. Not sure if they ever made it into the marketplace. I'll have to check out some of your other videos. This one is really good on facts and low on hype! A great combination. thanks.
Great video. I am a Fire Protection Engineer and have been working in the area for over 10 years. Your video is great and very well presented. Only note I would give is that every type of detector in the market now has their pros and cons, as well as recommended uses. As you mentioned, large halls use beam sensors because other types wouldn't be as effective. When dealing with business, industry and large venues the owners of the place hire people like me to analyze their sites and come up with the correct type of sensor, their installation requirements and settings. But it would be impossible to do that for the regular home. Therefore, some "general guidelines" have to be set. They're not ideal but are good enough for most places. Both ionic and photoelectric detectors are a good option for the home but small diferences in placement may have one be better than the other. In your specific case, the location of the detector and the use you have for the place seem to be better suited for the photoelectric but maybe, if you moved the installation point just a bit the ionic would've been just fine. Do not dismiss the ionic altogether cause there are places where it is a better solution. Anyway, just pointing out cause it seemed a bit harsh on the ionic technology. Again, great video otherwise.
I feel like the high sensitivity of ionization based detectors seems great for locations where you can't have any fire at all and false positives are less of an issue than false negatives.
@@Carl-b9t some do, some don't. It all depends on which you get. As an example, search XP95A detector from Apollo. On the datasheet you'll se it can be programed for single or dual sensor activation.
As a seafarer, I get a lot of fire fighting training. I also am a volunteer fire fighter when I’m home. That being said, an old fire chief I’d trained with once told me that he has a detector WITH A STROBE over every bed in the house and in the usual places as most of the fatalities he’d seen were in bedroom fires, (pillows on heaters etc…). You can sleep through a hallway alarm, but a bright flashing light directly over your head, as well as a loud alarm will wake you up.
Some people might sleep through an alarm, but i wake up on my way out of the bed room door when the alarm goes off, in my basement hallway (false alarm, they are all connected, but the one that senses fire would beep 30 seconds before all others went off so you could faster locate it). When it comes to fire alarms it probably triggers a survival instinct or something.. Its pretty crazy..
The flashing smoke alarm is a common staple in deaf/hard of hearing households, but it's also good idea that I worry gets overlooked for people with hearing loss/hearing aids (if you take them out to sleep) or those who sleep with white noise machines, television/radio/etc or headphones (especially noise canceling).
Up here in Canada, it's part of our fire code that a smoke detector equipped with a strobe and an auditable alarm of at least 80 dB must be mounted within a bedroom so that the detector is never more than 10 feet from anywhere in the room and is unobstructed by any permanently installed fixtures (aka the closet isnt an acceptable mounting location, even if it meets all other criteria). If your bedroom is larger than 20 feet by 20 feet (the maximum size of room for one center mounted detector), multiple detectors may be used, though they're hardly necessary as bedrooms are hardly ever that big. Same idea - no walls, close proximity, a bright light, and a very loud alarm would ensure that even the heaviest of sleepers will wake up if the alarm sounds.
THANK YOU! You might have just saved my life! Out of 5 smoke alarms in my home only 2 are operational. One had no battery, one had a mangled contact and therefore no power as well and the third one had a broken beeper that only crunched, but didn't scream. This was fucking scary, but very worthwhile the two minutes I spent. Again, thank you!
March 29, 2022 - *_Brampton house fire leaves five dead, including three children_* _Fire officials are urging residents to check their smoke detectors after a blaze tore through a Brampton home on Monday morning, killing three young children and their parents._ _“Fire spreads so fast in our houses nowadays with the construction that we have and the plastics that are in there, so the smoke is so thick and black (as a result),” he said. “If you don't have a working smoke alarm, unfortunately we are going to see more tragedies like over my shoulder. We need to get serious. We need to be serious about smoke alarms.”_
I've got a story about the laser beam smoke detectors. This one involves Argonne national laboratory, in illinois. Apparently they had some sort of large atrium space in one of their buildings, and some of the people who worked there found out that it had a laser smoke detector in it after they threw paper airplanes through the open space and one of them interrupted the beam and set it off.
Beam smoke detectors are pretty common for atrium spaces. Usually infrared light. My company uses an Xtralis/Vesda product called an OSID that has a black and white infrared camera, and special calibrated emitters. When the signal from the emitters decreases, you get an alarm. Balloons definitely can set them off.
This video probably will save lives, if people were paying attention. Thank you. I had both kinds installed in my home, but they stopped working recently ten years after I put them up. I now have replaced them with just a photoelectric detector.
A photoelectric alarm probably would’ve woken me up much earlier for the smoldering insulation in the walls that led to a fire. Similarly, it would also reduce false alarms from my stove and heater in my camper van. I think I’ll be switching out, now that I know there’s a difference. Thanks for this!
Truly appreciate the first 5 seconds of the video. I was able to take my headphones off knowing my dog won't be set off in the middle of the video (he has massive panic attacks when he hears the alarm beeping)
My dog too. I determined this was caused by the cook in our house not attending to shutting off timers right away and allowing them to beep for minutes. Maddening!
In all honesty: You pronounced "Jäger" / "Jaeger" almost perfectly. Either I am too tired atm (a valid excuse in case of mushy brain) or, besides a slight tinge of accent mixed in, it did sound absolutely fine.
I use several HEPA air cleaners to clean the air in my home. This can delay or prevent smoke alarms from going off. You need smoke detectors in every room if you use air cleaners.
I’ve put off watching this for a week until I had a time with headphones in just in case alarms go off so the dogs wouldn’t be bothered, and the first line of the video is “I won’t be setting off alarms”. I should have known better. You are one of the most considerate channels on the platform.
Back in 1976-77, when i was installing "commercial" alarm systems, the preferred "Smoke Detector" used BOTH an ionization-chamber-type detector, adjusted to avoid false alarming, AND a photo-sensor-type chamber. Since there's plenty of space for both chambers in one unit, those were the ONLY kind the 2 different companies I'd worked for used, (as well as my own personal preference in my home).
Pretty much the only type of commercial ionization detector you see nowdays is one where it's not the _only_ sensor in the detector; for instance the "IHPS " from Edwards' Signature-series: it has photoelectric, ionization, & thermal sensors in one unit, allowing for better recognition of any kind of fire. Other than that the commercial side of the industry has pretty much completely abandoned ionization unlike the residential side.
I have the combo type alarms throughout my home. I can attest that at least the "First Alert" brand will trigger on whichever sensor responds first. I have one a bit too close to my kitchen. It won't go off if I make toast, but once the oven gets going, it generally scares the crap out of me. It does have the benefit of being able to be silenced by pointing any IR remote, such as for your TV at it.
Yea first alert does it, their entire brand name is based on that fact lmao. It's good they are a popular one in stores as well. If there really are ones that wait for BOTH to detect they are absolute trash
@@Birdman3131 I'm aware, but if the detector is designed to turn off with the detection of ANY code from ANY IR remote, that's a lot of codes and the likelihood of a random flashing IR signal slightly matching one of them is then much higher. Look at the video 'faking a tv remote control with paper and a lighter'.
A few years ago i moved into a new house. The realtor actually brought this subject to my attention. She even used the correct terminology when she suggested that i swap all the ionization based alarms for photosensitive based alarms. That became the first project on the honey-do list! At the time, i didn’t think it was a big deal but wanted to error on the side of caution. I’m glad i did!
Was curious to see what the Nest Protect smoke alarms utilize and they're apparently a new generation of photoelectric with 2 different wavelengths to detect both small and large smoke particles. No mention of any americium. Supposedly this complies with UL 217 v8 which does away with either ionization and/or photoelectric requirements and instead presents multiple-criteria that sensors need to achieve.
Sounds like nest uses computer algorithms to help eliminate false alarms. Photoelectric also produce false alarms from steam and near bathroom so nest seeks to give accurate alarms.
Thanks for covering this. I've been a fire alarm technician (both in England and Canada) for the last 40 years. It's an important subject. Not enough people know that the test button on a smoke alarm does not prove functionality. They are required to be replaced every 10 years by code. A couple of tips. Every six months clean the smoke alarm. Vacuum the unit and wipe down the vents. When you have interconnected smoke alarms make sure they are the same manufacturer. In the past, the interconnect voltage could differ between products and lead to issues. If your smoke alarms are connected to other equipment (a sprinkler for instance) and they require replacement, contact a professional. There will be a module that may not be compatible with your new units.
Well, while to me it is rather common sense that button cannot be worth actual smoke in testing, I was actually surprised when I once learned about technical implementations (ie. read datasheets of common smoke alarm ICs and other application information), how sophisticated the testing functionality is, actually doing kind of manipulative test on the sensor chamber. As I had thought before that it just gives a direct feed for buzzer, ie. testing just the buzzer. Another interesting surprise was that while the cheap models don't usually have interconnection nor hush button features, they are actually often built around very same generic smoke alarm ICs than the more expensive models, and the IC actually has those functionalities. Ie. only connector, button, and maybe some series resistors are left out from cheap models. Often, the models containing those features cost ten times more, which is quite a profit from a few cents of added components.
Thank you so much for making this. I used to be a firefighter, and one of the hardest fires I had was when a space heater cord melted and caught the carpet on fire. It smoldering for a long time, causing so much smoke they occupants succumbed to smoke inhalation. Their ionizing smoke detectors never went off, not once. I've been telling everyone I know about the two types, and urging peoe to replace their old ones with newer ones.
Back when I was a kid we lived on the second floor of a 2 building in Brooklyn.The way the heating system was set up our apartment was very cold in the winter so we often relied on an old electric heater. Being it was an old building with few outlets we used an extension cord on the heater (I know... bad bad idea). Anyway one cold night we plugged the heater in and went to the living room to watch TV while the bedroom warmed up a bit. After about a half hour my folks sent me to bed and as I walked to my bedroom and passed the heater I noticed the plug, which plugged into the extension cord, was smoking like crazy. It was blowing off a lot of smoke and the air was filled with the stench of burning rubber. Even as a little child I knew this was very bad and I grabbed the extension cord and yanked it out of the wall, effectively killing power to the heater. then I called my Dad. Inspecting the plug we saw it was literally melting would probably have burst into flame a few moments later. This was back in the very early 1960s and in those days fire alarms and fire extinguishers in residences were pretty much non-existent. Had I not come into that bedroom and saw that plug smoking there is a good chance the whole place would have burned down that night.
Haven’t watched the whole video yet, but (and I hope you are honest) the imitate promise of no sudden alarms made me turn the volume up to a normal level. And that care is something I wanted to recognise!
when I was in highschool I bought a bunch of smoke alarms and pulled all the radioactive bits out to put together to make a cloud chamber to see alpha particles. I know it's really not that dangerous, I just always though it was odd how easy it was for a 14 to get their hands on a not insignificant amount of radioactive material
Ever read about the nuclear boy scout? Was a dude who wanted to make a working nuclear reactor for his eagle scout badge. He got his hands on some radium from old clocks and americium from a bunch of old smoke detectors. Unfortunately the only thing he succeeded in doing was irradiating his back yard. Later joined the navy and worked on nuke subs.
Alpha emitters are ok. Still don't want to ingest the stuff, but handling like any other toxic material is pretty much fine. Unfortunately, most people just don't use their brains... You were the type of kid who was building a cloud chamber, so I'm pretty sure you were using your brain ;)
"Testing the actual sensor instead of just clicking a button and checking if it beeps, might be more important." That precise thought goes through my head every time I test my smoke alarms.
Makes perfect sense until you remember how dumb some people are and realize there will inevitably be house fires caused by people trying to test their smoke alarm in reckless ways.
Eight years ago, at 3 am, a fire alarm went off in my daughter's bedroom. It is an ionization type. We all woke up and rushed into her room. There was no smoke at all, but there was an acrid smell coming from her small space heater. I unplugged it and doused it. That alarm probably saved our lives.
@@Nachiebree Yeah but when it's very cold outside people without central heat have no choice. People should get the ones that use hot liquid for those purpose.
@@Nachiebree Yes, and this is also why it's recommended to have the bedroom doors closed when sleeping. If the fire starts anywhere other than in the bedroom, you have a slight increase in the time you've got to escape the residence before being overcome by smoke. Which is a lot less time with all the plastics in modern houses than it used to be.
@@billybassman21 Correct the oil filled radiators are very safe. The surface temperature doesnt get very hot. Also ceramic space heaters are very safe as well.
There's actually a lot more to the algorithms in an optical smoke detector. To start with, the trigger threshold isn't absolute, because the device accumulates dirt over time. The initial pre-alarm (switch to rapid sample mode) is triggered if the difference between "this" sample and a rolling average of n previous samples exceeds some amount. More advanced detectors also trigger a "clean me" alert if the rolling average gets too dirty.
I don't actually know, but I suspect a lot of home/consumer grade smoke alarms still don't have that technology and simply work off of a fixed threshold. That is definitely how modern commercial smoke detectors work though.
@@csforesman Clean-me warnings are an optional feature that costs extra (but not much extra). The rolling threshold is a baseline feature, because without it the sensor requires very frequent cleaning. Plus, it's firmware, which is free :) source - worked in industry.
