Fire prevention in your home from our own personal Firefighter/Home Inspector Doug Simmons. Check out Doug’s bio at the bottom of this page.
Not only is it important to have smoke detectors in your home it is also important to ensure that they work properly. In most newer homes the smoke detectors are powered by the home's electrical system and have a battery backup. Do not get complacent and think just because your home has electricity powered smoke detectors that there is nothing you need to do to them. You still need to be diligent and change your smoke detector batteries twice a year, whether they need new ones or not. I cannot tell you how many house fires I have been on, in my 26 years as a firefighter, that the smoke detectors were either missing, had no batteries, or were too old and just didn't work. This is very frustrating, for firefighters, knowing if a home had proper working smoke detectors, we may have been able to save more of the home and/or its occupants. One last thing on smoke detectors and then I'll move on. Smoke detector manufactures recommend replacing your detector after 10 years. This is mostly because the element inside the detector that detects smoke or heat will become dirty and ineffective over time. New detectors may also be more advanced than older ones.
Keep Looking When Cooking Another basic fire prevention measure you can take is simply to not leave food cooking on the stove unattended. We all live crazy hectic lives and I get it. You’re helping the kids with homework while cooking dinner and the dog is scratching at the door. "I'll just take the dog out really quick, the bacon on the stove will be fine." Next thing you know, the kids are screaming, and you see flames coming from the kitchen window. Please be mindful when you are cooking and don't walk out of the kitchen when you are cooking. Unattended cooking is the cause of most house fires we respond to. It is also wise to not store anything on or around your stove, such as mail, homework, kitchen towels, etc. All it takes is a simple bump of the stove control knob to turn an eye on and if things are stored on the stove, they will catch fire.
Dryer Fires We can't talk about basic fire prevention without mentioning clothes dryers. Clothes dryers are an important part of everyday life, but they require basic maintenance to help in fire prevention in your home. Dryer lint is extremely flammable. A neat little experiment to prove this is to take a small amount of lint, go outside away from the house, cars, trees, etc. and light it on fire. You will be amazed at how fast it burns. The first part of clothes dryer maintenance that I sure hope we all do is cleaning the lint trap. The lint trap is a screen type filter that collects all the loose lint from the items you place in your dryer and limits the amount of lint that travels through the vent piping. You should clean the lint trap after every single time you use the dryer. These traps won't collect all the lint but do collect a large majority of it. That leads me to the next item that requires maintenance. The Dryer vent pipe. The vent pipe should be connected to the rear of your dryer and be routed to the exterior of your home. Dryer vents can become clogged with lint and in some cases, birds will enter from the outside and build nests inside your vent piping. I recommend cleaning your vent at least once a year. There are several different tools you can use to complete this task. The simplest is a brush with extension rods (you can perform your own google search or ask for product advise from your local home improvement store). You disconnect the dryer vent from your dryer and insert the brush adding the extension rods until the brush has passed the entire length of your vent pipe and exits the home. After you complete the vent cleaning reattach the vent pipe to the dryer and it is good to go!
Fire Escape Plan Lastly, we are going to discuss fire escape plans. Everyone should have a fire escape plan in place in the event of a fire. I'm sure you've all heard this before, but it really is worth talking about and its very simple to do. Pick a place in your yard and designate that as your meeting place. Your meeting place needs to be somewhere such as a mailbox, tree, fence, somewhere that can't be moved. Once you have designated a meeting place work with your family to figure out the fastest way to get from different points inside the home to your meeting place. A good fire escape plan will not be effective if you don't practice it. I suggest practicing your fire escape plan once a month. Make it a game where the family member that makes it to the meeting place first gets to pick desert one night, or something along those lines. However, you decide to create and practice your fire escape plan is fine just as long as you have one and practice it.
I hope you have found this information helpful and will see the importance of the issues I have discussed today.
Learn more about Doug at this link: https://www.chrisdhilton.com/doug-simmons
