How to Install a Smoke Alarm

hey kids so today's video is actually sponsored by the fire safety research institute uh fsri they actually reached out to me and i thought boy this is a good fit because i actually had some questions and uh in the video today you'll see that i'm i'm interviewing stephen kerber with fsri and kind of picking his brain and i'm learning right alongside you because there's certain things that i needed clear clarification on so you'll see that in the video and then at the end of this video i'll actually show you uh how to install one and then talk about a couple different options you have for smoke detectors you know with carbon monoxide detectors as well where they're two in one and i think i think that's a good thing to have so uh and then i'll show you how to install one so but first i do have a dad joke for you so uh last week i cooked dinner for some people and everyone thought it was terrible but the joke's on them because my smoke detector thought it was fire so anyway let's get started i'm here today with steve kerber with fire safety research institute uh steve i love to bring in experts so tell us a little bit about your background hey rob well my my most important title is dad i've got two sons uh cameron and owen and uh professionally i'm the executive director of ul's fire safety research institute uh so i lead a team that studies fire how fire grows and spreads and how to keep you safe oh that's great yeah i love to bring experts on my channel because i you know i do the best with what with my knowledge but i think it's important to bring in people that know a lot more than me so uh so let's just run through some questions that i you know um we've had a little bit of dialogue already but i uh yeah so we'll go through some questions and then also i'll throw in some on my own because i you know i'll admit my ignorance as well so why is it important to have smoke alarms in your home i think but most importantly having working smoke alarms can save your life i think that's certainly utmost importance and a lot of people don't realize how fast fire is i mean you may have as little as three minutes or less to escape your home if you have a fire so you need every second you can possibly get and that working smoke alarms gonna let you know when that clock is starting and uh get you to move yeah okay i you know um even speaking from my own self i i i'm just again uh gonna be all transparency i uh you know i don't necessarily it's kind of an afterthought and so it is something that we really need to be paying attention to because it's it's important because it saves your can save a life and you don't want to in hindsight go ah i wish i would have done that you know so it's important to to do it ahead of time so so how many smoke alarms do people need throughout throughout their house and where should they put them well it's uh the best guidance is that we want at least one smoke alarm on every level of your home that includes your basement and then we want one in every sleeping room so in every bedroom and then outside every sleeping area so if you've got three bedrooms off of the hallway you want one in the hallway in the middle of those three bedroom doors and then one behind each one of those doors okay and one thing that we've talked about that i didn't know about is the fact that smoke smoke alarms can actually talk to each other now there's certain yeah so if one goes off it sets the other ones off i thought what a cool feature i had never heard that before yeah even better we call that interconnected smoke alarms so that can be either through wires or it can also be through a wireless signal so the important part there is let's say you have a fire on the opposite side of your house where you're sleeping that if the one that detects the fire that's closest to the fire if that goes into alarm the one in your bedroom will go into alarm as well so you don't have to hear the one that's on the other side of the house the key is to make sure those smoke alarms are working doesn't do you any good if you've got them up on the ceiling and they've got dead batteries or they've expired so they have a test button so you want to push and hold that test button and you're going to hear a loud beep and that's going to be followed by the alarm going into alarm or going off so as you push that button if you hear it if it's loud that's great if it's quiet or doesn't go into alarm it's time to replace that battery your time to get a new alarm okay okay and i have seen smoke alarms that um you can't change the battery you actually got to change the whole smoke alarm itself um is that is that pretty common these days you just change the whole smoke alarm absolutely so you can get what they call sealed alarms that have a lithium-ion long life battery in them designed to last many years depending on the type it could be seven to ten years and that way you don't have to replace that battery but once you test it no longer works or we hit that 10-year mark we want to replace that alarm okay okay so how would you again this is for myself uh how would you um encourage somebody to keep track of the 10-year mark i you know we we're dealing with so much in our lives these days you got stuff coming at you every day and it's like oh you know it's an afterthought but it's so important so is there any you have any insight there as far as a way to remind you to to do it every 10 years that's a great question i mean it's i know i have trouble remembering what i need to do tomorrow uh let alone what i need to do 10 years from now um but a thing that we've seen people do is as you put that smoke alarm up you look at the manufacture date on the back of the smoke alarm and then