We've all experienced the panic of hearing a smoke alarm go off and immediately jumping into action mode -- only to realize there's no emergency. The loud beep is grating and you may even be tempted to remove the batteries, but that could leave your home vulnerable to a real fire.
Before your frustration builds to the point of battery removal -- or insanity, follow these safety and prevention tips. Read more to find out why your smoke detector goes off and how you can deal with the false alarms.
How smoke detectors work
There are two different types of smoke detectors. Ionization smoke detectors have two plates with an electric charge flowing between them. When something -- like smoke -- flows between these two plates, the electric charge is interrupted and the alarm is triggered.
Photoelectric smoke detectors have a small light inside. When something enters the detector and reflects the light onto a sensor, the alarm is triggered.
Notice how both of these types of detectors don't really detect smoke. They're triggered by foreign objects interacting with parts inside the detectors. This means that anything that can float into your smoke detector, like vapor, steam, smoke and large puffs of dust, can trigger your smoke detector.
This is why it may go off when you're cooking, even if you're not burning anything. The steam coming off of the food is triggering the alarm. Hair spray and other aerosols sprayed near the detector can set it off, too.
The hows and whys of monitoring air quality in the home
See all photosHow to cope
The most obvious way to cope with annoying smoke detectors is to take them down. But that leaves you vulnerable if there is a real fire and isn't safe at all. Don't do it.
Instead, install your smoke alarms in strategic places, ventilate the area and replace old alarms.
Place your smoke alarms carefully throughout your home. Photoelectric smoke alarms are best near bathrooms and kitchens where there's a lot of steam because humidity doesn't affect them as much. Note that the National Fire Protection Association recommends placing detectors 10 feet (3 meters) from your stove to help prevent false alarms while cooking.
Next, be sure to use your kitchen's exhaust fan when cooking. If you let the smoke and humidity out through the fan's duct, it'll be less likely to set off your smoke alarm. Be sure to also use your exhaust fan or crack a window in the bathroom to prevent humidity or aerosols from wafting out to the alarm.
If you don't have smart smoke detectors, you may want to consider installing them. Some smart detectors include Nest Protect, Halo Smart Labs, First Alert and Roost.
You can quickly shut off these detectors using an app on your phone if there's a false alarm. Smoke detectors are far less aggravating when you don't need to climb on a chair to shut them off.
Read next: Here are our buying guide to help you pick the right smart smoke detector for your home.
Read more: These four projects for beginners will get your home smart in no time.
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Posted on: January 13, 2021; Updated on: January 13, 2021
By MVS Chandrashekhar
The most likely reason smoke detectors go off unexpectedly is that people aren’t changing the batteries in them often enough. In most sensors you might think of, the strength of the signal goes up when they detect what they’re supposed to.
But most smoke detectors are instead designed to go off when their electrical current goes down. That’s because smoke in the air will reduce the current. If your battery is dying, the current that’s flowing through your sensor also goes down. And so you can get a false positive.
People often change the battery when they move into the house and then never touch it after that. The battery is supposed to be changed at least once every six months or so, but most of us don’t. It’s only when the smoke alarm goes off, you check it, you make sure you’re not dead, and maybe then change it.
The second most common cause of false positives is having your smoke detector too close to your bathroom. If you take a hot shower, the steam from the hot shower can, in some cases, cause false positives. The steam from the shower can block the flow of the current, just as smoke does. Anything that’s sort of heavy in air can cause that to happen. You want the smoke detector to be near the kitchen, because often when you cook, smoke happens. So, open the window if you don’t want it to just go off randomly.
Another common cause is the volatile organic compounds in paints or other chemical treatments in the house. It’s the stuff that keeps your paint wet but also lets it dry once it’s on the wall. Some of them can set off these alarms as well. It just depends on how the sensor is tuned.
Most new sensors are pretty well tuned. They weren’t nearly as good in terms of the sensitivity even 10 years ago.
How do smoke detectors work?
Inside your smoke detector, there’s a small Americium-241 radiation source that’s a byproduct of nuclear fuel. It emits alpha particles, which you can think of as little bullets. These little bullets come out of the source and hit air molecules to break them apart.
When that happens, some broken pieces will be positively charged, and others will be negatively charged. And those two oppositely charged ones will be attracted to the negative and positive battery terminals in the smoke detector’s battery. This movement of charged particles is what we call electrical current.
If smoke is coming into the area where this breaking apart is happening, it will block the charged particles from moving, reducing the current. So, that lowered current is what your sensor interprets as, hey, there’s smoke here.
Is there a better smoke detector?
A newer kind of smoke detector is based on the photoelectric effect. It’s what Albert Einstein got the Nobel Prize for. When light hits something, it generates electric current — it’s very much like a mini solar cell. Engineers figured out how to tune a light source in a way that is sensitive to smoke.
The light can be shining and you get current. But when smoke goes in, it will make the light scatter a different way, or block the light in a certain way, and that will change the amount of current that’s flowing.
If it is tuned correctly, you can interpret that change in current as the presence of smoke. And again, you can get false positives because organic compounds often absorb infrared light really well. It’s similar to the Americium-241 smoke detectors in some ways. The photoelectric ones probably are more power intensive. So your battery life span may not be as good. But, hey, you should be changing it every six months anyway.
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Topics: College of Engineering and Computing