Use Monitored Smoke and Heat Sensors
A grievous fire can start anywhere in your home without warning and can spread throughout the house much more quickly than you might suspect. Traditional residential fire prevention devices like battery-operated smoke detectors fire extinguishers can only provide protection when someone is in the home and even then only if they are in working order and everyone knows how to use them.
Similarly, precautions like developing an evacuation plan and taking a practice run-throughs at random times during the day and night still only tests your plan under what might be considered close to ideal situations. How effective would that plan be at saving your belongings if nobody was in the house when the fire starts? What if you have elderly family member in the home whose survival of that evacuation plan is utterly dependent on other more physically capable members of the household being there? Have you managed to train your pet to respond to the alarm set off by a conventional smoke detector? Fire safety prevention measures remain a valid and essential means of protecting your family, property and belongings, but fire monitoring fills in those gaps that, left unaddressed could leave you homeless or worse.
Smoke Detection Devices
Those 120 volt smoke detectors won’t do any good at if you forget to replace a dead battery. Even if the battery is in working order, fire safety can compromised if you can’t hear the alarm. Such is the potentially fatal flaw in even a smoke detecting device manufactured to meet the toughest of municipal codes: they only alert those already in the house and do nothing to summon assistance from outside the residence.
You could invest in a device that connects a smoke detector designed only to meet the minimum requires of municipal codes to your alarm system, but in most cases these supplementary additions are attached to a single connection. That means that the security company receiving the alarm set off by the smoke detector fails to receive such vital information as the specific location of the detector or the potential cause of it being set of.
Monitored smoke detectors, by contrast, feature far more sophisticated design and complex connections which are capable of alerting alarm system security companies to the exact room in which the sensor has been placed. This information can then be transmitted to the fire department before they head to the scene.
How Children Benefit from Fire Monitoring
When minutes or even seconds be the difference between life and death due to fire, such specificity afforded by monitored smoke detectors can be vital. For instance, children left home alone may not hear even the most piercing siren set off by a traditional smoke detector. That concern is erased with fire monitoring systems capable of detecting a fire cause by an electrical short circuit in the kitchen while the kids are upstairs in the bedroom.
How Seniors Benefit from Fire Monitoring
As previously indicated, battery-operated smoke detectors will be of little use to seniors home alone who are not physically capable of evacuating the home on their home. If that detection device is not wired to summon help from a home security system or other means of relating the information to the fire department, it is essentially useless. There is yet another concern for families with aging household members, however. Even if elderly residents should prove to be physically capable of evacuating on their own in the event of being alarmed by fire prevention devices, what happens if they cannot hear it or if the fire danger does not actually produce enough smoke to trigger that alarm?
In such cases, a monitored smoke detector should be aided with the accompaniment of a monitored heat sensor device. These devices are capable of determining a rise in the level of heat within a room and are designed to trigger an alert when the temperature reaches a specific degree. Some heat sensors work by applying a fixed trigger point which is usually about 135 degrees Fahrenheit. Other heat sensors are triggered by a predetermined rate in the rise of the temperature. Should a fire start in the kitchen due to a forgetful senior heading back to the living room to watch television, for instance, a sudden spike in the temperature of the house by ten or twenty degrees in less than half a hour would be enough for the monitored heat sensor to send an alarm to your security company.
How Fire Monitoring can Protect Pets
The single greatest utility of investing in fire monitoring systems may be the capacity to protection your home and save your possessions even when nobody is home. The alert sent by a monitored smoke detector or heat sensor can still bring firefighters to your home quickly enough to keep from losing all your belongings. Of course, much of the “stuff” accumulated over a lifetime can be replaced, but replacing a beloved pet is much more difficult. Installing fire monitoring systems has the potential to be the single deciding factor between coming home to a dog or cat that may be still be quaking in fear, but is still very much alive and coming home to a much more tragic sight.
According to the National Fire Protection Association, the average person will experience five fires in their home over the course of a lifetime. The odds of someone in the home suffering an injury due to fire is one out of ten. More positive news is that every single generation of Americans since the turn of the 20th century has enjoyed a lower risk of actually dying in a fire than the generation before them. A significant element to this long-term trend is technological advancements in warning systems and fire prevention. Fire monitoring alarm systems are the latest and greatest addition to that technology and it only makes sense to take advantage of it.
For more information, check out the National Fire Protection Association website at NFPA.org.