you go ahead and set a calendar invite for yourself so you set a recurring calendar invite let's say monthly so that you test it monthly or i mean now that all of our software's cloud-based and stuff like that you can schedule a meeting for yourself uh 10 years out that who knows you get surprised and i don't remember putting that on my calendar 10 years ago but heck i got to go replace all my smoke alarms now ah good insight yeah that's not something was that was that we talked about earlier so kind of put you on the spot there nice uh so let's see how do you know if your smoke alarms are expired and when do they need to be replaced i guess we kind of already talked about that one thing i thought about too as you were just talking i wonder you know in it in the discreet way if there might if you might want to just write on a sharpie on the side of the thing you know saying when it's expired instead of having to take it off and look at it and sometimes those are a little bit difficult to see when it needs to be replaced maybe that's anyway just throwing your spot on i mean a lot of the manufacturers will actually have a sticker on the side that's that's exactly what that's there for so you don't have to take it down to see that or some of them will put it on the back so if you just unscrew it a click take it down look at the back it's got that manufacturer date on it and you could absolutely put a sharpie on there needs to be replaced this day 10 years from that day right right i like it so uh so if people already have uh working smoke alarms inside their homes what else can they do to improve home fire safety well there's three main things that we want people to do i mean we've talked predominantly about smoke alarms incredibly important that you have them working and you have them in the right place next you mentioned clothes before your doze we've done a lot of research looking into how do we keep people safe if you do have a fire and because fire spread so fast today we found that a closed door so having a closed door between you and where that fire could be it's going to buy you those precious seconds potentially minutes to try and figure out what's going on i mean we're not used to waking up in the middle of the night because an alarm's going off so it's important that you've got time to figure things out and because fire spread so fast we want to put a barrier between you and where that fire is to stop that smoke and that heat from getting to you so you can do the third thing which is execute your escape plan so we know that people in the moment are not going to know what to do so you've got to be prepared and planning that escape plan thinking about fire safety with your family and knowing what we call the plan a b and c so plan a is know the quickest way out of your home so if you're in your bedroom and looking around it's going to be out that bedroom door and then probably out the front door of your house you're going to go outside go to your meeting place and make sure you've got all your family members and call 9-1-1 for help that plan c is or the plan b is all right that is blocked so you wake up you go to your door hallway's full of smoke you can't see a safe way out your plan b is well i'm gonna go to the window and if you're on the first floor you can go out that window and outside and follow your plan or if you're on a upper floor of your house and you don't have an escape ladder now we're talking about that plan c which is get behind that closed door if any smoke's coming into your room put some towels or clothes or whatever to block that smoke from coming into your room get to that window get help call 9-1-1 and have that door hold up for you so the fire department can come and rescue you okay yeah very good we shared offline uh that um you know when i was a kid i remember that this was important you know and in school of course i'm old now so i don't know what they're teaching in school necessarily or if they're teaching this and it's so important you know again like we like like we talked about you know uh because you don't want this to be you don't have regrets after the fact you want to be prepared and have this uh you know where it's just like you said you know when a fire comes you're not probably going to be thinking real clearly you're going to be you know and if you haven't rehearsed it oh no what do we do um so i think it is important to have that do we have resources for that is there like a link that i could put um for people to go to if they wanted more information on an escape plan what 100 so uh you're absolutely right you don't get any do-overs i mean this is one of those things where it's like man i wish i had planned well you don't get that opportunity in most cases um so we want people to plan and we've got resources at close yourdoor.org that will tell you everything you team need to know about installing smoke alarms clothes before your does and making escape plans nice okay good to know uh and then you know i also ask you about a fire extinguisher um is that is it important to have a fire extinguisher are we talking smoke alarms because you know for a bigger fire but you know i've always thought maybe there's a false sense of security with the with a fire extinguisher um i think it's important to put out small fires but go ahead and if you could speak to that you're absolutely right if it's a small fire i mean the general rule of thumb is we want to leave the firefighting to the professional firefighters however if you have a small fire in your home that's not growing it's not spreading quickly it's contained let's say it's on a pan on the stove for example one you've got to know how to use that extinguisher again so it comes