A couple weeks back, I knew the outside temperature was going to drop into the 30s sometime during the night. So I did my family-man duty and set the downstairs thermostat so it would wake up the dormant Jowers furnace as soon as the room temperature dropped to 65 degrees.
Sometime around 5:30 in the morning, the furnace kicked on. Since I hadn’t had it cleaned and serviced yet, every speck of dust, brown-recluse carcass and cricket leg inside the furnace heated up and turned into smoke. The dusty, buggy smoke billowed out of the heat-and-air ducts and found its way to the downstairs smoke alarm.
Since I’m painfully hyper-alert (I can smell ants and hear termites), I was out of bed and wearing my emergency robe by the third beep of the smoke detector. I took a look down the stairwell and didn’t see an orange glow or hear any crackling or whooshing, so I figured it was just some harmless furnace smoke and no fire.
Lucky for all of us Jowerses, I was right. The Jowers girls—wife Brenda and daughter Jess—never kicked off their blankets, never reached for their emergency robes. They slept right through the alarm, my dash down the stairs and my grouchy, mumbling return to my bedroom. I had to tell them about the smoke alarm during breakfast.
“There was a smoke alarm last night?” Jess asked. “Are you sure? Because I didn’t hear anything.”
“Did you smell anything?” I asked.
“Just breakfast,” she said.
Wife Brenda joined in. “I think I heard something, but I’m not sure.”
“Well, both of y’all need to know: if the smoke alarm goes off, sleepy time’s over. Go ahead and get up and move calmly toward the exits.”
Everything’s fine at my house, but our failed fire drill focused my mind on a few things. First, if you haven’t had your heat-and-air man come by to clean and service your furnace, call him now. You too could be jolted from a sound sleep by the shrill sound of a smoke detector and the wretched smell of burnt-up dust and bugs.
Besides that, now’s the time for your heat-and-air man to check out your furnace, just to make sure nothing has gone bad since last heating season.
While you’re thinking about your furnace and smoke alarms, consider this: if your smoke alarms are more than 10 years old, they’re obsolete. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) now requires that smoke detectors that are 10 years old or older be replaced.
I know, I know. The NFPA can’t actually require you to do anything. But they use the word “require” when they’re talking about replacing obsolete smoke detectors and that means they’re serious.
I say if your house is 10 years old or older and you don’t know how old your smoke detectors are, go ahead and get new ones.
I’m going to pick up a few new smoke detectors for the Jowers house. Our house was built in 1914, and wasn’t rewired until 1985. That means we don’t have the newfangled hardwired smoke detectors that are required by the building code for new houses. We’ll have to rely on battery-powered units.
I’m going to get wireless smoke detectors. If you don’t already have them, get some. When one of these units senses smoke or fire, it sends a signal to all the other smoke detectors and all of the little sumbitches start beeping. If you put one in every bedroom—like you’re supposed to—there’s no way anybody could sleep through the noise, let alone the fire.
This has set me to wondering about the range of these wireless smoke detectors. If one of my next-door neighbors installs these things, and one of them goes off in the middle of the night, will it set off every smoke detector in my house? I sure hope not.
If you haven’t bought a smoke detector in the last 10 years, get ready for a little sticker shock. The wireless units cost about $40 to $50 each.
One last thing about smoke detectors: the laws that govern home inspectors in Tennessee say that they have to test smoke detectors as part of the inspection. That’s a great idea, right?
Nope. It’s a terrible idea. The only way to really test a smoke detector is to start a fire or find another way to blow some real smoke into the house. Pushing the test button on a smoke detector just tells you that the beeper works.
Working under the new law, some unfortunate home inspectors are going to push the little test buttons and unwittingly drain the batteries inside the occasional smoke detector. When the owners come home, their smoke detector will be beeping and somebody will have to climb up a ladder and put in a new battery just to hush the thing up. Or, worse yet, the homeowner won’t be able to find a battery and he’ll just leave the smoke detector disabled.
And one of these days, a smoke detector that a home inspector said was fine on Monday will have a dead (or missing) battery on Tuesday, and a fire will start on Wednesday.
I say don’t rely on a home inspector’s test of your smoke detectors. Test your own smoke detectors at least once a week.
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