Smoke alarms for rooms where people smoke

[usenet]

Will ionisation smoke alarms be triggered by smokers? (I assume that optical alarms almost inevitable will).

[Rick Dipper]

I used a CO detector .... very effective with an open fire, it goes when stuff falls out the fire, but not with the normal smokes from the fire.

Rick

[Mike]

Use the ones made with depleted uranium in the detector and hopefully the problem will go away.

[BigWallop]

You need something like a rate of rise heat detector rather than a smoke detector.

[usenet]

... but will it detect any fire? The situation I'm thinking about is a bedroom or living room where people smoke, no open fires involved (well not in all cases anyway).

[usenet]

I don't have a problem, but I don;t want to crete one either. A smoke alarm that goes off when there's not a fire (i.e. with cigarette smoke) is useless.

When you say "the ones made with depleted uranium in the detector" is this any sort of ionisation smake detector? That's the question I originally asked really.

[Steve Jones]

He was being sarcastic.

[usenet]

Hmmm, too subtle for me then! :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ours aren't.

[usenet]

Your ionisation alarms or your optical alarms (or both maybe!)?

[RichardS]

My guess is that in decreasing order of sensitivity alarms go Ionisation, Optical and Heat Detectors.

There's got to be some solution to this - after all many hotels have smoke detectors and also have smoking bedrooms. Why not call a manufacturer and see what the suggest, of failing that your area's fire prevention officer?

As you've already said, over-sensitive alarms can be just as bad as no alarms at all - after the 2nd or 3rd false alarm people start to put any trigger down to a false alarm, which is not really what you want!

[usenet]

My attempts at getting a response from either manufacturers or the Suffolk fire service have failed completely so far. Maybe I could try London fire service as the flat is in London.

[usenet]

Not a lot of help there either.

If you hunt around for contact details of a 'fire prevention officer' you can rarely find anything. The fire brigade sites have lots of links to publicity campaigns and government sites saying how we should fit smoke alarms etc., etc. but there's not a lot of real information on how to go beyond sticking a cheap battery alarm in the hall and in the landing.

In fact if you do a Google UK sites search for "fire prevention officer" you get very few hits for any actual such beings. Most of the hits are suggesting you get in touch with one or about people who were one once.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No idea. Just bought em because BCO said to have em.

[Rick Hughes]

Why not use a standard Kitchen type Heat Detector .. will react to a fire, but not be triggered by smoke.

[Pete C]

Hi,

IME ionisation alarms can detect a few molecules of singed toast, optical are better in this regard.

cheers, Pete.

[Ben Schofield]

The trick is to spell ionisation as ionization when googling :-). Then you get advice such as this, from

IONIZATION VERSUS PHOTOELECTRIC DETECTORS

In cases where smoke detectors are subject to frequent false alarming due to cooking, smoking or similar causes, the State Fire Marshal encourages the installation of photoelectric smoke detectors as they are not as susceptible to these types of false activation.

Studies have shown that ionization detectors are better at detecting small, invisible particles of combustion that are typically present from fast, hot, flaming fires. These studies have also shown that photoelectric detectors are better at detecting larger, visible smoke particles that are more commonly seen from slow, smoldering fires. Both types of smoke detectors have been shown to be effective in detecting typical residential-type fires. Some research seems to indicate that photoelectric detectors may activate slightly sooner as many residential fires start out as slow, smoldering fires.

So photoelectric appears to be the way to go...

Ben.

[usenet]

I also tried phoning the local fire brigade for the flat in London. The response there was that they get so many requests like this that they ask people to put the request in writing and 'someone will get back to you'. Not a very useful response as one really needs to have a bit of a 'conversation' to get soemthing helpful in response to this sort of question.

[usenet]

OK, thanks, while everywhere describes the difference between ionisation and photoelectric detectors this is the first I've seen that specifically says photoelectric is less susceptible to false alarms from cigarette smoke.

[graham]

Are there any good web sites aimed at the residential market that list all the different types of detectors for sale?

Graham