Up to Snuff
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Getting Smoke Detectors Up to Snuff |
Over the past 20 years, smoke detectors have become household safety items with a large global market dominated by U.S. companies. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has been intimately involved with this development. |
In the 1960s, smoke detectors
already were available but they had yet to become household items. The rule to the
consumer was caveat emptor since the detectors sometimes didn't even sound off in
heavy smoke. There were no standards by which the performance of different brands could be
compared or for determining the actual effectiveness of the detectors in helping reduce
injury, death and property loss due to fire. In 1974, however, Underwriters Laboratories
(UL), one of the country's premier product testing organizations, sent a researcher to the
National Institute of Standards and Technology with the
mission of collaborating with researchers there to develop the badly needed standards. In a set of seminal test burns using homes slated for demolition, the UL/NIST team made critical qualitative measures of such relationships as how the amount of escape time depends upon the placement of smoke detectors in a home. From these and subsequent studies, NIST research directly affected how many detectors you have in your home, where they are located, how loud they are, how sensitive they are (you don't want them going off every time you cook), the kinds of batteries that go into them, the presence of a test button, and the self-monitoring feature that produces a chirp when the batteries get too low. Not only do smoke detectors save thousands of lives, they also have saved billions of dollars in property losses, and they constitute a domestic market of at least $100 million. Collaborations between NIST's Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL) and industry also have enabled U.S. manufacturers of smoke detectors to capture 50 percent of the world market. |
| Links: | Learn about a current
smoke detection project at NIST. NIST division in which fire related research is going on: Fire Research Division More general information about fire research and the fire safety and response community: Fire Research Information Service |