back to planning and then we want everyone to have a safe way out so if you do decide you're going to use it because the fire is small you also want to make sure that you've got a clear escape route and that you don't have the potential of getting blocked or trapped and that everyone in your house is making their way out and calling the fire department so that if you're not successful everybody's still safely getting out yeah very good very good so the three things to remember are the you know having a smoke alarm having a fire escape plan and then close before you doze this has been so educational to me you know trying to get my head around exactly what i have been doing wrong so uh so it's very good one and one thing we've uh you know it's i don't know if it's funny or it's just if or if it's sad but i think a lot of us will uh take the battery out of our smoke detector because maybe we put it too close to a kitchen or whatever and it's going off all the time and it's a nuisance and so you know i'm guilty i i i've done it myself and you know and that's not that's not good so i i guess it really comes down to where you're placing those smoke detectors so that they're not going off all the time um and just being smart about where you put them absolutely so when we say one on every level it's not one in every room so we normally want to keep it out of the kitchen keep it away from the kitchen maybe in a family room or at the bottom of uh the steps to the second floor because you're absolutely right it's incredibly common to have what we call nuisance cooking alarms you burn the toast you burn the food and now you're stuck with not only the smoke in your kitchen but now you've got this blaring sound uh driving you crazy so a lot of the new alarms will have a hush button and what that does is as you set it off you go ahead you hit that hush button it desensitizes it for a few minutes so that you can get the smoke out you can open the windows you can fan the smoke out of your house and then as that smoke is gone your alarm's still up your alarm still has its battery in it and it's ready to work the next time that it's needed yeah good to know um and do you does it matter if it's wired or or um not wired i i don't know if if one is better than the other i you know my house is built in mid 70s and so nothing's wired as far as that goes um so and and would you recommend that a person would use the same smoke detector in all the rooms or does that matter i was just thinking for familiarity i'm just again thinking for myself here uh because because each one's a little bit different and then you know oh this one i got to do this to hush it this one i got to do that you know i think it'd probably be a good idea to maybe try to stick with the same model for each each location you're spot on i mean you want to make it easy for yourself so it really doesn't matter whether it's wired or battery the wired ones do have a battery backup in case you lose power um so that they they work all the time but yeah i'm with you i mean i i like having them all be the same and i like replacing them or testing them on the same frequency also knowing how they work there's also combination smoke alarm carbon monoxide alarms so you only have to have one alarm instead of two so you want to do what's convenient for you and uh the simpler you can make it because you're not thinking about it all the time so i think your your advice is spot on you want to put them all in replace them all at once and then test them all at the same time yeah and you recommend uh you were talking about monthly testing them but um at a minimum we should be testing them every time daylight savings time is what i've always heard is you know whenever we're changing our clocks forward or back it's just a good reminder that's the time to do it it's a good reminder to uh also if you have battery alarms that do have removable battery to replace those batteries and and don't wait until you hear the chirp it which always seems to be at three o'clock in the morning um get get that on a regular schedule so yeah if you do that every six months at daylight savings um and even if you test them at that frequency it's it's in your head you're thinking about your family safety that's also a great time to say hey kids we we haven't talked about fire safety or practice our escape plan um let's one day light savings let's do it during the day time when everybody's awake and then at night let the next six months let's look at all right what would we do if we were sleeping and we were all in our beds what would i expect all of you to do yeah well this has been great it's been educational to me like i said i've learned a lot um just talking to you even before before going online with you uh so i don't know is there anything else you'd like to add or um and also i do got to acknowledge the fact that you're a dad that's congratulations it's uh you know it's a blessing and it is very rewarding and my kids are out of the house now and so you know enjoy that time while you have it i i do enjoy them uh it is a blessing um the one thing i would add is as as your kids do move on uh they become responsible for their own fire safety so it's important that as dads we go ahead and pass that information onto our kids and maybe ask some questions of let's say they go off to the university um do you have smoke alarms are those smoke alarms working do you have an escape plan you're now living somewhere else how do you get out uh don't think that dad's gonna wake you up um that you now have to be responsible for that yourself um so i think that's an incredible transition in life where it's really important that we pass that fire safety how do i onto our kids so that