Fire Protection Update

So, my daughter found a cute trick about 3 weeks ago:  If you set a bunch of dry oatmeal in a non-microwavable playset bowl on 5 minutes in the microwave, it catches fire.

Lots of fun things result:  You mommy trotting you out into the cold, lots of folks with sirens showing up, seeing the inside of a Crown Victoria as you shelter from the sub-zero temperatures.

Thankfully, though the microwave was toast and there was smoke in the house, nothing happened permanently and everyone was safe.

That afternoon, though, debriefing with Whitney, I questioned, "Why didn't the smoke detectors go off?"   Basically, my wife had gotten out of the shower, smelled smoke and the smoke alarms never went off.  It was then I figured-out how woefully unprepared we were for any sort of fire.

You see, our old house (1.5 story, 4 br, 2 bath on slab) was built in 2003 and had recent everything: Smoke detectors in every bedroom, one tied-in to the ADT system with constant A/C power, the works.  Our current home (2 story, 4br, 2 bath on full basement) was built in 1985 and had one detector on the ground floor and one upstairs, and both candidly looked at least 20 years old, if not older.

So, I fired up Consumer Reports and bought some top picks.  Got two of these to replace their ancient brethren:


Those are hardwired 120V with a double-A battery backup.  They yell at you to "EVACUATE THERE'S A FIRE" in addition to a 100dB+ tone.  

Also picked-up 4 of these, one for each upstairs bedroom and another for the basement



Thats the First Alert Atom, and I really like the design and the compact size (above is pretty much 1:1 scale.  Thing is tiny)

I also have an ABC fire extinguisher hard-mounted to the wall as you go into the kitchen.  Today we had a small fire in the oven (some residue got too hot) and it was great knowing we had the fire extinguisher at hand.

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