SPRING AHEAD - AND CHECK YOUR SMOKE DETECTORS!

I posted this on another thread, but given this issue is near and dear to my heart, I wanted this to be its own thread. If this saves one life, it's worth it:

Howlin said:
I want people to benefit from what happened to me. TELL EVERYBODY!

My family and I are here today because I read your story here on FR. It prompted me to check my smoke detectors and REPLACE THEM just a week or so before my own home caught on fire.

Had I not checked our smoke detectors - and found one that failed - I might not be sitting here today. You see, it was replacing the one that failed with a new, working one that saved my family's lives, and saved my home from burning to the ground.

Please everyone, and I'm literally begging here .... check your smoke detectors today. Test them, replace the batteries, and if they don't test out right, REPLACE THEM! Smoke detectors are relatively cheap, especially in comparison to the cost of a human life.

While you're replacing your smoke detectors, be sure to look at the package and READ IT to see if it detects CO (Carbon Monoxide.) Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE should have at least TWO CO detectors in their home. One near their furnace, another in the living quarters of the home.

Carbon Monoxide is odorless, and tasteless. You won't know that it's in the air in your home absent a CO detector. You really won't know until it's too late.

On December 31st 2000 around 2:30am, my home caught on fire. It is only by the grace of God and a fellow freeper sharing her experience with the entire FR forum that I'm alive to type this today.

About a week or so before New Years Eve, 2000 I read the tragic story of Howlin's son's death due to Carbon Monoxide. It was a story that moved me to tears, as no parent should ever have the responsibility to bury their child.

But after reading that story, I got up and checked my own smoke detectors to see if they detected Carbon Monoxide. They didn't.

It was during my checking of my own smoke detectors that I found one that had failed. Ironically, a little more than a week after replacing my own smoke detectors and putting in an inter-connect system so they'd all go off if one did, those very smoke detectors ended up saving the lives of my family and I.

When I awoke to the sound of the smoke detectors going off, it was the most frightening moment of my life. In a room about 10 feet away from me, fire had broken out. The fire which started outside the house in a pile of wood, had made its way inside through a dryer vent, and caught my utility room on fire.

Dialing 911 and getting the family out of the house is still kind of a blur. I don't remember much of it, I simply acted out of instinct to protect my wife, and then 2 and 4 year old son.

By the time the Fire Department arrived - about 3 minutes after calling 911 the entire woodpile caught on fire (about 2 cords of wood) and the side of the house caught on fire. Luckily the Fire Department was hooked up and ready go to, and put the fire out within seconds.

"Another minute or so, and you'd have lost your house" the fire chief said to me. Those words haunt me to this day. I'd have been lucky to only lose my house if I hadn't have replaced the smoke detectors just a week or so before the fire.

So as I sit here with tears rolling down my face again (as they always do when I type this post..) PLEASE check your smoke detectors and make sure you have CO detectors in your home. Your life depends on it.

Good advice.

The smoke detectors required by the latest building codes are AC powered, with battery backup. The batteries in those last much longer than the older battery-powered ones, since the backup battery is essentially just sitting there doing nothing unless the power goes off. I change mine once per year, although they are probably good for three or four years. The newer units with battery backup are supposed to beep at you every 15 seconds when the backup battery gets weak.

If you have the old battery-powered ones, you should change out the 9V batteries twice per year (when the clock changes is a good time to do it).

Regardless of which type of units you have, you should test them every so often by pushing (and holding) the "TEST" button. (Be careful not to press the "silence" button (if it has one) instead of the "test" button. If you do that, the test button won't work for about thirty minutes.)

The latest codes require that a smoke detector be installed:

Inside every bedroom
Outside every sleeping area (like the hallway outside a group of bedrooms)
On every floor of a multi-story building

All of these must be interconnected so that if one goes off, they all go off. Which brings me to:

Please read the instructions that came with your detectors so that you will know what the indicator lights on them mean, and what the various beeps mean. When every detector in your house is screaming at you, it is very important that you be able to identify which of the units is causing the alarm - on the units in my house, the red LED will blink rapidly when it is in alarm.

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