I guess "clean me" warnings make sense on industrial systems with central monitoring; but in the case of a cheap home smoke alarm, it is easier just to let it give a false alarm if the sensor head gets dust in it. At least the householder than has a chance to try vacuum-cleaning it, or blasting a can of air duster through it, to see if that makes an improvement. But that would definitely not be popular in an alarm system in a factory which took a SIM card and automatically dialled up the fire brigade! You could easily lose a whole day's worth of production over a bit of dust .....
many of the older ones that employed drift compensation, but no flash memory would take the first few samples on boot up as "clean" air, this was a real compatibility problem when attached to even older systems that used smoke verification, requiring 2 device trips, with the reboot between, ESL 5xx series smokes were a real issue, going from about 4% obscuration on the first trip, to requiring 15% or more on the second trip. many of the more modern commercial smoke detectors will actually log events on the device itself,
@@bluerizlagirl the issue that clean-me principally addresses is when the sensor is becoming saturated with dirt. If the baseline "clean air" sample/average is too dirty, an actual smoke event won't move the reading far enough to trigger an alarm.
I'm a residential maintenance tech who installs probably 4 or 5 alarms a month and I had no idea there were even different types. So thankful for this info, and will be exclusively installing photoelectric alarms from here on out!
UPDATE: the alarms were about 25-30 years old. And now we have 6 alarms instead of just 3 - I added alarms to each bedroom. I sleep much more soundly now. -- Thanks for this video (yet again!)! I’m going to be replacing the smoke alarms in our house today that are god only knows how old, and I went with photoelectric because of you! :D
Excellent breakdown of the two technologies. When I first installed some "new" (at the time) photoelectric smoke detectors I became aware of a "flaw" they have regarding their location. I had to move one of mine that was in a bedroom, because every afternoon at around the same time, a false alarm would be triggered. Why? It was sitting directly opposite a large window and at that time of day there was a perfect storm of sunlight beams at just the right angle and dust particles in the air which triggered the sensor in the alarm. I moved the detector about 2-3 feet across the room and it never happened again. It is apparently not uncommon for this issue to occur.
That is what i am saying. Why not both? And have a comparable alarm, that will not warn you when you toast bread or open an oven, but will warn you in the alarming cases?
@@Narinjas Yes indeed, and some manufacturers even make units that have both methods of detecting possible fires. Mine will trigger either because it detects ions or because it detects particles that could be smoke. And from the comments I'm seeing here, I was probably right to do so. I rarely have any false alarms that don't involve actual burning materials. (I guess those are probably not technically false, but I've yet to need to use anything to put them out, so I consider them false alarms)
Honeywell’s current product lineup for central monitored systems has three options. A heat alarm, a combo photoelectric and heat alarm, or a super combo photoelectric and heat and carbon monoxide alarm. Seems like thermal sensors are the new thing for detecting those fast flame fires. Heat alarms are great for kitchens and garages too.
These technologies have been used in central monitored systems from well before domestic smoke alarms became common. Modern smoke detectors also allow for the central monitoring system to be programmed to use these technologies in differing ways to allow for different circumstances in an installation. Other methods of false alarm rejection are also used with a delay time after the first positive smoke sampling to the repeated confirmation sampling to allow non smoke particles to dissipate prior to the second sampling.
Those kind of detectors have been available in the professional market for years now and pretty amazing (in the netherlands at least, ionization detectors are highly discouraged) they usually.
Why does your comment, from an established account and shown here with 52 likes and counting, appear so far below the exact same text shown with just 30 likes reposted by a spam bot that only joined half a year ago?
Great video. I work in the fire protection industry in Australia around smoke detection in commercial installations. Material was bang on point. I also live in a building where we had a very large fire. One of the minor things that came out after the fact was that we might have been able to have a faster occupant warning if one of the smoke alarms was ionisation rather than all ionisation like we have. FPAA (Australia's NFA) actually lobbied the Australian government to allow both types to be installed. There are some videos of the submission on FPAAs UA-cam. As well as testing smoke alarms, owners should RTFM. Especially around battery replacement and cleaning requirements. In Australia the manual specifies the exact makes and frequency of battery replacement. Read it. Photoelectric alarms trap dust and other airborne constraints over time. So placing them near air handling will increase their contamination. As they accumulate contaminants they become more sensitive and prone to nuisance alarms. I have actual real world data that shows this from a commercial building. I have detectors in the HVAC ductwork as required by the building permit that last under year because they accumulate too much particulate matter. If you'd like to see such data I'm happy to share.
Don't use those. The two types of sensors require different mounting locations for best effect. A smoke alarm needs to be at the highest point in the room, whereas a CO sensor needs to be mounted at roughly half hight. Thus the mounting point for one type of sensor makes the other one almost useless.
@@y4kv They also don't discourage sticking one's ass in a beehive, doesn't mean you should do either. The recommendation for CO sensors is to mount then on a wall, at half height.
@@user-xu2pi6vx7o this is based on manufacturer's recommendations, many are designed to operate just fine at ceiling height, some are designed to operate at outlet height. the truth is, CO mixes pretty evenly in the air, with only a little variance based on position in a room, vs temperature. yes, thermostat height is optimal, but not absolute
@@davidconner-shover51 I should note that in california thought they dont outright say to not use the combo units they deeply recommend you also install a standard detector at mid height as well
You have no idea how much you helped us. Our smoke detectors were going off constantly just by turning on the oven, always waking and terrifying our toddler. He even was acting out "turning off smoke detectors" with his stuffed animals.
I went and tested my fire alarm as you told me and... huh, it doesn't work. *Takes it off the wall and looks* Oh wow! There's literally no battery in it! I don't know how long it has been like this! Thanks for the reminder! Immediately went to the store and bought a new one, so now it's working! Thanks again for potentially saving my life!
All of the cheap ionisation alarms I've dealt with, when the battery is removed, either the main plastic cover will NOT re-install, or the alarm itself will not re-attach to its base (because like a spring loaded thing pops out), or a spring loaded, small label "no battery" pops out from somewhere. It's possible this is a requirement of Australian/New Zealand laws but not mandated in other countries.
your videos have sparked me into an engineering career, and I just want to thank you for that. I started watching about 3 years ago and I love all your videos, and it makes me want to learn. thank you so much!
Thank you for this public service announcement. I have worked for two companies that exclusively installed and maintained smoke alarms. I think you only missed three points, the first concerning dead air spaces. The space near where your walls meet your ceiling or another wall, or at the apex of a cathedral ceiling is considered a bad area to install an alarm due to poor air movement. For example, the one that you show on your wall is probably in the least optimal place it could be due to the meeting of the walls, the meeting of the walls with the ceiling, and the air intake being immediately beside it. I suggest you reconsider whether or not it could be moved (it can, but at what cost?) or install another alarm in a more appropriate location. The second, is areas near high levels of air flow, for example near a duct. The constant airflow can cause dust build up on the sensor blocking smoke from entering. It is recommended that you vacuum your alarm at the same time you test it although I'm not sure how much that would actually help. The third is that photoelectric alarms are sensitive to water vapour, including from showers, baths, ovens, dryers, and cool temperatures in humid environments (for example at night). As we had a strong preference for installing photoelectric alarms we would avoid installing an alarm near a bathroom, laundry or kitchen if at all possible. If one of these areas, excluding kitchens, was a must we would install an ionisation alarm. Another option for these locations is a heat alarm which gives the same reaction as a smoke alarm but based on temperature instead of smoke. When it comes to smoke in a can, you can purchase it off the shelf from electrical wholesalers. One of the companies I worked for required testing with smoke, the other required testing without smoke. The latter said that they found that the smoke in a can would cause nuisance alarming after the service visit. The reason given was that the smoke in a can would cause build up on the sensor after several tests and would cause premature failure of the alarm. In my estimation, the smoke would simply not clear quickly enough after the test and the hush feature timed out. Being impatient I would spray smoke into the alarm, then, once the alarm sounded, pull the battery and wave the alarm around to clear the smoke. Being lazy, I built a fan to do that for me in a low effort and less embarrassing way. If you test with smoke in a can then I suggest you either have a fan handy or you have an understanding of how to take your smoke alarm off the wall/ceiling for manual smoke clearing.
yep good point about the corners of rooms, i was surprised when he said they were wall mounted at all. best it on a ceiling at least 500mm from the wall was our requirement in a hotel company. Or if you are in france "please put one in the bedroom ffs" their regulations have no requirment for smoke detectors in a hotel bedroom.. even if it has a kitchenette. insane.
What household items might work as smoke detection? For instance incense or lit and extinguished matches. Could one clear the sensor with compressed air much like cleaning other electronics?
@@johnno4127 smoke detectors are designed not to detect small amounts of smoke like that from those sources however if you held enough burning incense sticks under a smoke alarm it will trigger. Compressed air is a good option for clearing the smoke afterwards, air in a can works as well but too much can cause condensation and just make things worse.
I would simply like to say that I appreciated the pluralization of atrium as “atria”. The precision of speech and attention to detail is something I always really admire about your videos! Not that I would have been bent out of shape if you’d said “atriums”, because that is definitely what I would have thoughtlessly said :P
I'm glad I'm not the only one who appreciates little details like this. As a man from the Great British lands, I hardly ever use the word atrium, I use the plural even less. So this brought me joy.
The attention to detail and the precision of speach, combined with the first video I saw on this channel, regarding British plugs, convinced me he must be British. Since then I've seen him speak of living in the US, but the first impression is hard to shake.
@@jackholmes2374 "As a man from the Great British lands", you ought to know that the Romans (temporarily) conquered Great Britain (or at least part of it). Atrium is a Latin word. Atria is Latin-style declension. The proper way for an Englishman to form the plural is to add a bloody "s" at the end (or an "es", or sometimes completely change the word, e.g., goose [from Old English, from Proto-West Germanic] -> geese - btw wtf is the deal with that? who invented this language?). Anyhow, I just don't get why you exalt the use of the grammatical conventions of the Romans, who subjugated your country in the olden times lol. It's one thing to take their vocabulary and their alphabet, but to use their grammar, their method of pluralization, as well - a step too far, if you ask me. I'll leave you to tea time. Tea and biscuits. "s" for the plural and apostrophe "s" for the genitive - that is the English way. We say "atrium's walls" meaning "walls of the atrium"; we do not say "walls ātriī", which I think would be the Latin-style grammar, using the genitive singular version of atrium. (But I'm not an expert on Latin, so don't quote me.)
@@robertjenkins6132 Thank you for this insight you knowledgeable man. I shall take this on my travels. It would be a heck of a lot cooler to say things the Latin way. You know what, sod it. I'm going to from now on and see the reactions I get. But yes. Instead of the word "Atrium", I hear words like 'Enterance hall" or "Foyer" being more regularly used. Also side note, I've never fully understood how to pronounce "Foyer". I've heard it pronounced "Foa-yay" which to me sounds ludicrous. Hmmm.
The first thought when I clicked on the video was "I'm probably going to hate this because I hate the sound of smoke alarms..." I sincerely appreciate the opening line.
Same for me too. Always hated the sound of fire alarms. So I’m glad he didn’t play the sounds too. Especially since I stream the audio to my hearing aid so that would not have been fun lol.
When I was in elementary school, we had a firefighter come in every year and give a talk about fire safety. I specifically remember him recommending that canned smoke product you mentioned to test fire alarms.
As someone in the alarm industry, I can vouch that I HAVE seen a Radiation trefoil on an older Smoke alarm. Not common though. Also, the same test smoke I use at work is available on amazon. first result when I searched for "smoke alarm test smoke" You'll also want some canned air, the sort that you use for cleaning your pc, to clear the detector out after smoking it. And hey, Carbon Monoxide detectors are only in the last few years starting to get rated for 10 year use. Before that it was 5 for most detectors. Also a very good sensor to have in the house, especially good to have a monitored one, when you need it the most, you may be the least able to respond to the alarm, and it's nice to have a panel calling the fire department to help you.
Some experience as a volunteer firefighter here: I would unequivocally recommend photoelectric detectors over ionization in residential use. There are very few circumstances which result in efficient combustion yielding low density smoke in a household.
I used to have a ionization alarm that went off too often! I moved it further away and bought a new one for the kitchen. I did not know at the time why the difference in sensitivity was such and chalked it up to "new vs old technology". Thanks to your video I now know why and I'll keep rocking both sensor techs at once :)
So. Long time ago I recall being told that there were two types of detector alarms, smoke detectors and fire detectors. I always assumed the fire detector responded to heat and I even wondered how effective that might be since that meant they were probably calibrated to only go off after a certain temperature was reached. Now thanks to you I'm guessing the "fire detector" alarm was in fact this ionization thingie. As an aside, I once had a cooking oil fire on my stove. Unforgivably, I left a pan of oil on the stove and left the kitchen for a moment and then became distracted. A sudden whoosh and roaring sound brought me running back and the scariest thing was, except for the blinding flames I literally could see nothing else. There was like a vortex pillar of roaring vertical fire and otherwise it was completely pitch dark. I was terrified but I knew I had to put it out and at least I knew not to throw water on it. I got thick towels and edged up to it as close as I dared and gingerly plopped them over the pan. Everything in me wanted to toss the towels from a distance but the thought of toppling the pan and having burning oil everywhere stopped me. As soon as the fire went out I could see again. The lights were still on and there wasn't that much smoke at all. Its just that the fire was SO bright that it drowned out all the other light in the room. Its was like if you are in a dimly lit room and someone opens the door and the sunlight behind them is so bright all you can see is their silhouette. There might be more than enough light in the room for you to see them the moment they shut the door but as long as its open the sunlight totally overpowers the light in the room. That's what the fire was doing, it was so bright the rest of the room seemed pitch black. Lesson - when there's a fire you may well be effectively blind and unable to see exits or obstacles or where you fire-extinguisher is etc.
Thank you for making me realize I would have no idea what to do in a grease fire and look it up! (For those following along at home: turn off the heat, *cover the pan* with a metal lid (glass will shatter), and pour baking soda on any remaining _small_ flames (it doesn't go far). DO NOT use water, which will make it explode, and try not to use a fire extinguisher, which is likely to tip the pan over.)
Fire alarm technician here. Smoke alarm is what you have in a residential home (photoelectric or ionized). They make noise locally in the event they are alarmed. Smoke detectors go to a building fire alarm and annunciate the entire building (also photo or ionized although photo smokes are becoming the most common type now.) Heat detectors that solely detect changes in heat come in rate of rise/fixed temp or fixed temp only. The ROR function looks for 15 degree rise over the course of a minute. The fixed temp function is typically 135F or 200F depending on where it’s being utilized. Fire detector is a coined term for either smoke detectors or heat detectors. Canadian install code has provisions for “fire detectors” to allow engineers to select detectors based on their location and application.
@@calebbarris912 Good explanation. I touched on rate of rise, but kind of got them confused with the fixed temp heat detector. Either way a good fire prevention system utilizes more than one detector as all have pros and cons.
I actually think this is a fairly good point in favor of the ionization alarm. This kind of fast flame fire over oil I assume would set off that type well. I've heard from a firefighter that oil fires actually tend to be one of the more common types. I have no stats to back it up, but given how cheap these are... it's hard to not just justify having both in appropriate places.
I feel like this should go without saying, but, uh, don't go playing with that americium.
Especially don't eat it. That's bad.
Best not to make nuclear reactors at home with it either, so I'm told. That would be even more bad.
All the detectors I've seen sold in my state say not to operate them above 100 degrees, but it's over 100 degrees for about 1/4-1/3 of the year.
speaking of radioactivity, what do you think of LFTR's?
instructions unclear. I'm currently glowing in the dark
I'm surprised the "Nuclear Boyscout" didn't get a mention
Not only have you radically improved my dishwasher's performance; you have also upgraded my home's fire safety. I very much look forward to the next assistance I didn't know I needed. Thank you most sincerely!
I, too, have benefited from your dishwasher breakdown. My wallet thanks you, too.
Technology Connections: Life Pro Tips and Fun Facts You Didn't Know or Likely Won't Ever Need (but still enjoyed learning about)™
@@Kitteh.B This is what life hacks always should’ve been.
He's like Batman...
No I take that back, he's still great though
I have new light bulbs for my room lol
The clear 'No alarms go off' at the beginning was very very appreciated. Wish all professional folks could set expectations that way
It really helps us neurodivergent people
Same, and for anybody anxious about installing a smoke detector you can ask your local fire dept. to do it, just make sure you call the non-emergency number. 💛
@@cosmicminun59 you can only speak for yourself
I've never experienced ours giving a false alarm 🤔
(It's an ionization alarm called "First Alert")
and we have a propane heater not far from it
P.S. It has always made noise when there was smoke
also it made the other one in the house go off as well
@@VineFynn nah, they're right
Those "nuisance" alarms almost killed us. I kept taking them down when we cooked. A nightmare I had about a fire caused me to buy one, single photoelectric alarm for the baby's room. Less than a week later, that was the ONLY fire alarm installed when we had an electrical fire at 4 a.m. we lost almost everything we owned but we lived and that's all that matters. I keep that melted smoke detector hung up in my garage. We owe our lives to that one smoke detector.... and that nightmare I had.
Whoa ! Good on you for listening to your dream!
Whoa daisy!! Thank goodness y'all got through that one.
I had to run past the fire in the hallway with my 2yo and 13yo autistic son. It was hot. My wife couldn't find the fire extinguisher (she thought we had one). So now every room has a small one.
One big tip... don't buy cheap, led night lights. Ours melted and caught fire.
@@fredtaylor9792 I’m glad you and your family are safe.
@@JimGordon Thank all of you for showing the love. My little boy just turned 5 and has no memory of it, thankfully. For a little while after, I couldn't smell smoke without getting nervous.
As a Fire Electrical technician I often watch these types of videos to see if the presenter is actually giving out correct information, and also a person has to be open to maybe learning something new regardless of their background.
I would therefore like to commend you on a very accurate, informative and knowledgeable video, and would recommend anyone who is interested in Fire Safety in their house (which should be everyone) to spend 25 minutes to watch this video as it will be time very well invested.
All of his videos are this good.
Good to hear a vote of confidence in Alec's information!
Any alarm is better than none !
He wouldn’t be making the videos for long if he was talking nonsense, also they pay him good so he doesn’t need praise my fire expert friend!.
I agree with the OP here, I also work in the industry as a tech/installer. There are many videos that we can have disagreements with...some with rolling our eyes. This video stated nothing false or improper. Well done.
Whoa!!!! My DAD was the Donald F. Steele whom you mention up front - he an Bob Enemark had the patent on the photoelectric smoke detector, with their company Electro Signal lab. He could have written your script - I grew up hearing the exact same explanation about how it worked, how it differed from the ionizations, and how the research backed up the fact that many many more people die of smoke inhalation than of actual flames. Great job!!!
Doxxing yourself IRL
Cool!! It must be wild to hear your dad casually name dropped in videos like this. You must be proud of him.
that people still use the old design must’ve been frustrating for your dad.
Many thanks to your dad! Think of all the lives his technology has saved.
Thanks Nina, this is a really cool story! It's kinda rare when after hearing about someone instrumental to something like this, to then get a glimpse into the personal side of that person! My dad worked for Bayer Corp designing the Ascensia blood glucose meters, and I heard the same kinds of stories from him about meters as what you're describing with your dad's stories. Couldn't appreciate it back then, but I do now.
As a 35 year veteran firefighter I want to thank you. And congratulate you on a very well presented report. As you stated, having alarms, maintaining alarms and heeding alarms is vital.
Better to feel the fool being outside in the rain and cold for a false alarm than the smart guy that dies of smoke inhalation if there is an actual fire.
Even though the damn cursed alarm outside my apartment kitchen goes off every time I cook unless I point a fan at it. I still replace the battery when it beeps. It would be so easy to just rip out the battery and rid myself of this constant nuisance but it just seems like that's a bad idea (and against the terms of my rental agreement). I do so wish I could replace it though and throw the damn thing into a fire... It literally goes off if i turn the oven on.... Even with nothing in it. When it goes off I don't run to see what's on fire. I run to turn on the "cooking fan" as we call it.
@@justintime5021 Are you not allowed to replace it with another model with a photo sensor?
@@ReivecS it is spelled out pretty clearly in our rental agreement
@@justintime5021 well I suggest you do it anyway and send them this video as to why ;)
Funny story, I replaced all my ionization alarms with newer photoelectric ones, within a week I had one that went off on a regular basis, I took it down and opened it up to see what the issue was. Turns out that a small spider had taken up residence in the light chamber. My best guess is that he would pass through the beam occasionally creating a false positive. The other photoelectric ones have never had any such issues
I had the same problem with an ant setting it off a 3AM.
I'm right there with ya Russell. IDK why ants do that at 3-4am but they do. Drove me crazy until I figured it out.
I had the same problem with a spider. Of course it was the one alarm I can't reach without a ladder, and of course it was 3am. By the time I got the light chamber open there was actually a web in there that I had to vacuum out.
Mine too had a spider
Did you just assume this spider’s gender?
After watching this I reached out to Kidde since I have a bunch of the dual sensor alarms in my home (Kidde Dual Sensor Battery Operated Smoke Alarm Pi9010). I asked "Does this product trigger the alarm when ONLY ONE sensor detects smoke, or when BOTH sensors detect smoke?" They replied "Only one of the sensors has to detect smoke to make the unit go into alarm." Might want to add a note about that since your preference away from this detector was based on the possibility that both sensors would need to detect smoke for it to go off.
Sounds like a product I'd buy. But it's worthy to note if your buying a new detector to fix one that regularly puts out false alarms, the dual sensor one would not solve your issue.
@@raviolisauce103 Considering the slightly more complex electronics required for a dual sensor alarm, It would make sense they would also include some implementation of sanity checking both sensors to prevent false alarms.
@@TwistedMe13 rather easy to treat both sensors when only one is needed to trigger the alarm. Basically having two detectors in the same casing. The only necessary overlap is connecting the sensors to the alarm. Having a line that goes high when the alarm is "on" connected to the buzzer, with the other one in parallel is cheap.
You have to be careful with this sort of information. Customer service reps often give out misinformation.
@@tommyl3707 that's how big corporations get sued... i hope you are wrong and that a large company, with international exposure/sales of products like Kidde or otherwise, spends a decent amount of time and money or R&D, testing and training their customer service staff (or at the very least providing them with the appropriate training literature for a back up)
That photoelectric alarm that went off every time the dryer was on likely failed due to lint! The microcontroller typically adjusts to the background level of radiant light detected. When dust builds in these detectors, they can sometimes trigger due to the reflectivity of the dust on the far side of the chamber bouncing light around. Sometimes it's because turbulent air will knock dust loose to float through the chamber. I can only imagine that, over time, tiny lint particles built up in the detector, so the air turbulence created by the dryer would knock that lint off the walls to float through the beam. For future reference, you can pop the cover off and clean out the sensor with canned air. Less plastic in the landfill!
Thanks for saving me the time to type that up! ;)
I too had thoughts of lint. Though just of active fine lint getting airborne during drying, I'd not thought of the disturbance of residual lint possibility. Could be disturbance of accumulation in parts of the dryer itself in addition to the possibility of accumulation in the detector chamber contributing to the issue presenting over time.
IIRC, there are secondary filters available that can be used to reduce particulate when a dryer vents indoors. Also one can improvise such by placing a length of nylon stocking like a sort of windsock over the end of a vent tube. I suppose one could alternately stretch a couple pieces of stocking material over the terminus end and band them in place or some such---but such would need maintenance/cleaning more often than the loose windsock style approach due to surface area and lint accumulation pattern differences. Letting either design become completely clogged might create a fire hazard in and of itself.
dryer venting into the hall = yuck lol
I had to do exactly this to the smoke alarm on my boat a few weeks ago, it kept going off for no reason. Pulled it apart, opened the chamber and blew the crap out of it, and so far it's been no more trouble.
>canned air
>less trash in landfill
Stop killing the planet and get a DataVac duster or a compressor
I have to say, I used to call my smoke detector the ‘cooking detector’ because it basically went off whenever I did any kind of cooking. I eventually got frustrated and tore it off the wall. It’s great to know there is a better alternative - you might have just saved my life.
Could be related to your cooking skills though...
And what kind of detector was it?
@@ktriebler The annoying kind.
There's an online joke that smoke detectors should have voice recognition so you can shout "I'm cooking!" and it will shut up.
"It's a smoke detector not a cooking timer!"
I actually work as a fire alarm tech! While we do test the smoke detectors with cans of fake smoke, there are several brands that actually recommend testing it via magnet or pressing a test button. It's because the fake smoke can leave an oily residue on the device if too much is sprayed or if it isnt blown out well enough with compressed air. This residue can then gather dust, making the detector less sensitive or, in severe cases, block it up completely. Personally I prefer using the fake smoke as it tests the sensors as well as the circuit and FACP. But in the event of a desensitized detector, we test the sensitivity of the detectors every other year, so if we find one that has become desensitized, we either clean it out or replace it.
As far as home use goes, I think testing your smoke alarm with just the button is more than sufficient. Because you can gunk up the sensor with the fake smoke, I feel it would end up doing more harm than good as many people may over do it and end up clogging up the detector. And unlike commercial fire alarm systems, most/all 120V or battery powered detectors don't have the ability to test the sensitivity of the detector. So if a detector were to become desensitized, you would have no way of knowing.
At my organization, I use the product "Smoke Check" product from HSI when testing our fire alarms on our ships. We get it from grainger and use it to test hundreds of smoke detectors every year. We test yearly.
Haven't had any trouble with any sensors after using the stuff. As far as using it at home, the technology isn't massively different so I don't know if it would be that much of a problem. But I've never tried it.
My school has a 3030 system that was prone to false alarms because of some sensitivity issues in the older detectors. This was partially caused because the old detectors’ bases were replaced with new ones after an expansion to allow the full system except for old pull stations to be addressable. We now are using the pre alarm feature which is working great! In the near future I think we could use a system upgrade because we have three generations of alarms and detection equipment in the school.
Most recently, we got all new door holders and fan shutdowns which is good, but I think that getting the older portions of the building synchronizing alarms should be prioritized.
Hmm, used some spray smoke to test it. Not sure if I overdid it. Better spray it again to see if it'd desensitized!
Hmm, still working. Ah, but what if I desensitized it THIS time? Better test again with more spray.
As a fellow fire alarm tech, I totally agree with this, and would add that having tested many thousands of smoke detectors I could easily count on one hand the number of times one has failed the functional test (testing with canned smoke) for a reason that wouldn't have also failed a button test.
Canned smoke? Are you all too good to just light a rolling paper or some small piece of paper on fire to get a small amount of real smoke that won't leave a nasty residue?
My house hasn't had a smoke alarm in over 10 years. I bought one a few months ago and it's just been sitting in the project room. Because of this video I finally installed it. Thanks for the reminder.
Now it's time to check the battery!
"The half life of americium-241 is over 400 years, so the sensor could easily outlive you."
I like that you said 'could easily' instead of 'will definitely.' I admire your optimism.
That was the joke
While the half life being so great could mean a detector could be usable, effectively they become more sensitive with age.
My parents house has some fitted ones that are about 20 years old, and some quick number crunching shows it should still have about 95% of the americium, but it has became a lot more sensitive to cooking, making toast, etc...
