People worries about smoke alarms?
House fires may smoulder in a couch for hours before bursting into flame, and there may be as little as three minutes to safety evacuate once there is an open flame.
A real concern should be whether smoke detectors are located in the correct places to give an early warning. A detector should be placed in the hall outside bedrooms and the doors kept shut. A detector should also be placed in any bedroom where people smoke.
Detectors chirp periodically when the battery needs to be replaced and there is a button that should be used to test that the electronics work.
If a detector is energized by house current, there is a concern that a short circuit that causes a fire may open the circuit breaker that energizes the alarm.
Many detectors that use a small amount of radioactive material to ionize air in the detector will alarm when there is a sudden change in room air opening doors to the outside or cooking food in a kitchen and an over-ride button will silence the false alarm until the air clears. Using a magazine, etc. to fan and clear a false alarm will help save the battery.
A general concern is that only one person will hear the alarm and must alert all others in the house who must follow a prior plan to escape (out windows using rope ladders, etc.) to avoid the flames. Everyone should meet at an assigned location so that no one races back inside to rescue someone who has already escaped.
Importance of having a smoke detector?
Fire safety organizations consider smoke detectors and smoke alarms to be the most important device in the prevention of deaths and injuries from fires. Many of these organizations sponsor periodic campaigns to remind people to test their systems and to replace the batteries in their smoke detectors.
Fire detectors prevent a lot of deaths most commonly household deaths if you were not to have a smoke detector and there is a fire in your house you wouldn't know and would most probably end up extremely injured / ill or even dead you might think that the blaze will wake you up but did you know if you are inhaling smoke from a fire for just under 3 minutes it will knock you unconsciousness so you wouldn't know what was going on and most probably end up dyeing.
Disposal of smoke detectors?
Safe disposal
The Radiation Health Committee has recommended that the preferred method of disposal for small numbers of smoke alarms is to include them in the domestic rubbish. The Committee considered this action acceptable because:
The amount of radioactive material in each smoke alarm is extremely small and, from environmental and public health perspectives, the disposal of individual smoke alarms with domestic rubbish does not represent any hazard;
The radioactive material is securely bound in a metal foil within the smoke alarm; and
The amount of naturally-occurring alpha-emitting radioactivity in normal soils is equivalent to a dozen or more smoke alarms in every cubic metre. The dispersal of smoke alarms, even in large numbers, through refuse land-fill sites is therefore not significant in comparison.
Recommendations
Individual (up to 10) smoke alarms can be safely disposed of in domestic rubbish.
When more than ten smoke alarms are collected together for bulk disposal, they must be treated as radioactive waste and the requirements of the National Health and Medical Research Council's Code of Practice for the Near-Surface Disposal of Radioactive Waste in Australia (1992) must be met.
- Websites used
http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howthingswork/a/aa071401a.htm
- http://www.nswfb.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=704
