Proper Smoke Detector Testing

Smoke detector testing.

Most people don’t understand how to test a smoke alarm, pushing the button and sounding the alarm does not test the smoke detector circuitry, and it does however test the battery and the audio alarm.

The detection circuitry can only be tested with a smoke spray or actual smoke.  It’s never a good idea to light a fire in your house or apartment, so remove the smoke detector and take it outside to light a fire.  The best way to do this is plan ahead by purchasing one of those cheap cigars; they should provide you with plenty of smoke.

Make sure you are testing with a New Battery.

Wave the smoke under the unit until the alarm sounds, if after 10 seconds the alarm doesn’t go off use a vacuum cleaner to clean the face of the detector.  If on a second try it still refuses to sound off replace the unit.

Smoke detectors are required to be replaced every 10 years.

Fire Safety Today - an Introduction

My Twitter account is called @firesafetytoday.

I’ve been in the Fire Safety business for 20 years and wanted to leverage my knowledge to increase my income, because I learned that working on fire extinguishers was a laborious task with limited chances to increase my profits without some way to increase sales and to do that I decided to write a book on fire safety and sell it online affording me the chance to reach a higher volume of customers.
Instead of writing a book, I decided this Blog would suffice and maybe I'll assemble the posts into a book.

The Internet has been growing rapidly and forcing media communications to change as well, so I decided I needed to explore Internet Marketing first and that led me to Full Sail University.

I’m following these Blogs through RSS: National Fire Protection Association NFPA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA, the Burn Foundation, the USA Coast Guard, Fire Engineering, and Keyes Life Safety Compliance.

I specialize in Hand Portable Fire Extinguishers and Smoke Detectors.
During my 20 years of servicing and selling extinguishers, I had the opportunity to meet a high volume of people.  When companies wanted to conduct live fire extinguisher training (very messy by the way), it gave me the chance to interact closely with employees and discovered they had a lot of questions about fire extinguishers and smoke detectors.

Stay tuned for my fire safety posts.