So I wonder how long it'd actually be before the sample doesn't provide adequate current to the detector even without any smoke particles.
WTF, I scrolled down and was looking at your comment as Alec was saying this haha
@@luketerry8872 I think it is getting more sensitive due to contamination inside the alarm. Like bit of smoke particles and all on the walls of the chamber.
In the Bible, there are references about people who lived over 800 years. There are trees, turtles, and lobsters that are several hundred years old.
Do your future self a favor: when he says to pause the video and check your alarms, DO IT!
My dad was a firefighter, and he always talked about the importance of smoke alarms. I was pretty sure we had them all over the house. It's been a while since I checked on them, but I was sure we had at least 4 or 5. When I went to check them out, however, I was surprised to find that through years of re-decorating rooms, frantic battery hunts, and false alarms from the kitchen, most of them had disappeared. There are now only 2 working alarms in the whole house. I am now getting this problem resolved, but would never have even known about it had he not reminded me.
Thank you for helping to bring my fire safety up to scratch!
Indeed I recently installed smoke alarms in every room!
In most civilised countries virtually no one is installing smoke alarms in their houses and yet it is very rare for someone to die in a fire. I have no idea what is special about the USA, I can only suspect...
@@marcinpietrzak9358 Ehm, I'm from the Civilized world, namely The Netherlands, one of the most developed nations in the world and Smoke alarms are very very common.
You won't need it for 99,99% of your life, but it would be ultra sad if you would die in a house fire, when a simple cheap smoke alarm could've alarmed you and saved your life now wouldn't it...
Yep, test those suckers annually (or more), it only take a couple minutes.
My apartment building has detectors in each unit. We get the sensors tested every year (mandatory anyway). We recently discovered one owner had wrapped their sensor in tape as it was going off frequently while cooking.
Speculations: the owner is an idiot, or burns everything, or needs to clean their stove (inside and out)
It is possible an optical sensor would help, though I'd have to check to see what we've got installed to be sure. In MY case, I've had mine go off maybe twice in 8 years due to burning food. I use the hood fan over the stove when cooking anything that might make smoke (like when cooking meat) or generates a lot of steam (like boiling pasta). My understanding is that is what the hood exhaust is for (but gee whiz is mine loud).
My apartment has one single detector outside the bedroom door (mostly in the middle of the apartment). Which is probably the minimum spec for a 700sqft apartment built in 2003.
I dont even have any fire alarms in my house
You pronounced "Jaeger" (or Jäger, the "ae" is simply an alternative way to spell the "ä" character) pefectly by the way. As a native german speaker, I am simultaneously very impressed and not at all surprised that you got it spot on.
I think Attack on Titan fixed that issue for a lot of people. :)
@@Omniverse0jay-ger
Until very recently, I was an engineer at a smoke detector company, and your conclusion aligns with my experience lighting different materials on fire and cooking food to see how different smoke detector designs respond. A couple of other things to note:
1. There are a lot of comments from people complaining about nuisance alarms from steam in photoelectric detectors. Both types of smoke detectors are sensitive to steam. One thing that can make a big difference is the chamber design. Some smoke detectors are just better at keeping steam out while still letting smoke in.
2. The photoelectric chambers are designed to reflect some light back to the photodiode so that they can monitor that the LED is working. Over time, the "clean air" level rises as the chamber accumulates dust. Smoke detectors compensate for the changing clean air level so that their sensitivity stays the same.
3. Some companies have started including multiple light sources of different wavelengths or shining from different angles. That can make a big difference for smoke detectors to be able to differentiate from nuisance sources and actual smoke. One company made a version of a smoke detector where they just replaced the IR LED with a blue LED. That alone makes almost no difference and is pretty much pure marketing BS. What does make a difference is having multiple light sources and comparing their signal ratios with an algorithm to determine when to alarm.
Which ones, Alan? Brands/models?
Thanks for bringing this up. I love this channel, but I had hoped this would have addressed #1 more directly. Good to know that the design type wouldn't prevent the steam-based false alarms, and only repositioning or choosing a better chamber design would.
Why do you say the wavelength makes no difference? Surely it must affect the sensitivity to different sized particles, no? I was going to suggest a detector design with two different color LED's for exactly this reason.
@@ncdave4life I had a Kidde Duel detector (like the one in the video) that would detect me taking a shower 6 ft down the hall. I had to replace it. The First Alert duel detector (so far) has not given me any false alarms. (First Alert SA320CN Dual-Sensor Smoke and Fire Alarm)
@@susanyoung6579 Wavelength does make a difference, it's just that the difference is small enough that just replacing the IR LED with blue only makes it slightly more sensitive to smaller particles. You really need two light sources (blue and IR for example) so that you can compare the ratio between them to determine how sensitive the algorithm should be.
My grandmother still had in her home an ancient fire alarm that was a literal bell hit by a hammer driven by a wound spring. A piece of wax I believe held the hammer back unless the heat of a fire melted the wax.
Needless to say, more modern fire alarms have been installed for decades, but we kept those up also as curiosities. They looked quite nice.
That's pretty much how pressurized spriklers work. Those have a burst tube filled with an expanding liquid that will burst when heated and release a small disk that blocks the water when everything ist fine.
I have one! It has a wound up spring motor similar to an alarm clock. The motor is kept from turning by a piece of special wax. The problem with this kind of alarm is it requires an actual fire to heat the air. Photo alarm will catch the smoldering phase of the fire.
@@glasslinger Funny seeing you here
@@MrFrozenFrost poll n
I have 4 of these! You. Can also pop off the outer bit of the “sensor” and make them go off as I learned taking one down.
I'm retired from an Australian Govt research organisation. I was in the fire research area. We did full scale house burns and compared the detectors some decades ago. That and other lab testing showed how ineffective the ionization detectors are in most home fires which start with smoldering. They took tens of minutes to respond to typical fires, or not at all as you mentioned. The ionization types are gradually disappearing here but still specified in the UK for use in bedrooms!
It is now recommended to use a combination photoelectric and carbon monoxide detector. It is also worth mentioning that commercial smoke detectors are photoelectric.
The VESDA (very early smoke detection apparatus) systems were originally a flash tube (xenon) and later a laser type), and developed for use in computer / data centres or labs and so on. They have a pump that draws air into the detection chamber. The beam types you mentioned are also sed for tunnels etc to monitor car exhaust etc and operate jet or extraction fans.
Ionization for life!
CSIRO representing
Seen a million and three beam-type detectors installed in large indoor spaces here in the UK - shopping centres, office atriums etc...
@@intercity125 I was forgetting the same. Cheers
Those VESDA systems are incredibly sensitive. I used to work in a data center, and the smallest amount of particulate of any kind would set it off including steam. There was a microwave at one point in an adjacent area and it would trigger the VESDA all the time even though it wasn't actually in the same area. Kind of scary since we had to stop it before it flooded the whole DC with Halon.
I cant tell you how much I appreciated you saying what you did right up front about not setting them off.
11:27
I professionally install and service security and life safety in the US. For garages I do heat detectors. Smokes and carbon is pointless in a garage, but heats work great for fires in garages.
In the average american household I always recommend heats in kitchen and garages, then smokes and carbons on every floor (including basement). Some older houses have old wood or oil furnaces that can rarely emit puffs of smoke, so heats and CO in old systems is usually recommended to prevent false alarms.
Also watch out for smoke detectors outside of bathrooms (typically in the hallway outside of bathroom). Steam can cause plenty of false alarms.
This is why my brother had to use a sensor one where we have our smoke detector. Probably should have one other in the main living area of our small house. Parents when they lived in a similar house, they had to eventually replace the one they had a cheaper Ion type with a light sensor one.
Exactly why this video is so helpful, my second floor alarm went off during EVERY shower, the first floor one went off EVERY time I made toast or cooked, the basement one went off I guess becauae of the water heater/furnace.
I replaced them with photo electric and no problens since.
Alec is correect, I disconnected them years ago because I wasn't aware of the two types
I can understand for commercial garages, but I feel like having an alarm that sounds when there's car exhaust building up in a home garage is a good thing? You shouldn't be running the car indoors...
I used to do exactly what you do and came here to say exactly what you said. So I will just say I agree with this statement 🙂
@@renakunisaki that’d be a carbon monoxide alarm, which are required in every home here in California.
You start the video by letting us know that you're not going to set the alarm off. Us headphone users thank you!
In the next section you tell us to stop watching you to ensure that we:
1 - have detectors and 2 -test them.
Everyone should be thanking you!
Just a few more reasons I love this channel!
You can hurt your own ears. Alec didn't need to be responsible for it.
@@LakeNipissing I don't understand what you mean.
@@ZSchrink At the start of the video, Alec promised he would not make any alarms activate in the video... to quote you: "us headphone user thank you." But he told everyone to pause the video and do it themselves with their own smoke alarms.
@@LakeNipissing OOOOOOOHHHHHHH, now I understand what you mean 😁 thanks for clarifying, that went right over my head!
How loud is your audio set that the alarm would affect you?
Incidentally, the Nest Protect has dual photoelectric sensors with wavelengths at 880 nm and 450 nm to detect both types of fires. Seems like the perfect solution, except it doesn't meet Midwestern Frugality Regulations.
Trust me once you go Nest Protect sensors you can’t go back, well worth the money just based on the fact that you can silence a nuisance alarm with your phone. So no need to stand under it blowing air on it.
what's frugality?
@@NoNameAtAll2 not wanting to spend money unnecessarily. Nest alarms are not cheap, and unless you are in the know, they seem like a frivolous luxury compared to the $10-$20 one off the shelf at the hardware store
smoke alarm collectors used to rage about the nest protect voice being different
Those are $$$$$ as hell and use up WiFi
The prologue, intro, whatever, made me tear up. The obvious care and respect. What a professional. You are so appreciated.
The one weakness I’ve seen from photoelectric is false alarms from shower steam. Happened to me in an apartment that had its placement just outside the bathroom in the hall. The bathroom’s vent fan wasn’t able to overcome the steam output and it’d end up going off every single time if I didn’t aim a stand fan directly at the detector to prevent steam from reaching it.
And vaping
(yeah, i know....) lol
Gotcha. So, ionizing in bathrooms, photoelectric in kitchens.
My childhood home had an old ionization alarm on the wall just outside the bathroom that I took showers in. That ionization alarm, later in its life, started giving false alarms when the door was opened and the steam was allowed to hit it. So I think steam can affect ionization alarms as well as photoelectric, at least over time.
@@01100101011100100111 Much like how dust getting into a photoelectric alarm can gunk it up. It just takes much longer for an ion alarm to give false alarms from steam than it does for a photoelectric one to do.
just put a latex glove over it
I have been designing and maintaining commercial fire detection systems for over 40 years. Your video is one of the best explanations of this subject I have ever seen. When I started, ionization was the norm. Currently, ionization is not used in commercial applications except for very explicit situations where smokeless and fast fires are anticipated. Very rare situations. I personally have not seen ionization sensors installed commercially in the last two decades. A note, the size of the particle is not really what affects the ionization sensor, it is hot particles of combustion. The best way to explain what an ionization detector is looking for is ask people if they know that smell when they fire up their furnace for the first time in the fall. That nose tingling smell of the dust burning off from the furnace. That is exactly what an ionization sensor is looking for., what we call Hot Smoke. An ionization “smells” particles of combustion, a photoelectric “sees” particles of combustion. Thank you for doing your research.
What do you think of dual sensors needing two detections?
I used to work in the field. In Germany, ionizing detectors have been banned for many years. We actually mostly use hybrid detectors (optical/thermal) that also measure the temperature and can thus also detect fires that produce no smoke at all. Not sure how fast the thermal part is tbh.
The installation of blue LEDs in optical detectors has also made it possible to detect much smaller particles. At least in products in the professional area, no idea if there are those for the home.
I worked in a place with an office in a remote part of the building with poor heat. In winter (-30C here), the room would get cool. Open the door to get something, and the inrush of 20+C air hitting the comfortably cool sensor would trigger an alarm. We speculated the thermal sensor was triggering on a (sudden) rise and not an absolute temperature threshold.
@@eh42 Condensation is a more probable reason for the triggering. When the hot air get into the cold device it will condensate and the small drops will reflect light. Had a similar problem when using the oven for cooking. The damp air triggered the alarm every time so I had to move it to a corner that was not in the path for a hot air.
@@bknesheim Sorry, wasn't clear. That would make sense for a combination heat/smoke detector. But the detector was just heat.
@@eh42 That's possible. Thermal detectors can operate on 2 different protocols. Rate of Rise, or Fixed temperature.
You forgot the obligatory "StRiCtLy fOrBiDdEn iN gErMaNy" line that every German content on UA-cam has.
I just want to say thanks for the very first sentence. So many youtube creators seem to rely on yelling and sudden loud noises to keep attention, or inject drama, or for comedy. That's fine. I don't expect the world to change to my preferences. It's just not my cup of tea to get a sudden adrenaline dump and a day of arrhythmia.
Right after I clicked this video, in the second while it loaded, I thought, "Oh no, it's gonna have loud alarms." And I hovered my mouse pointer over the back button.
It's like you read my mind, man. That's very considerate of you.
