Children and smoke alarms

[Clefable]

What with the awful fires in the news, I thought it was worth posting that standard fire alarms fail to wake young children in the majority of cases.

Studies done after the awful Mick Philpott arson case, where five of the children died in their sleep despite smoke alarms being operational, show that standard alarms struggle to wake children in around 80% of cases. Intermittent sounds work better but the best results were with a voice alarm, where kids woke up in 10-15 seconds where three minutes of continual blaring didn’t.

This means that in the case of a fire, don’t assume the alarm will have woken your children, even young teenagers. It’s instinct to run downstairs to see what’s going on, but wake the children first because if you get trapped down there, they may not wake up, even with an alarm blaring.

We had a false alarm last month around 4am, every alarm in house going as they are linked, and my kids did not wake up. We stupidly went downstairs to investigate and we should not have. Thankfully it was just a faulty sensor on one.

You can get alarms that use voice alerts but annoyingly I haven’t found any that fit the fairly recent Scottish Government regulations. I may buy a separate voice one for upstairs.

Just something to bear in mind.

We had a house fire and although it happened at 7pm, it was December so very dark. Luckily we were all up and about obviously so got out quickly.

The fire spread so quickly I couldn't believe it. It is shocking how fast a fire spreads.

The thing I wanted to share was that it was an electrical fire and within five seconds pir electric cut off and the house was in pitch darkness. In terms of escape plans it's worth thinking about that and how you would get out in the dark and ensure children are rescued. I would definitely recommend practicing your escape as it takes away some of the shock/panic element .

That’s what we have as well. It’s also useful that it says whether it’s going off for fire or carbon monoxide (as in, it yells “fire” if it detects smoke).

Our old one used to just have a different alarm tone for each.

The Boxing Day fire was so so tragic. As a result of that we’ve bought an additional 2 smoke detectors and a heat detector. I’ve also talked to the children about what to do but my youngest, 8 is now really scared and finding it difficult to sleep. I tried to explain it’s like school where practice happens but won’t usually be needed in real time. It’s hard to know how to pitch it.

It’s really tricky. We did it as a bit of game with our two but they are a bit younger. We pretended to be in bed asleep and DH set the fire alarm off and then we acted out what might happen (with some silly stuff to keep it light!). Not sure how much it will help them tbh but it was useful for me and DH at least.