The days surrounding the time change to Daylight Savings Time are also a good time to remember to check out your smoke and CO alarms. State Fire Marshal Dan Krier says modern alarms are very reliable if they’re maintained…
“When a smoke alarm is present at the time of fire, they only activate about 50% of the time, because the other 50% of the time for the data reported to us, the battery is missing or it has been disconnected.”
Krier says alarms do have a shelf life, and do need replacement from time to time, but if yours are pretty current models, all it should take is a test and a battery change…
“If your smoke alarm or your CO alarm is less than 10 years old and it functions well when you do the test, now is a great time to change the batteries.”
Krier says when a smoke detector is working the way it should, it alerts people about 96% of the time.