When I was growing up, we had like three of those mechanical, clay tab activated fire alarms. They were by no means smoke detectors, but they were loud and built really well. Years after they came to our home, and were forgotten about, the one in the garage had it's clay tab finally fail. You are supposed to replace those clay tabs yearly I believe. And the whole house was instantly drowned in the loudest dinging you can imagine. It was in an uninsulated garage meaning the neighbors heard it too. Needless to say the fire department showed up because someone called about the alarm. Since we didn't have any of the replacement tabs, it kept going off. The pin that activates the wind up spring mechanism was like 100 lbs and you needed a key tool to get the tab on. Tool also wound the spring and would stop the mechanism from rotating, stopping the noise. It was actually fairly complicated. Anyway, we ended up just leaving the key in it, taking it out every once in a while. We made a box stuffed with pillows, and would let it run in that. It didn't make it silent, but the neighbors couldn't hear it. One day the spring finally ran out... Moral, if you are going to buy industrial fire alarms from a traveling sales person, make sure to get some replacement parts up front.
hammer would have worked. :D
Holy cow that's hilarious haha
Cool story bro.
I assume that if a fire started under it the clay tablet would melt and trigger it? Would it be an antique for being so old, I would like to see how it works
@@samuelfellows6923 guess that means it’s a heat alarm rather than a smoke alarm :)
I've been a fire alarm engineer for 19 years, you did a great job explaining the differences between the two technologies.
I don't know about elsewhere, but here in the UK, the only place you see ionisation detectors these days is in domestic smoke detectors (the ones you show here that are connected to the mains)
Most of the commercial fire alarm manufacturers that make the equipment for commercial/industrial/education/hospitals etc moved away from the detectors before I even started.
The ONE place you would have seen them still used would have been in server rooms or other areas with an automatic fire suppression system, where they would have been mixed with optical detectors. The one thing you missed is that because of their ability to pick up fast burning fires early, they are very good at detecting electrical fires. The automatic suppression systems require 2 detectors to release the gas/foam, so the mixture of different technologies means that any kind of fire will trigger enough detectors in as fast a time as possible (there are always a minimum of 4 detectors even in the smallest room that is protected by a suppression system)
However, even that is moving on with the times and many companies simply don't make ionisation detectors anymore. They can't simply be thrown out, they need to be disposed of by a registered company because they're radioactive. The minor benefits simply don't outweigh the drawbacks anymore.
Exactly the same on the US.
One other way to release the foam is to get Jeff Goldblum to say "Release the foam."
One type of fire detector I have seen in industrial settings but not in residential are what was described to me as "rate of rise" detectors, which (IIRC) detect how fast the temperature is rising and/or if the temperature rises to a certain level.
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Looking them up, the two are different technologies sometimes combined in one protection scheme. Rate of rise being one technology, and fixed temperature detectors.
And apparently they are slower to respond than smoke detectors, so are used for the protection of property, not people.
@@MonkeyJedi99 exactly. My alarm company installed them in my house and I found out they will activate when the temperature is 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the room it is in. Well, darn, by that time that means the sofa and other items are in flames and who knows what else is in flames where I may only be able to exit the house by jumping out of a window. So i went to wallyword and installed smoke detectors in every bedroom and hallway. Of course, the one near the kitchen goes off if someone is burning toast or didn’t turn in the hood vent over the stove. Having careless and clueless teenagers in the house, I’ll keep the smoke detectors. Guess I’ll go out and by a few of what Alec talks about in this video. I imagine guests in my home who notice three different devices on my ceilings will assume my children are pyromaniacs. Oh well.
There’s no good reason to worry about disposing the tiny amount of americium via the normal method. The rules were made by idiots. Cat litter is more radioactive than your smoke detector.
Thanks for explaining this! I once had a kitchen full of smoke go completely undetected by an ionization alarm. Afterwards I tested the alarm with a piece of burning paper and it worked fine. It's nice to finally understand the difference between these alarm types.
When you talked about how frequent false alarms will often lead to people disabling or taking down their fire alarms, my partner and I definitely looked at each other bashfully.
Thank you for this. Replacing our kitchen ionisation fire alarm with a photoelectric tomorrow, I think.
I thought I'd mention that there's another type of alarm called a "Heat Detector". These aren't meant to replace smoke alarms, but to work alongside them. They are also suitable to use in garages since they aren't affected by dust, fumes or changes in humidity. There are two types: fixed temperature or rate-of-rise. A fixed temperature heat detector gets triggered at a specific temperature (usually around 60°C). The rate-of-rise type gets triggered when it detects a rapid rise in temperature (usually about 8°C per minute).
Heat detectors only detect active fires. They are more for property protection vs life safety, although if they gave you a heads up on your attached garage being on fire, it might help with that as well.
@@timfischer Yes, that's exactly the reason why I said they AREN'T intended to replace smoke alarms, but to work in conjunction with them....especially since they are the only cost-effective/feasible option that will work in garages. It's better to have something that detects active flames in your garage as opposed to nothing at all.
These are commonly used in Condo/Apartment buildings, at least in Canada. My understanding is that the heat alarm also triggers the building alarm to get everyone out immediately.
Much more inrestingly in the theater world we have multi alarms, because we use haze an smoke effects, commonly we'll have an alarm that has heat rise, monoxide and a photo electric detector and if two trigger of the three it alarms. We do also have silent alarms to manually reset if we use pyrotechnics so we don't need to switch the off during the performance. We do also have code names where we ask for certain people to alert the crew to fires before the performance. every so often the stage curtains catch alight and the tech crew come in and throw sand on it, because fire extinguisher stain.
They're more appropriate for areas like kitchens because obviously there's smoke and steam present, and (usually) people aren't asleep in there, not requiring an alert before flames are present.
This has to be one of the most mindful homeowner that has ever existed.
Another thought-provoking episode. Thank you.
I have a feeling there isn't a more efficiently setup or safe home within hundred of miles of this man. 🤣
All I hope is that the automotive industry never uses Americium in its red turning signals.
I'm an electrician with a fire alarm certificate, and we were taught one reason for not frequently testing smoke alarms with simulated smoke: it can degrade the device's sensitivity by leaving nearly negligible deposits on the important bits in the chamber. When a monthly is done, only one per zone gets tested that way, and they go through a rotation.
Yes, the smoke simulating spray can leave deposits on the detector. This because the aerosol product is not fine particle "dry smoke."
Here's a simple analogy, it's 2022. Countless people use a vape device in their car. Have any of you noticed the fogging of the interior of the windshield? You betcha, that's the oil from the vape.
Ionization detectors have the advantage of seeing vapors that are not as visible optically. If you have a fire that is burning bright and clean, notice how little visible smoke there is. This initial fire has to heat the surroundings to the point where they emit visible smoke. There is a third class of detectors, that are descendants of the mining industry, and chemical industry. Devices that sniff for hazardous gases or combustion products. One of these is familiar, carbon monoxide. Homes now have these as required safety equipment.
Required in Europe where CO2 refrigeration is commonplace, CO2 detectors are required, as a refrigeration leak can asphyxiate people in the building.
Here in Australia our building tests every alarm in the block. That’s weird
@@robertborchert932 Seems like a CO detector and optical smoke detector make a nice pair. The sorts of 'clean' fires which might happen domestically tend to put out (and often kill with) CO.
I think those are the current requirements for California and probably a lot of other places.
@@travcollier yes! A clean fire, one that does not necessarily produce particulates, is quite deadly. It raises heat, is not detected, and once flashover ensues, it is too late.
I have monitored evolutions with proper instrumentation, and I saw CO levels rise impressively. This is why I really agree that more sensors is a good thing.
Care to guess how many areas in residences are protected by thermal sensors? Easy answer.
I know just how fast a fire can evolve, and how long it takes from detection to response. Seconds count, lives count.
I've been on the response more times than I could count. This is why I trained my crew differently. I trained to deploy for the possibilities, and attack based upon the situation found. I had standard operating procedures to train for, but I encouraged "playing" with the equipment. You always revert to your training when the rubber hits the road.
Well how much can it degrade by. It can't possibly affect it that much.
13:11 "Many" is a bit of an understatement. The *vast majority* of fire-related tragedies (60-80% according to the NIH) are not from the flames, but from smoke inhalation.
There is a third technology of fire detectors: Heat sensors. They are a perfect solution for the kitchen. They maybe do not detect a smoldering early fire, but once the heat at the ceiling reaches 60°C it goes off. Considering that many sources of electrical house fires are in the kitchen, it is a good investment that can give you a few extra minutes before a smoke detector in another room notices the fire.
Wow that is a great addition! I hadn't thought about it but that makes a lot of sense 👌
There's actually 2 types of heat sensor detectors, so you have to make sure you get the correct one. One is a temperature cutoff detector, the other is a "change of temperature" detection which is horrible for the kitchen.
Retired Home and Commercial fire system tech here, we always put Heat sensors in or near kitchens for this exact reason. We also used them in attics were gas heating was used and in garages with a living space above them . Though this is not code in my area I set it as a company policy, in the mid 2000's Ford had the Cruise Control Switch Recall and it kill several people when the vehicles went up flames in their garages and they had their bedrooms over the garage.
Also I made it company policy that CO sensors were to be installed at the point of generation. I had read years ago that a family died when the alarm finally went off and they ran out their rooms to a house filled with CO. The sensor was all the way across the house from the gas hot water in the utility room and the sensor was just outside the master bedroom door.
There is also photoelectric and heat combination. Where it looks for a temp gradient and smoke particles. Not sure if there is much domestic stuff like that but in commercial it's common to have heat and photoelectric. Heat detectors don't nuisance alarm. Technically a heat alarm is not smoke detection.
I came here to say exactly that. Thanks 🙏👍
"Now I can hear you asking, 'Why not both'?"
I've never been more terrified of someone preemptively knowing what I was thinking, the second I was thinking it. What a good video.
I had the same experience when I thought I figured out why smoke detectors should be replaced every 10 years (because the radioactive stuff would be depleted of course!)
Immediately after that thought he explains why this is not the reason.
I love this channel so much!
Yeah.. but I thought about having one ionization detector in the place where it's least likely to trip a false alarm and fitting out the rest of the spots with the photo-electric ones.
@@Der_Thrombozyt Yes, this seems to be the right answer, and the approach I've taken.
Same here. Many times I'll think he missed a point, then, sure enough, covers it! I just say: YES!
Great minds think alike 😎👍
This is undoubtedly the best youtube channel where a guy sits and talks in front of a camera. The cadence is perfect, keeps things moving without being too fast to keep up,and the edits are not at all distracting and never feel superfluous. 10/10
Before I get started watching this UA-cam video from 2 years ago, thank you for putting that at the beginning
There is a third option: Alarm sensors that detect heat above a programmed level. These type of sensor can be used in kitchen areas. I would recommend installation of a smoke alarm about 20 inch from the wall, and away from electrical sources.
They also would be good for a garage.
there is a fourth option: Alarm sensors that react to the radiation of a burning fire.
@@tretronthedragon There is a fifth option Dogs!
@@RolandoMarreroPR Why not all of the options?
Yup, these are commonly used in garages.
Depending on where you live, you may not be allowed to use these indoors in place of a smoke alarm. Look up your codes if you plan on doing this.
I'd like to preface this comment by stating that my experience and knowledge comes from previously being a Firefighter for QFRS/QFES in Australia.
Now with that out of the way, it makes me extremely happy to see one of my favourite channels tackle the interesting subject of fire safety.
Here in Australia (at least in Queensland), we have been rolling out LEGAL requirements for ALL homes to be fitted with a minimum required number of alarms, they MUST be of a photoelectric type, hardwired and interconnected. Their recommended/required positions on walls and ceilings relative to things like fans, lights, exposed beams are also outlined.
The reason this has happened is we had a number of house fires where large families were lost due to ineffective, inoperable or just plain non-existent smoke alarms.
I am unable to provide you with hard stats on how many fires bypass the incipient (smouldering) stage and go directly to active, however, every structural fire I responded to during my tenure had an incipient stage where either occupants or neighbours were alerted by smoke alarms or smoke itself.
Unfortunately, due to "modern" manufacturing and heavy use of synthetics in homes, the time it takes for a home to go from an incipient stage to fully involved (smouldering to the whole house on fire) has dramatically decreased. Back in the 80s/90s, it was normal for a house to take 30 minutes to reach fully involved. The average time now? Around 4 minutes.
So when you say seconds matter, I cannot stress enough how correct you are, and that specific point must be stressed. If even a single 3-seater couch/sofa/lounge in your home is alight, it carries enough thermal energy itself to burn your entire house down and it will progress VERY quickly. If there's a fire, save yourself and your loved ones and GET OUT FAST. Have a plan in place.
Those laws are in place now, but they are not retrospective. They only apply for new builds and new installs for rentals, IIRC, and if your landlord replaces one smoke alarm there is no requirement to interconnect to existing alarms. Sadly there will be a long tail of house fires where occupants have obsolete smoke alarms but at least it is a start.
Oh my god you have solved an old puzzle I've had rolling around my head for almost a decade now!
Years ago my apartment burned down. Not my fault, my neighbor was stupid. But anyways, it happened during the night and I woke up to someone banging on the door to warn me of the fire. When I woke up I saw the room was filled with smoke. I quickly got out but while I watched the building burn down I thought it was odd that the smoke alarms had never gone off. Especially considering that the damn things would go off pretty much every time I cooked on the stove.
I told many people this story and could never explain why. At one point I wondered if I had imagined it. But now I know it was true and why it happened!
I currently live in a house and have had issues with my smoke alarm above my stove going off. I figured it was just something I had deal with for the sake of having smoke alarms, but now I know that I need to replace all ionization alarms around the kitchen. For some reason I have about half of each in the house.
Thanks again!
Put one of each in bedrooms. That way you are covered for sleeping areas. I have
I can't help but wonder how many people you may have saved with this video. I have been avoiding replacing my alarms because of the nuisance beeps. It's only having watched this that I realize how long its actually been since I unhooked them. I'll be going out in the morning to buy the photoelectric style and hooking them up right away. I don't think I'm all that unusual in my attitude about them which brings me back to the original question. How many people like me are going to watch this and learn how easy it is to solve the false alarm hassle. I don't know for sure but this is one subscriber you did get through to. Thanks.
Just wanted to say I really appreciated the statement up front that you're not going to be including any alarms being triggered in this video. As someone with sensory sensitivities, it really put me at ease that I didn't have to worry about a sudden loud noise.
Agreed! I'm prone to sensory over-stimulation _(especially piercing sounds),_ and on the tail-end of recovering from c-ptsd*.
Little warnings or statements about sudden loud noises make life so much more bearable.
Its nice, knowing all my sirens won't be screaming. xD
* _Fun fact:_ feeling relaxed and safe _can be triggers for panic attacks. Those are a real curve ball of the mind._
As someone with sensory issues, and chronic migraines, knowing this video wasn't going to trigger a sudden migraine was a huge relief. Sometimes loud ads will do it still but this video had no midrolls thankfully.
*73 adult-babies liked Aaron Bower's comment + counting* "sensory sensitivities" *=translation=* "adult-babies"
*y'all need to grow some balls you’d be useless if WW3 happens* 🤣
As someone without those sensitivities, I was still put at ease, and still appreciated it. The noise from those things (both in volume and just the sound) is god-awful.
I also really appreciated that, thank you! I don't mind it but my dog has panic attacks at alarm sounds so it's useful to know I don't need to carefully manage how I watch the video with her in the room.
I just want to say how impressed I am by your videos -- especially by how well they hold my attention. I generally click on them "just to check it out" (fully expecting to switch to something "more interesting" within two or three minutes) but then I end up watching the whole thing (and even replaying parts to make sure I caught everything).
I don't quite get how you manage this, but please keep it up -- your videos are well worth the time.
Oh my goodness! I appreciate this video soooooo much! We have an alarm in our kitchen that goes off when our oven is on, when our toaster oven is on, and sometimes when the stove is on. It drives me nuts. Plus our hallway alarm goes off if too much steam comes out of the bathroom. I am now pretty sure I know which alarm we have and can replace them. Hallelujah!
20 years ago I bought a wireless home alarm integratred smoke alarm that worked fine when pressing the test button. But I got the idea to test if it detected smoke or fire, and it didn't. I got it replaced at the store, and the replacement was just as bad. I really went overboard and charred it before returning it to the store. So yeah, good advice to test for smoke, the test button just tests the battery.
Wow... just wow...
Returning the thing charred though is pretty funny and makes one heck of a point!
@@WouldntULikeToKnow. Oh yeah, let's weld a pair of wires on the thing and plug it on a 220V outlet to test its performance :-D
Eh, no. The test button creates internal conditions that should start an alarm condition. For residential smoke alarms, it is also usually the only way of testing consistent with the UL listing. Your alarm just sucked.
There's so many terrible ones that I can't tell what to buy
I have a rather interesting anecdote regarding the "across-the-room laser" type smoke detectors. I learned about their existence relatively recently in a maker space on my university campus when my rocketry team was doing a test-fitting of our newest L2 rocket. As we rose it up vertically, the nose broke the beam and triggered the alarm, resulting in us having to explain what happened to campus security and the fire department. Not exactly the best way to kick off launch day...
I learned about them in college when planning a large event in our campus theater. The event management & planning team informed us that no guests could bring anything that becomes airborne (like balloons) since it would trigger the fire alarms.
I hate beam detectors for this very reason, though many of the newer ones understand that a sudden blockage is a trouble, not an alarm
It would be a pretty easy fix to install the laser line of sight somewhere where it’s virtually impossible to impede the beam. Across a structural beam, for example, or right above hanging light fixtures.
@@davidconner-shover51 Yeah it's also evidence for why these types of sensor (or any critical sensor really) should also never be used alone, both as a system and also in a numerical sense that one sensor doesn't give a good picture. Smoke will fill a room roughly evenly given time. If one or two sensors report a zero reading suddenly, that's a blockage. If a cluster reports flickering and then maybe total blockage, that's probably a fire.
I once was ripping out the ceiling at the place I worked at the time. There were cables everywhere and most were not needed anymore. This made it a nice job to get some agression out, as it was mainly just pulling cables like there was no tomorrow, cutting things up and just throwing stuff around you'd usually had to be carefull with.
Some of th cables had gotten tangled up with wires leading to the smoke detectors, so badly that the only way to get the ceiling out was by removing the detector first. But yeah... removing a smoke detector in a commercial building...
I asked my chief about it, who was being honest by saying he didn't know if it could be removed or not.
I said I would walk down to the reception to notify them I was about to remove a smoke detector, which could lead to an alarm.
The director of the building overheard me saying this and said I didn't have to worry. He was very tall and could reach up to the ceiling easily, where I had to use a small ladder. 'Ofcourse you can remove it.' He grabbed the detector, turned it 45 degrees clockwise to detach it from it's base and put it on the table and continued his conversation with a few co-workers. I didn't say anything, turned around and only thought like 'yeah right...'
I had just got back up on my ladder when the door to the department flew open. 'Did you guys hit a cable or something?' It was the receptionist lady who was already on the phone with the fire department as her panel had suddenly reported an alarm. I only pointed to the director...
You had a dryer vented into your hallway? Don't do that. A dryer must be vented outside. Period. The lint dust can cause white lung disease like people who worked in cotton mills would get. I live in Ottawa, Canada, a climate similar to yours in Illinois. It's really tempting to want to save that warmth and humidity to make your indoor air better, but you will never filter out the finest lint particles enough. Also, you will slam your home with humidity and end up with condensation everywhere, possibly causing mold and other issues. Find a way to vent the dryer outside even if it means hanging the (metal, not vinyl!) dryer duct outside the window. Vinyl ducts are for bathroom fans only. Dryers do occasionally catch fire (ever forgotten a Bic lighter in your workpants?) and metal ducting is not going to ignite, while the vinyl will.
Good advice!
Except for ventless dryers that capture that lint.
@@szurketaltos2693kinda self explanatory that the ventless dryer doesn’t need a vent…
@@tanner4280 was adding in case someone reading OP didn't know, chill
Wtf are you talking about. He didn’t have a dryer vent in the hallway
I just love your videos, you seem to be such a chill, clever and sensitive (thanks for not having any alarms in the video) guy. Thanks for your content and keep up the good work.
Awesome video, with just a couple of notes...
I work for an Alarm Monitoring Company, and those photo-electric smoke detectors are great... so long as they are maintained. Those chambers do need to be cleaned at least once a year, otherwise, they start to accumulate dust bunnies that can make them more or less sensitive. In fact, most of the commercial level sensors have two photo sensors, as you mentioned, and if the line-of-sight detector is blocked, the sensor will send a "Maintenance Alert" to remind you to remind the customer to clean the chamber, or have a technician dispatched to do the same. This is especially true in humid environments like the PNW. The second thing is don't put a photo-electric smoke detector anywhere near a bathroom. Steam from showers and baths are our number 2 cause of false alarms. Even with a fan running, the steam will leak into the hallway, set off the alarm, then because the person is the only one home and in the shower, they can't hear the alarm nor the calls to contact them, and they only know it is an issue when the fire department shows up.
If you can't hear a modern smoke alarm in the shower, you may need a hearing aid..
Bullshit, there is no way in the nine hells that a shower could cover up the infernal screeching of a smoke alarm.
@@Monkeh616 I mean, I assume one would take out their hearing aid while showering.
that explains our smoke detector in our last apartment. I'd have to pull it down every single time I took a shower otherwise it would go off constantly. I wish there was a "disable for 30 minutes" button so I wouldn't have to be in danger of forgetting the hang the thing back up.
@@Ivy_Panda That's fair, but still - you have to be really deaf not to hear these things, they can wake the dead.
That PSA at the beginning... is exactly why I love your channel. You do a lot to make sure everyone is going to be entertained and maybe learn something rather than annoyed.
As someone who is very sensitive to noises and by extension of that has anxiety over fire alarm sounds, that warning at the start made the difference of whether I was going to continue watching. I'm so glad I did because guess who doesn't have to worry about nuisance alarms as much!!!
genuinely agreed; i said "thank you" out loud to an empty room just knowing that i wouldn't have to ride the mute button to prevent my dog from panicking
I designed several smoke detectors back in the 80's . Various familiar brand names. Also designed calibrated smoke boxes for UL testing. I'd say you did a good job explaining things. Ionization for hot fires, photoelectric for cold fires. We experimented with alternate ionization sources too, besides americium. Not sure if they ever made it into the marketplace. I'll have to check out some of your other videos. This one is really good on facts and low on hype! A great combination. thanks.
Which would you use?
Great video.
I am a Fire Protection Engineer and have been working in the area for over 10 years. Your video is great and very well presented. Only note I would give is that every type of detector in the market now has their pros and cons, as well as recommended uses. As you mentioned, large halls use beam sensors because other types wouldn't be as effective. When dealing with business, industry and large venues the owners of the place hire people like me to analyze their sites and come up with the correct type of sensor, their installation requirements and settings. But it would be impossible to do that for the regular home. Therefore, some "general guidelines" have to be set. They're not ideal but are good enough for most places. Both ionic and photoelectric detectors are a good option for the home but small diferences in placement may have one be better than the other. In your specific case, the location of the detector and the use you have for the place seem to be better suited for the photoelectric but maybe, if you moved the installation point just a bit the ionic would've been just fine.
Do not dismiss the ionic altogether cause there are places where it is a better solution.
Anyway, just pointing out cause it seemed a bit harsh on the ionic technology.
Again, great video otherwise.
I feel like the high sensitivity of ionization based detectors seems great for locations where you can't have any fire at all and false positives are less of an issue than false negatives.
What do you know about dual sensors? Need both to trigger alarm like he said?
@@Carl-b9t some do, some don't. It all depends on which you get. As an example, search XP95A detector from Apollo. On the datasheet you'll se it can be programed for single or dual sensor activation.
As a seafarer, I get a lot of fire fighting training. I also am a volunteer fire fighter when I’m home. That being said, an old fire chief I’d trained with once told me that he has a detector WITH A STROBE over every bed in the house and in the usual places as most of the fatalities he’d seen were in bedroom fires, (pillows on heaters etc…). You can sleep through a hallway alarm, but a bright flashing light directly over your head, as well as a loud alarm will wake you up.
Some people might sleep through an alarm, but i wake up on my way out of the bed room door when the alarm goes off, in my basement hallway (false alarm, they are all connected, but the one that senses fire would beep 30 seconds before all others went off so you could faster locate it). When it comes to fire alarms it probably triggers a survival instinct or something.. Its pretty crazy..
The flashing smoke alarm is a common staple in deaf/hard of hearing households, but it's also good idea that I worry gets overlooked for people with hearing loss/hearing aids (if you take them out to sleep) or those who sleep with white noise machines, television/radio/etc or headphones (especially noise canceling).
@@bsidethebox Definitely teenagers. I swear, they sleep like the dead. Strobe lights it is! Glad I saw these comments.
I’ve slept through a general alarm, embarrassingly.
Up here in Canada, it's part of our fire code that a smoke detector equipped with a strobe and an auditable alarm of at least 80 dB must be mounted within a bedroom so that the detector is never more than 10 feet from anywhere in the room and is unobstructed by any permanently installed fixtures (aka the closet isnt an acceptable mounting location, even if it meets all other criteria). If your bedroom is larger than 20 feet by 20 feet (the maximum size of room for one center mounted detector), multiple detectors may be used, though they're hardly necessary as bedrooms are hardly ever that big.
Same idea - no walls, close proximity, a bright light, and a very loud alarm would ensure that even the heaviest of sleepers will wake up if the alarm sounds.
THANK YOU! You might have just saved my life!
Out of 5 smoke alarms in my home only 2 are operational. One had no battery, one had a mangled contact and therefore no power as well and the third one had a broken beeper that only crunched, but didn't scream. This was fucking scary, but very worthwhile the two minutes I spent.
Again, thank you!
March 29, 2022 - *_Brampton house fire leaves five dead, including three children_*
_Fire officials are urging residents to check their smoke detectors after a blaze tore through a Brampton home on Monday morning, killing three young children and their parents._
_“Fire spreads so fast in our houses nowadays with the construction that we have and the plastics that are in there, so the smoke is so thick and black (as a result),” he said. “If you don't have a working smoke alarm, unfortunately we are going to see more tragedies like over my shoulder. We need to get serious. We need to be serious about smoke alarms.”_
I've got a story about the laser beam smoke detectors. This one involves Argonne national laboratory, in illinois. Apparently they had some sort of large atrium space in one of their buildings, and some of the people who worked there found out that it had a laser smoke detector in it after they threw paper airplanes through the open space and one of them interrupted the beam and set it off.
Oh my !
@@tanya5322 busted 😂
At least it hopefully didn't activate the sprinklers.
if that's true then it was setup wrong. it requires more than a momentary interruption.
same thing happened with balloons at my high school. lol
Beam smoke detectors are pretty common for atrium spaces. Usually infrared light. My company uses an Xtralis/Vesda product called an OSID that has a black and white infrared camera, and special calibrated emitters. When the signal from the emitters decreases, you get an alarm. Balloons definitely can set them off.
This video probably will save lives, if people were paying attention. Thank you.