they now know and can pass it on from there yeah that's a great point thanks for thanks for bringing that up because i think you know you go off or the kids go off and the last thing they're thinking of is that you know they go off and they rent an apartment or they get you know on campus housing or what have you and they got so many other things that are new to them that they're dealing with it is important to remind them that you know do you have a do you have a smoke smoke alarm uh you know have you tested it because i think that's probably one of the furthest things from their mind at that time because they're juggling so much new so many new things yeah and as a parent that's one of your things that's that might be a little bit of a safety blanket for you i mean you're you're you're scared because they're now out of your house um so but you should sleep a little better at night i mean even if they the best case scenario is they have fire sprinklers um so if they do have a fire in their dorm or in their off-campus housing uh people are not dying in sprinkler buildings that sprinkler is putting that fire out while it's small and uh that's the best situation we can have yeah good okay that's all the those are all the questions i have and i'll include a lot more in the description of some of the things that people can do i guess i yeah one thing that we've talked about too and i this will also be in the description but you know as far as uh mounting them on the ceiling or mounting them on the wall um is do you have a preference there my preference is on the ceiling because if you think about smoke and heat going up the first place they're going to go and begin to spread out is at the ceiling but it's also accepted to have it close to the top close to the ceiling at the top of the wall okay yeah as long as we're mounting it not halfway down the wall as long as it's up close to the ceiling absolutely okay well very cool that's that's about it all i have and yeah like i said it's been very educational for me and i i think this will be very educational for for my viewers and hopefully they'll stick with it like we talked about a lot of times i think it's hard to stick with videos for very long but it is important because there's a lot of information here and so hopefully people people have learned as much as i have well thank you for sharing and thank you for all you do to educate everybody all right so i hope that was helpful insight for you um so the one that i'm gonna actually install is this one it's a combination smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector uh and all these are they're pretty simple and i'm gonna get this one is a a 10-year battery life so you don't have to worry about the battery uh and all you do is just mount this to the ceiling and then you mount and then this just clips into it it just twists in pretty easy and then on the back they have a date to tell you uh when you should change it because they're supposed to be changed every 10 years uh because there's the you know a lot of the ones that um have been out there for a while take a battery a 9 volt battery and then it is a good habit to get into around daylight savings time to replace those batteries and then you should really be checking your uh your smoke detector every month uh but i know you know we all get busy and time gets away from us and you know if you can make a mental note to do that that would be just one more way to feel safe and it's not hard you just push the button to see if it's if it's working okay so these are very very easy to install basically you're just gonna install this mounting plate and i'm installing that in the middle of my um upstairs hallway this particular one i'm gonna install like right in here and all you're going to need to do um yeah so we'll install this plate and then this just clips onto it pretty simple so let me show you what i'm going to do and you know not to make this more difficult than it is this is the anchor that came with this particular one so what how these work is you just you make a hole and then you just tap these in and then the and then the screws kind of tiny screws those just screw in right pretty pretty easy um you've seen me do a video on a heavier anchor you don't need it for this though just use these they're fine um all right so i'm just gonna walk through that real quick all right so i'm just going to mark up where i'm going to put the holes so do that and that okay okay so then i went ahead and make a hole make a hole there just you can drill a little hole whatever you need to do to make that hole a little bit bigger i got this nail that i'm just putting in here to make that hole big enough to where those anchors can fit in there okay then you just take your anchor and you tap it in get it started by pushing it tap it the rest of the way okay and then the same thing on the other one okay so now we're just screwing in our screws into those into those anchors there you go and then then you just snap this guy on and this has got a 10-year battery in it like i said so it'll should be good but it's always good to test them around around the uh daylight savings time still it's good to come up here and push this button so it's good all right i hope this whole video was helpful to you and like i said i you know hopefully you learned something because i know i did uh there's some things that i didn't know you know a lot of times you walk into a place and you see a smoke detector and you just assume somebody that installed it knew what they were doing and so it's good to have this information and so i thought it made sense to to partner with fsri so anyway thanks for watching i hope this was helpful for you and god bless you