I have a house wired smoke alarm. I noticed that a burned English muffin will set it off even though there is no smoke that I can see. On the other hand if I leave my wood stove door open too long and I see a cloud of smoke in the room it will NOT set of the alarm. Just an observation. I know many false alarms are set off in apartments and assisted living places because of burned toast. Maybe it's not really a smoke alarm but a burned toast alarm.
Smoke alarm or stink alarm
Mar 27, 2010
3 Replies
There are two methods used by common domestic smoke detectors. One is optical, it sees the smoke, the other uses elextrical charges. Both detect different kinds of fires best. For best protection you want both. I don't recall which, but one is less sensitive to false cooking/frying alarms.
The optical detection models are recommended for kitchen areas because they are less sensitive to the type of emissions that are commonly produced by cooking and cooking appliances, and produce much fewer false alarms. The ionization detectors are more likely to give early warning in the case of a slow, smoldering fire. We used to have a lot of false alarms in our kitchen area until we substituted the optical for the ionization model in our kitchen nook.
Hell, I've got one that gets set off by the steam from my shower. I had to move it to the other side of the room to get it to keep quiet.
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