I had both kinds installed in my home, but they stopped working recently ten years after I put them up. I now have replaced them with just a photoelectric detector.
A photoelectric alarm probably would’ve woken me up much earlier for the smoldering insulation in the walls that led to a fire. Similarly, it would also reduce false alarms from my stove and heater in my camper van. I think I’ll be switching out, now that I know there’s a difference. Thanks for this!
The building next to the oney condo is in the unit on the far side caught fire a few years ago.
Truly appreciate the first 5 seconds of the video. I was able to take my headphones off knowing my dog won't be set off in the middle of the video (he has massive panic attacks when he hears the alarm beeping)
Absolutely, we all know what they sound like anyway! And I can't even imagine what that high pitched sound is like for a poor doggo 😢.
My dog too. I determined this was caused by the cook in our house not attending to shutting off timers right away and allowing them to beep for minutes. Maddening!
My mom's dogs don't want to come into the house for about three days whenever I change the batteries and it goes through its required self-test
Hmm, gave me an idea. Imma train my doggos to run outside when they hear the smoke alarm.
@@ChemEDan That's... actually a good idea, although false alarms might provide an issue.
In all honesty: You pronounced "Jäger" / "Jaeger" almost perfectly. Either I am too tired atm (a valid excuse in case of mushy brain) or, besides a slight tinge of accent mixed in, it did sound absolutely fine.
Funfact: His pronunciation of Jäger was much closer to German than his pronunciation of Walther. :D
I use several HEPA air cleaners to clean the air in my home. This can delay or prevent smoke alarms from going off. You need smoke detectors in every room if you use air cleaners.
I’ve put off watching this for a week until I had a time with headphones in just in case alarms go off so the dogs wouldn’t be bothered, and the first line of the video is “I won’t be setting off alarms”. I should have known better. You are one of the most considerate channels on the platform.
Back in 1976-77, when i was installing "commercial" alarm systems, the preferred "Smoke Detector" used BOTH an ionization-chamber-type detector, adjusted to avoid false alarming, AND a photo-sensor-type chamber. Since there's plenty of space for both chambers in one unit, those were the ONLY kind the 2 different companies I'd worked for used, (as well as my own personal preference in my home).
Pretty much the only type of commercial ionization detector you see nowdays is one where it's not the _only_ sensor in the detector; for instance the "IHPS " from Edwards' Signature-series: it has photoelectric, ionization, & thermal sensors in one unit, allowing for better recognition of any kind of fire. Other than that the commercial side of the industry has pretty much completely abandoned ionization unlike the residential side.
I have the combo type alarms throughout my home. I can attest that at least the "First Alert" brand will trigger on whichever sensor responds first. I have one a bit too close to my kitchen. It won't go off if I make toast, but once the oven gets going, it generally scares the crap out of me. It does have the benefit of being able to be silenced by pointing any IR remote, such as for your TV at it.
Yea first alert does it, their entire brand name is based on that fact lmao. It's good they are a popular one in stores as well. If there really are ones that wait for BOTH to detect they are absolute trash
The idea of being able to turn off the alarm with any IR remote is interesting
that seems a bit sketch given that fire generally emits a lot of, ya know... flickering IR light?
@@Muonium1 But not in any pattern.
Remotes emit a code. Don't need to know what the code is to be able to tell it from noise.
@@Birdman3131 I'm aware, but if the detector is designed to turn off with the detection of ANY code from ANY IR remote, that's a lot of codes and the likelihood of a random flashing IR signal slightly matching one of them is then much higher. Look at the video 'faking a tv remote control with paper and a lighter'.
A few years ago i moved into a new house. The realtor actually brought this subject to my attention. She even used the correct terminology when she suggested that i swap all the ionization based alarms for photosensitive based alarms. That became the first project on the honey-do list! At the time, i didn’t think it was a big deal but wanted to error on the side of caution. I’m glad i did!
Was curious to see what the Nest Protect smoke alarms utilize and they're apparently a new generation of photoelectric with 2 different wavelengths to detect both small and large smoke particles. No mention of any americium.
Supposedly this complies with UL 217 v8 which does away with either ionization and/or photoelectric requirements and instead presents multiple-criteria that sensors need to achieve.
Thank you i was just about to look up a nest detector after watching this video and was wondering this!
Sounds like you actually want the opposite of his vids recommendation
Sounds like nest uses computer algorithms to help eliminate false alarms. Photoelectric also produce false alarms from steam and near bathroom so nest seeks to give accurate alarms.
Thanks for covering this. I've been a fire alarm technician (both in England and Canada) for the last 40 years. It's an important subject. Not enough people know that the test button on a smoke alarm does not prove functionality.
They are required to be replaced every 10 years by code.
A couple of tips. Every six months clean the smoke alarm. Vacuum the unit and wipe down the vents.
When you have interconnected smoke alarms make sure they are the same manufacturer. In the past, the interconnect voltage could differ between products and lead to issues.
If your smoke alarms are connected to other equipment (a sprinkler for instance) and they require replacement, contact a professional. There will be a module that may not be compatible with your new units.
Well, while to me it is rather common sense that button cannot be worth actual smoke in testing, I was actually surprised when I once learned about technical implementations (ie. read datasheets of common smoke alarm ICs and other application information), how sophisticated the testing functionality is, actually doing kind of manipulative test on the sensor chamber. As I had thought before that it just gives a direct feed for buzzer, ie. testing just the buzzer.
Another interesting surprise was that while the cheap models don't usually have interconnection nor hush button features, they are actually often built around very same generic smoke alarm ICs than the more expensive models, and the IC actually has those functionalities. Ie. only connector, button, and maybe some series resistors are left out from cheap models. Often, the models containing those features cost ten times more, which is quite a profit from a few cents of added components.
Thank you so much for making this. I used to be a firefighter, and one of the hardest fires I had was when a space heater cord melted and caught the carpet on fire. It smoldering for a long time, causing so much smoke they occupants succumbed to smoke inhalation. Their ionizing smoke detectors never went off, not once. I've been telling everyone I know about the two types, and urging peoe to replace their old ones with newer ones.
Back when I was a kid we lived on the second floor of a 2 building in Brooklyn.The way the heating system was set up our apartment was very cold in the winter so we often relied on an old electric heater. Being it was an old building with few outlets we used an extension cord on the heater (I know... bad bad idea). Anyway one cold night we plugged the heater in and went to the living room to watch TV while the bedroom warmed up a bit. After about a half hour my folks sent me to bed and as I walked to my bedroom and passed the heater I noticed the plug, which plugged into the extension cord, was smoking like crazy. It was blowing off a lot of smoke and the air was filled with the stench of burning rubber. Even as a little child I knew this was very bad and I grabbed the extension cord and yanked it out of the wall, effectively killing power to the heater. then I called my Dad. Inspecting the plug we saw it was literally melting would probably have burst into flame a few moments later. This was back in the very early 1960s and in those days fire alarms and fire extinguishers in residences were pretty much non-existent. Had I not come into that bedroom and saw that plug smoking there is a good chance the whole place would have burned down that night.
Haven’t watched the whole video yet, but (and I hope you are honest) the imitate promise of no sudden alarms made me turn the volume up to a normal level. And that care is something I wanted to recognise!
when I was in highschool I bought a bunch of smoke alarms and pulled all the radioactive bits out to put together to make a cloud chamber to see alpha particles. I know it's really not that dangerous, I just always though it was odd how easy it was for a 14 to get their hands on a not insignificant amount of radioactive material
Ever read about the nuclear boy scout? Was a dude who wanted to make a working nuclear reactor for his eagle scout badge. He got his hands on some radium from old clocks and americium from a bunch of old smoke detectors. Unfortunately the only thing he succeeded in doing was irradiating his back yard. Later joined the navy and worked on nuke subs.
Alpha emitters are ok. Still don't want to ingest the stuff, but handling like any other toxic material is pretty much fine. Unfortunately, most people just don't use their brains... You were the type of kid who was building a cloud chamber, so I'm pretty sure you were using your brain ;)
@@DyoKasparov Bro that's not getting radioactive material, that's doing an entire fission research
Sheldon would be proud of you
AT one time there was a science kit sold to kids that had uranium or something in it. Obviously banned today.
"Testing the actual sensor instead of just clicking a button and checking if it beeps, might be more important."
That precise thought goes through my head every time I test my smoke alarms.
Makes perfect sense until you remember how dumb some people are and realize there will inevitably be house fires caused by people trying to test their smoke alarm in reckless ways.
I work at a plastic injection company as a mold maker. I had no idea what the "Smoke Chambers" I worked on were used for. Thanks for this.
Eight years ago, at 3 am, a fire alarm went off in my daughter's bedroom. It is an ionization type. We all woke up and rushed into her room. There was no smoke at all, but there was an acrid smell coming from her small space heater. I unplugged it and doused it. That alarm probably saved our lives.
Space heaters are also not recommended while sleeping.
@@Nachiebree Yeah but when it's very cold outside people without central heat have no choice. People should get the ones that use hot liquid for those purpose.
@@Nachiebree Yes, and this is also why it's recommended to have the bedroom doors closed when sleeping. If the fire starts anywhere other than in the bedroom, you have a slight increase in the time you've got to escape the residence before being overcome by smoke. Which is a lot less time with all the plastics in modern houses than it used to be.
@@GoogleDoesEvil The surface on the ones that use oil don't get as hot so they do not set things on fire that easily.
@@billybassman21 Correct the oil filled radiators are very safe. The surface temperature doesnt get very hot. Also ceramic space heaters are very safe as well.
There's actually a lot more to the algorithms in an optical smoke detector. To start with, the trigger threshold isn't absolute, because the device accumulates dirt over time. The initial pre-alarm (switch to rapid sample mode) is triggered if the difference between "this" sample and a rolling average of n previous samples exceeds some amount. More advanced detectors also trigger a "clean me" alert if the rolling average gets too dirty.
I don't actually know, but I suspect a lot of home/consumer grade smoke alarms still don't have that technology and simply work off of a fixed threshold. That is definitely how modern commercial smoke detectors work though.
@@csforesman Clean-me warnings are an optional feature that costs extra (but not much extra). The rolling threshold is a baseline feature, because without it the sensor requires very frequent cleaning. Plus, it's firmware, which is free :) source - worked in industry.
I guess "clean me" warnings make sense on industrial systems with central monitoring; but in the case of a cheap home smoke alarm, it is easier just to let it give a false alarm if the sensor head gets dust in it. At least the householder than has a chance to try vacuum-cleaning it, or blasting a can of air duster through it, to see if that makes an improvement.
But that would definitely not be popular in an alarm system in a factory which took a SIM card and automatically dialled up the fire brigade! You could easily lose a whole day's worth of production over a bit of dust .....
many of the older ones that employed drift compensation, but no flash memory would take the first few samples on boot up as "clean" air, this was a real compatibility problem when attached to even older systems that used smoke verification, requiring 2 device trips, with the reboot between, ESL 5xx series smokes were a real issue, going from about 4% obscuration on the first trip, to requiring 15% or more on the second trip.
many of the more modern commercial smoke detectors will actually log events on the device itself,
@@bluerizlagirl the issue that clean-me principally addresses is when the sensor is becoming saturated with dirt. If the baseline "clean air" sample/average is too dirty, an actual smoke event won't move the reading far enough to trigger an alarm.
I'm a residential maintenance tech who installs probably 4 or 5 alarms a month and I had no idea there were even different types. So thankful for this info, and will be exclusively installing photoelectric alarms from here on out!
Thank you for saying up top you won't set off the alarms! I was literally reading through the description for that when you said it
UPDATE: the alarms were about 25-30 years old. And now we have 6 alarms instead of just 3 - I added alarms to each bedroom. I sleep much more soundly now.
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Thanks for this video (yet again!)! I’m going to be replacing the smoke alarms in our house today that are god only knows how old, and I went with photoelectric because of you! :D
Excellent breakdown of the two technologies. When I first installed some "new" (at the time) photoelectric smoke detectors I became aware of a "flaw" they have regarding their location. I had to move one of mine that was in a bedroom, because every afternoon at around the same time, a false alarm would be triggered. Why? It was sitting directly opposite a large window and at that time of day there was a perfect storm of sunlight beams at just the right angle and dust particles in the air which triggered the sensor in the alarm. I moved the detector about 2-3 feet across the room and it never happened again. It is apparently not uncommon for this issue to occur.
That is what i am saying. Why not both? And have a comparable alarm, that will not warn you when you toast bread or open an oven, but will warn you in the alarming cases?
@@Narinjas Yes indeed, and some manufacturers even make units that have both methods of detecting possible fires. Mine will trigger either because it detects ions or because it detects particles that could be smoke. And from the comments I'm seeing here, I was probably right to do so. I rarely have any false alarms that don't involve actual burning materials. (I guess those are probably not technically false, but I've yet to need to use anything to put them out, so I consider them false alarms)
Honeywell’s current product lineup for central monitored systems has three options. A heat alarm, a combo photoelectric and heat alarm, or a super combo photoelectric and heat and carbon monoxide alarm. Seems like thermal sensors are the new thing for detecting those fast flame fires. Heat alarms are great for kitchens and garages too.
These technologies have been used in central monitored systems from well before domestic smoke alarms became common. Modern smoke detectors also allow for the central monitoring system to be programmed to use these technologies in differing ways to allow for different circumstances in an installation. Other methods of false alarm rejection are also used with a delay time after the first positive smoke sampling to the repeated confirmation sampling to allow non smoke particles to dissipate prior to the second sampling.
