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When it comes to smoke detection, time is of the essence. That’s why we designed a test that simulates a real-life emergency.
The first thing to know is that there are two main types of fires that these products are designed for: smoldering fires and smoldering fires.
A smoldering (or slow-burning) fire refers to combustion that occurs on the surface of a solid material. Burning fires produce large amounts of dense smoke but cannot sustain flames. Think of a cigarette that burns slowly but never catches fire.
Smoke detection testing is currently underway.
A smoldering fire can turn into a smoldering fire if proper action is not taken immediately.
Smoldering fires are the ones we are most familiar with, and are usually caused by the ignition of any flammable material, such as flammable materials, wood, paper, etc. These materials generally produce less smoke than a smoldering fire but are more destructive.
We built a chamber containing the smoke detector under test and fed it with two different types of smoke through the chimney. Then we timed the speed of response. The sooner the smoke detector alarm is triggered, the better.
To simulate smoke from a burning fire, I lit 300g of charcoal and let it heat up for 10 minutes before feeding the smoke. I wanted to make sure that most of the coal was lit and that the smoke was thick enough to set off the alarm.
It was easy to recreate a roaring fire, just 30g of shredded paper does the trick. Again, I made sure there was a significant amount of smoke before bringing it through the chimney into the room.
To the great annoyance of my neighbors, who had to endure random smoke alarms going off, and to whom I sincerely apologize, I repeated the entire process three times for each smoke detector model under test and for each type of smoke, for a total of six test runs for each smoke detector. Finally, I calculated average response times. You can check them out in the chart below:
