Check your smoke detectors.

Just did mine while I was off for the holiday. I tend to change the batteries often when I’m using the wood burner
 
Just replace mine.

Last Thursday a friend of mine just lost his house (total loss) to an electrical fire. He is a single guy and was not home. IMO A blessing in disguise, really, he had a water leak ever since he did an addition 10 years ago.
 
A blessing in disguise???
The house has a lot of bad memories, bad divorce, cheating whore of a wife and so on. IMO he is better to be out of it and rebuild new. It was paid off so the insurance check should be sizable and enough to rebuild nicely.
Doesn't leak anymore.

Water damage must have been considerable.

Leaks like a sieve now the roof is gone LOL.
 
Every room in the house has a smoke detector except the dining room, hard wired. The alarm system has wireless detectors for every bedroom and the kitchen, the motion sensors are also flame detectors, two in the house and one in the man cave. Rate of rise temperature sensors in house and cave. Wife thinks I went overboard. I’ve seen house fires, ain’t pretty. Thanks for the reminder Jim.
 
Jim, whats your advice for this annoying little issue we have........Every time I cook the kitchen alarm goes off. (It's not my cooking, really!) Every time we put a log on the fire the living room alarm goes off. The alarms are all placed so high that I'm not tall enough to reset them and the shrill noise hurts and runs me out of the house. I really do want the alarms in every room but can't deal with the constant sounding.
 
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At the very minimum you want one detector on each level of your house, as well as a good CO detector on the main floor....not near a CO source.


Smoke detectors are typically not placed in kitchens any more....for the reason you gave. Neither are they commonly placed in rooms with wood burning stoves.


As long as you have a detector somewhere on each floor you should be fine. Every room is unnecessary.



I do like a detector in each bed room however.
 
Thanks, Jim. Our house is one level and the rooms are small. Aside from the kitchen and living room we have 2 other detectors....bedroom and our computer room. And a CO detector in the living room. I feel better about it now. Thanks.
 
Up here it's common to have dual detectors. Smoke and co in one. I have multiple brands and standalone versions of each.

As to smoke leakage from a wood stove i strongly suggest burning a wood stove in cycles of full loads, espescially if it is a modern 'reburn' unit with secondary combustion. This means once the fire is established you burn it down to coals, crank your air control wide open and crack the door for 30-60 seconds before you fill it up full with wood. Continue to burn on high and bring the temp of the stove up while off gassing the fresh load and then incrementally cutting your air back as the load settles in and secondary combustion is achieved. Two things. 1. This is how modern efficient stoves are meant to be run. 2. When you load on coals you will have much less smoke escape. Modern woodstoves are not meant to be fed a piece or two at a time as it will fit and often will have smoke spillage if trying to load with active flames due to the restrictive design of baffles or other clean burn tech.

If you must load a piece or two at a time. Crack the door slightly for a bit first. Most doors on wood stoves are large enough in relation to the overall firebox size that if just opened they will most assuredly create a negative pressure, overcome draft, and allow smoke spillage.
 
Ha! I love the smell of wood smoke, been around it all my life, reminds me of camping. When we built our house over 22 years ago, we installed smoke detectors. Well with an old-fashioned wood cook stove that runs year round, those annoying little bastards didn't last long. Choices we make.
 
I'll add to this discussion from a Fire Captain's perspective.

Most smoke detectors were designed to last 10 years with a battery change annually. We run a lot of false alarms caused by old smoke detectors, I believe newer detectors are better at alarming when they should.

There was a period of hardwired detectors that came with and without battery backups. You want a battery backup.

The new generation stand alone smoke detectors can be purchased with a 10 year lithium battery. You just replace the whole thing every 10 years. These are my favorite detector. They are especially well suited for spots that are hard to access, you only have to get to it once every 10 years.

In my area, building codes are going overboard, in my opinion, requiring a detector in every room and hallway.

I would recommend at a minimum one in the hallway adjacent to bedrooms and one on each floor, stay away from the kitchen.

Add a CO detector if you have gas appliances, wood stove, fireplace, etc.
 
Thanks for the reminder.

I saw a post recently about a house fire that started in the hearth. The HO had place logs in and around the area of the hearth to help room dry. The residual heat from the hearth combusted the logs. Luckily during the day so no serious loss of life or property damage.

We bought a new house in the summer, the alarm monitoring system includes hard wired smoke as well as water and intruder detection. We had been in a day or so and decided to cook steaks for dinner. The griddle pan got real hot and set of the alarms with the smoke. Picture me and the missus legging it around the house trying to mute the alarms not exactly knowing where they were. LOL. Just as we got the alarms silenced both our mobiles started ringing from the monitoring company checking we were ok. We explained what had happened and just after we hung up the house alarms kicked in again...

Oh, how we laughed!
 
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