Those kind of detectors have been available in the professional market for years now and pretty amazing (in the netherlands at least, ionization detectors are highly discouraged) they usually.
Too bad they're hard to get right now.
Why does your comment, from an established account and shown here with 52 likes and counting, appear so far below the exact same text shown with just 30 likes reposted by a spam bot that only joined half a year ago?
I’ve been a fan for a few years… thanks for another outstanding deep dive video
I’ll buy photoelectric smoke detectors…. exclusively
Great video. I work in the fire protection industry in Australia around smoke detection in commercial installations. Material was bang on point. I also live in a building where we had a very large fire. One of the minor things that came out after the fact was that we might have been able to have a faster occupant warning if one of the smoke alarms was ionisation rather than all ionisation like we have. FPAA (Australia's NFA) actually lobbied the Australian government to allow both types to be installed. There are some videos of the submission on FPAAs UA-cam. As well as testing smoke alarms, owners should RTFM. Especially around battery replacement and cleaning requirements. In Australia the manual specifies the exact makes and frequency of battery replacement. Read it. Photoelectric alarms trap dust and other airborne constraints over time. So placing them near air handling will increase their contamination. As they accumulate contaminants they become more sensitive and prone to nuisance alarms. I have actual real world data that shows this from a commercial building. I have detectors in the HVAC ductwork as required by the building permit that last under year because they accumulate too much particulate matter. If you'd like to see such data I'm happy to share.
try replacing or cleaning the dust caps on the sampling tubes, should cut down on the dirt buildup in the chamber
I removed my photoelectic alarms due to false positives.
I'd be interested in the discussion of the combo carbon monoxide alarms too and how the chosen technology affects the carbon monoxide sensing
Don't use those. The two types of sensors require different mounting locations for best effect. A smoke alarm needs to be at the highest point in the room, whereas a CO sensor needs to be mounted at roughly half hight. Thus the mounting point for one type of sensor makes the other one almost useless.
The EPA doesn’t discourage co detectors from being ceiling mounted. And may commercial alarm installations have them ceiling mounted too.
@@y4kv They also don't discourage sticking one's ass in a beehive, doesn't mean you should do either.
The recommendation for CO sensors is to mount then on a wall, at half height.
@@user-xu2pi6vx7o this is based on manufacturer's recommendations, many are designed to operate just fine at ceiling height, some are designed to operate at outlet height. the truth is, CO mixes pretty evenly in the air, with only a little variance based on position in a room, vs temperature. yes, thermostat height is optimal, but not absolute
@@davidconner-shover51 I should note that in california thought they dont outright say to not use the combo units they deeply recommend you also install a standard detector at mid height as well
This is literally my favorite channel on UA-cam
1:55
"A nuanced discussion! Those go great with the internet."
Alec's insightful sarcasm is a treasure.
I burst out loud with that one!
You have no idea how much you helped us. Our smoke detectors were going off constantly just by turning on the oven, always waking and terrifying our toddler. He even was acting out "turning off smoke detectors" with his stuffed animals.
I went and tested my fire alarm as you told me and... huh, it doesn't work. *Takes it off the wall and looks*
Oh wow! There's literally no battery in it! I don't know how long it has been like this! Thanks for the reminder! Immediately went to the store and bought a new one, so now it's working! Thanks again for potentially saving my life!
Yeah, we take them out when they make the annoying "low battery" chirp... and then forget to buy the battery.... three years goes by...
@@LakeNipissing that's why I'm very fond of the built in battery ones
All of the cheap ionisation alarms I've dealt with, when the battery is removed, either the main plastic cover will NOT re-install, or the alarm itself will not re-attach to its base (because like a spring loaded thing pops out), or a spring loaded, small label "no battery" pops out from somewhere. It's possible this is a requirement of Australian/New Zealand laws but not mandated in other countries.
your videos have sparked me into an engineering career, and I just want to thank you for that. I started watching about 3 years ago and I love all your videos, and it makes me want to learn. thank you so much!
Thank you for this public service announcement. I have worked for two companies that exclusively installed and maintained smoke alarms.
I think you only missed three points, the first concerning dead air spaces. The space near where your walls meet your ceiling or another wall, or at the apex of a cathedral ceiling is considered a bad area to install an alarm due to poor air movement. For example, the one that you show on your wall is probably in the least optimal place it could be due to the meeting of the walls, the meeting of the walls with the ceiling, and the air intake being immediately beside it. I suggest you reconsider whether or not it could be moved (it can, but at what cost?) or install another alarm in a more appropriate location.
The second, is areas near high levels of air flow, for example near a duct. The constant airflow can cause dust build up on the sensor blocking smoke from entering. It is recommended that you vacuum your alarm at the same time you test it although I'm not sure how much that would actually help.
The third is that photoelectric alarms are sensitive to water vapour, including from showers, baths, ovens, dryers, and cool temperatures in humid environments (for example at night). As we had a strong preference for installing photoelectric alarms we would avoid installing an alarm near a bathroom, laundry or kitchen if at all possible. If one of these areas, excluding kitchens, was a must we would install an ionisation alarm. Another option for these locations is a heat alarm which gives the same reaction as a smoke alarm but based on temperature instead of smoke.
When it comes to smoke in a can, you can purchase it off the shelf from electrical wholesalers. One of the companies I worked for required testing with smoke, the other required testing without smoke. The latter said that they found that the smoke in a can would cause nuisance alarming after the service visit. The reason given was that the smoke in a can would cause build up on the sensor after several tests and would cause premature failure of the alarm. In my estimation, the smoke would simply not clear quickly enough after the test and the hush feature timed out. Being impatient I would spray smoke into the alarm, then, once the alarm sounded, pull the battery and wave the alarm around to clear the smoke. Being lazy, I built a fan to do that for me in a low effort and less embarrassing way. If you test with smoke in a can then I suggest you either have a fan handy or you have an understanding of how to take your smoke alarm off the wall/ceiling for manual smoke clearing.
yep good point about the corners of rooms, i was surprised when he said they were wall mounted at all. best it on a ceiling at least 500mm from the wall was our requirement in a hotel company. Or if you are in france "please put one in the bedroom ffs" their regulations have no requirment for smoke detectors in a hotel bedroom.. even if it has a kitchenette. insane.
What household items might work as smoke detection? For instance incense or lit and extinguished matches. Could one clear the sensor with compressed air much like cleaning other electronics?
@@johnno4127 smoke detectors are designed not to detect small amounts of smoke like that from those sources however if you held enough burning incense sticks under a smoke alarm it will trigger. Compressed air is a good option for clearing the smoke afterwards, air in a can works as well but too much can cause condensation and just make things worse.
I would simply like to say that I appreciated the pluralization of atrium as “atria”. The precision of speech and attention to detail is something I always really admire about your videos!
Not that I would have been bent out of shape if you’d said “atriums”, because that is definitely what I would have thoughtlessly said :P
I'm glad I'm not the only one who appreciates little details like this. As a man from the Great British lands, I hardly ever use the word atrium, I use the plural even less. So this brought me joy.
The attention to detail and the precision of speach, combined with the first video I saw on this channel, regarding British plugs, convinced me he must be British.
Since then I've seen him speak of living in the US, but the first impression is hard to shake.
I care about proper use of language, but I do not demand perfection, only that you put in some effort.
@@jackholmes2374 "As a man from the Great British lands", you ought to know that the Romans (temporarily) conquered Great Britain (or at least part of it). Atrium is a Latin word. Atria is Latin-style declension. The proper way for an Englishman to form the plural is to add a bloody "s" at the end (or an "es", or sometimes completely change the word, e.g., goose [from Old English, from Proto-West Germanic] -> geese - btw wtf is the deal with that? who invented this language?). Anyhow, I just don't get why you exalt the use of the grammatical conventions of the Romans, who subjugated your country in the olden times lol. It's one thing to take their vocabulary and their alphabet, but to use their grammar, their method of pluralization, as well - a step too far, if you ask me. I'll leave you to tea time. Tea and biscuits.
"s" for the plural and apostrophe "s" for the genitive - that is the English way. We say "atrium's walls" meaning "walls of the atrium"; we do not say "walls ātriī", which I think would be the Latin-style grammar, using the genitive singular version of atrium. (But I'm not an expert on Latin, so don't quote me.)
@@robertjenkins6132 Thank you for this insight you knowledgeable man. I shall take this on my travels. It would be a heck of a lot cooler to say things the Latin way. You know what, sod it. I'm going to from now on and see the reactions I get.
But yes. Instead of the word "Atrium", I hear words like 'Enterance hall" or "Foyer" being more regularly used.
Also side note, I've never fully understood how to pronounce "Foyer". I've heard it pronounced "Foa-yay" which to me sounds ludicrous. Hmmm.
The first thought when I clicked on the video was "I'm probably going to hate this because I hate the sound of smoke alarms..." I sincerely appreciate the opening line.
Same for me too. Always hated the sound of fire alarms. So I’m glad he didn’t play the sounds too. Especially since I stream the audio to my hearing aid so that would not have been fun lol.
At the 14 minute mark I can’t possibly imagine how you’re going to fill the next 10 minutes but I’m here for it.
When I was in elementary school, we had a firefighter come in every year and give a talk about fire safety. I specifically remember him recommending that canned smoke product you mentioned to test fire alarms.
As someone in the alarm industry, I can vouch that I HAVE seen a Radiation trefoil on an older Smoke alarm. Not common though.
Also, the same test smoke I use at work is available on amazon. first result when I searched for "smoke alarm test smoke" You'll also want some canned air, the sort that you use for cleaning your pc, to clear the detector out after smoking it.
And hey, Carbon Monoxide detectors are only in the last few years starting to get rated for 10 year use. Before that it was 5 for most detectors. Also a very good sensor to have in the house, especially good to have a monitored one, when you need it the most, you may be the least able to respond to the alarm, and it's nice to have a panel calling the fire department to help you.
I have several with the radiation trefoil on them - they are somewhat older though, and were bought (and installed) in Europe.
I inspect fire alarm systems for schools and commercial buildings, it was really cool to see what I do talked about like this. Great stuff!
1:05 - we know how much you love that toaster!
Some experience as a volunteer firefighter here: I would unequivocally recommend photoelectric detectors over ionization in residential use. There are very few circumstances which result in efficient combustion yielding low density smoke in a household.
I used to have a ionization alarm that went off too often! I moved it further away and bought a new one for the kitchen. I did not know at the time why the difference in sensitivity was such and chalked it up to "new vs old technology". Thanks to your video I now know why and I'll keep rocking both sensor techs at once :)
So. Long time ago I recall being told that there were two types of detector alarms, smoke detectors and fire detectors. I always assumed the fire detector responded to heat and I even wondered how effective that might be since that meant they were probably calibrated to only go off after a certain temperature was reached. Now thanks to you I'm guessing the "fire detector" alarm was in fact this ionization thingie.
As an aside, I once had a cooking oil fire on my stove. Unforgivably, I left a pan of oil on the stove and left the kitchen for a moment and then became distracted. A sudden whoosh and roaring sound brought me running back and the scariest thing was, except for the blinding flames I literally could see nothing else. There was like a vortex pillar of roaring vertical fire and otherwise it was completely pitch dark. I was terrified but I knew I had to put it out and at least I knew not to throw water on it. I got thick towels and edged up to it as close as I dared and gingerly plopped them over the pan. Everything in me wanted to toss the towels from a distance but the thought of toppling the pan and having burning oil everywhere stopped me. As soon as the fire went out I could see again. The lights were still on and there wasn't that much smoke at all. Its just that the fire was SO bright that it drowned out all the other light in the room. Its was like if you are in a dimly lit room and someone opens the door and the sunlight behind them is so bright all you can see is their silhouette. There might be more than enough light in the room for you to see them the moment they shut the door but as long as its open the sunlight totally overpowers the light in the room. That's what the fire was doing, it was so bright the rest of the room seemed pitch black. Lesson - when there's a fire you may well be effectively blind and unable to see exits or obstacles or where you fire-extinguisher is etc.
There are 3 types, ionization and photoelectric as he explains, but there is also a rate of rise heat detector that does detect heat.
Thank you for making me realize I would have no idea what to do in a grease fire and look it up!
(For those following along at home: turn off the heat, *cover the pan* with a metal lid (glass will shatter), and pour baking soda on any remaining _small_ flames (it doesn't go far). DO NOT use water, which will make it explode, and try not to use a fire extinguisher, which is likely to tip the pan over.)
Fire alarm technician here. Smoke alarm is what you have in a residential home (photoelectric or ionized). They make noise locally in the event they are alarmed. Smoke detectors go to a building fire alarm and annunciate the entire building (also photo or ionized although photo smokes are becoming the most common type now.)
Heat detectors that solely detect changes in heat come in rate of rise/fixed temp or fixed temp only. The ROR function looks for 15 degree rise over the course of a minute. The fixed temp function is typically 135F or 200F depending on where it’s being utilized.
Fire detector is a coined term for either smoke detectors or heat detectors. Canadian install code has provisions for “fire detectors” to allow engineers to select detectors based on their location and application.
@@calebbarris912 Good explanation. I touched on rate of rise, but kind of got them confused with the fixed temp heat detector. Either way a good fire prevention system utilizes more than one detector as all have pros and cons.
I actually think this is a fairly good point in favor of the ionization alarm. This kind of fast flame fire over oil I assume would set off that type well. I've heard from a firefighter that oil fires actually tend to be one of the more common types. I have no stats to back it up, but given how cheap these are... it's hard to not just justify having both in appropriate places.