National Safety Month and Fire Safety – The Results

As you know from my fire safety assessment post, June was National Safety Month, and I chose to take that time to assess the fire safety needs in my home. I turned to Kidde’s Home Safety resource to determine if our home had enough smoke alarms and fire extinguishers. What I found was startling.

I began the process with the following:

Basement level (fully finished with one bedroom): one smoke alarm at the bottom of the stairs outside of the furnace room.

First floor: one smoke alarm in the hallway between the kitchen and the foyer.

Second floor: one at the top of the stairs and in each of the four bedrooms.

Our only fire extinguisher in the home is in the kitchen pantry.

According to the laws of our county and the age of our home, we’re required to have the following: hardwired, interconnected smoke alarms with battery back-up outside each sleeping area and on every level. The first problem is that all smoke alarms should be replaced when they’re 10 years old, and ours are much older than that.

The Kidde Fire Safety page provides a guide for smoke alarm and fire extinguisher placement, which I used next to determine where we should install additional smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) alarms and place additional fire extinguishers or escape ladders.

According to Kidde, here are the fire safety basics for every family to remember:

• Install smoke alarms on each level of your home, in hallways, inside bedrooms, and outside all sleeping areas.
• Install carbon monoxide (CO) alarms on each level of your home.
• Keep fire extinguishers within reach. Primary extinguishers should be in living areas and your garage/workshop.

I found that we needed the following, available at the Kidde online store, from Amazon, and Home Depot:

• A fire extinguisher in the garage.
• An escape ladder in two additional bedrooms (we only had one in our daughter’s third floor bedroom).
• A fire extinguisher in the furnace room.
• A smoke alarm/CO alarm combo in the furnace room placed at least 15 feet from the furnace.
• A fire extinguisher upstairs, perhaps in the laundry room.
• A smoke alarm outside of upstairs bedrooms (we only had them inside the rooms).
• Smoke alarms inside and outside of the basement bedroom.
• A Worry-Free Kitchen alarm – combination smoke/CO in the kitchen.
• New alarms to replace all seven smoke alarms installed when the house was built 15 years ago.

Thankfully, Kidde has everything on this list, from alarms to ladders.

I also chose to install Kidde’s new RemoteLync Monitor, which provides remote notifications to my smartphone whenever a smoke or CO alarm is going off inside my home. Kidde’s RemoteLync device provides me with peace of mind knowing that I will receive an alert if there is a fire emergency in my home while I am away. The unit plugs into a wall outlet and listens for my existing smoke and CO alarms. If it hears an alarm going off, it contacts me via my phone as well as anyone else on my contact list such as my husband.

Have you assessed the fire safety needs of your home? What upgrades and updates could you use?

Disclosure: This post is part of a year-long sponsored ambassador campaign. All opinions are my own. Follow Kidde on social media at facebook.com/kidde, on Twitter @KiddeSafety, and @kiddefiresafety on Instagram.