Best smoke detectors for 2024
When it comes to detecting smoke, time is of the essence. That is why we have designed a test that simulates an emergency situation in practice.
The first thing you need to know is that these products are designed for two main types of fires: smoldering fire and flaming fire.
A smoldering (or slow-burning) fire refers to the combustion that takes place at the surface of a solid material. Smoldering fires produce large amounts of thick smoke but cannot sustain a flame. Think of a cigarette that burns slowly, but never really bursts into flames.
Smoke detection testing is being conducted.
A smoldering fire can and will become a flaming fire if the right action is not taken immediately.
Flaming fires are the fires we are more familiar with, and they are usually started by the ignition of combustible material, such as a combustible fabric, wood, paper, etc. These generally produce less smoke than a smoldering fire, but are more destructive.
We built a room that houses the smoke detector to be tested and fed the two different types of smoke into this room through a chimney. We then timed the speed of the reaction. The sooner the smoke detector alarm went off, the better.
To simulate smoke from a smoldering fire, I lit 300 grams of charcoal and let it heat up for 10 minutes before adding the smoke. I wanted to make sure most of the coals were lit and that the smoke was thick enough to set off the alarm.
Recreating a flaming fire was easy, just 30 grams of shredded paper was enough. Again I made sure there was a significant amount of smoke before feeding it up the chimney into the room.
Much to the inconvenience of my neighbors, who had to tolerate smoke detectors going off randomly, and to whom I sincerely apologize, I repeated the entire process three times per smoke detector model tested and per type of smoke, for a total of six test runs per smoke. detector. Finally, I averaged the response times. You can view them in the chart below:
