When it comes to smoke detection, time is of the essence. So we designed a test that mimics a real-life emergency.

The first thing to know is that there are two main types of fire 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. Smoldering fires produce a lot of thick smoke but cannot sustain a flame. Think of a cigarette that burns slowly but never explodes.

A burning fire can and will become a burning fire if the right action is not taken immediately.

Flaming fires are the ones we are more familiar with, and they usually originate from the ignition of any flammable material, such as a flammable substance, wood, paper, etc. It usually produces less smoke than a burning fire but is more damaging.

We built a room with a smoke detector under test and fed it two different types of smoke through a chimney. Then, we timed the speed of the response. The sooner the smoke detector alarm is triggered, the better.

To simulate the smoke coming from a burning fire, I burned 300g of charcoal and heated it for 10 minutes before feeding the smoke. I want to make sure that most of the coals are burned and that the smoke is thick enough to raise the alarm.

Recreating a burning fire is easy, just 30g of shredded paper does the trick. Again, I made sure there was plenty of smoke before feeding it through the chimney and into the room.

To the great inconvenience of my neighbors, who had to endure random smoke alarms, and to whom I sincerely apologize, I repeated the entire process three times with each model of smoke detector under test. and each type of smoke, totaling six test runs per smoke. detector. Finally, I averaged the response times. You can check it in the chart below: