Can you hear anything?
No?
Well that's a huge problem because this working
"smoke detector"
should be freaking out right now
but it thinks everything is just fine
We all trust smoke detectors
to save our life in a fire
But…
what if we shouldn't?
At least not all of them
For decades some firefighters and scientists
have been claiming that the most common smoke alarms
Americans use are dangerously flawed
Did not go off until the room was filled with thick smoke
They will not detect certain types of common fires
in a home
in a timely fashion
The most common type
has an alarming rate of failure…
Alarming rate of failure….
Oh
and here's the insidious part
if I move that same smoke alarm to my kitchen
where I'm cooking food
and I open the door
I think many of you know what's about to happen
<Alarming>
Why is it alarming over nothing?
Why is it alarming over nothing
but also ignoring dangerous smoke?
I got to the bottom of this
and I want to show you how a flurry
of engineering, science and regulation
came together
to save our lives
but also left us with a dangerous blind spot in detecting fires
By the end we'll find out
how this smoke alarm sausage is made
and supposedly how these issues
have finally been fixed in 2024
with these
the new generation of alarms
Let's talk about what that means
and whether you can stop
waving the white towel
This video is brought to you by Novium
more on them later
Most of you know what a smoke alarm does,
sense a fire and make a loud sound to get you out
The earliest alarms started to be commercially
available in the 1890s and these were really simple:
a thermometer and an alarm
But the problem is when a fire starts in another room,
by the time the heat reaches the detector,
your home is burning and you probably
aren't making it out alive
So inventors thought
Why don't we detect smoke instead?
You can see signs of a fire
way before any heat reaches you
In the 1930s the Ionization Alarm was invented
and today make up 87% of all American alarms
probably the ones you have at home
But to understand why they're not detecting
some types of smoke
we need to take a closer look
at the sensor
So let's pop off the dome and see what's inside…
Whoa!
Radiation!
In the middle is a small radioactive puck
shooting out alpha particles like a miniature fireworks show
Ionizing
aka charging
the air above it with electricity which creates
an electric current that the alarm can monitor
When smoke crashes the party
it's packed with a whole ton of smoke particles
that act like a group of bullies
knocking away the alpha particles
and dropping the flow of electricity
As more of these troublemakers rush in
the current takes a nosedive
and once it falls below a certain point
the alarm goes off
letting you know there's a problem
<Alarming>
This new technology was a game-changer!
By the 70s
these alarms were selling by the millions
and have saved tens of thousands of lives since
They've also brought with them
a new source of frustration
I can be cooking and seeing no smoke
and the fire alarm goes off
you're panicking
you have to get a towel to wave at the fire alarm
And it’s all really stressful
So then
What's the cause of all these false alarms?
Turns out when you're cooking a meal
there's a whole bunch of tiny particles flying off your food
and most of them are too small
to see with your naked eye
But to your ionization alarm
it's a massive flood of particles that look just like smoke
That quickly drop the voltage and then…
Sigh…
how annoying
But here's the thing
that same sensitivity that drives you crazy
is actually a lifesaver
when it comes to detecting a type of fire
called a flaming fire
You know
when you're cooking you get distracted
cuz you're chatting up your girl
and your food suddenly catches on fire
Flaming fire
This also gives off a ton of tiny particles
that an ionization alarm quickly reacts to
giving you time to put it out
or escape your home
So then, why is it sleeping on the job here?
Turns out the sensor is detecting them,
but it needs more smoke before it goes off
because this
is a different type of fire
and it produces a different type of smoke particle
Let me explain
Let's say you're at home and you go to sleep
with a cigarette in your hand
or more likely today
your power strip overheats and it starts burning the material
There's no flame but a ton of smoke
This is a smoldering fire
Just like what's happening here
notice
no flame but it's burning
Zoom in
And the smoke particles this time are HUGGGEE
which is why the smoke is so visible
Compared to what was coming out of the oven
So then, why isn't the alarm going off?
That's because smoldering fires release way fewer particles
and an ionization sensor is all about
the number of particles
It can't actually see how thick this smoke is
So smoldering smoke has to keep building and building
before it finally goes off and during this time
it's filling your home with an especially toxic smoke
Now imagine you're sleeping
your sense of smell is on vacation,
here comes carbon monoxide and other chemicals
that put you into a deeper and deeper sleep...
forever…
But let's say the smoke doesn't get you
Get out of here!
Nobody likes you!
If you don't extinguish a smoldering fire fast enough…
<PFFFFFFFFF>
Thanks to modern construction your sofa or mattress
can become a roaring inferno in as little as 3 minutes
compared to 17 plus in vintage furniture
and that's because older furniture was made
from natural materials like linen and cotton
Today we use synthetic materials as they're cheaper,
easier to clean
but they also burn way faster
thanks to their chemical structure
Check this out
natural materials are like a net
they are bound together
and require more time and energy to break apart
while synthetic materials are like gasoline for fire
simple, uniform, and quick to release energy
When working on my animations
I sometimes reach for paper to think through ideas
like whether I would show the double bonds in natural materials
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Now, let's get back to the story on ionization alarms
and how they were slow to the smoldering fire party
Ionization alarms were accused of being
too slow to save your life in a fire
So couldn't manufacturers just increase the sensitivity?
Problem solved right?
Well not quite
as false alarms would happen even more
and I think we know what most people will do next
<Garbage, cat screaming>
Wow, this is a problem and starting in the 90s
This was getting public attention.
They don't detect smoke,
They're...uhhh
they're nothing more than a flame detector
I would have had the visibility in order to find those keys,
open those doors,
get me and my children out of there
and I wouldn't be talking to you today
There are many people in graves today in Australia
because they thought that they had the right type
of alarm when they didn't
When he says the 'The Right Type'
he's talking about these
a Photoelectric alarm
and according to some firefighters and scientists
these will save your life in a fire
If we could wave the magic wand right now
and eliminate all the ionization smoke alarms
and replace them with photoelectric
in the US we would save 1500 lives a year
We would cut our fire deaths in half
To understand why they thought photoelectric was so much better
let's get inside and see what makes it tick
The most important change is the sensor
and once I lift the dome it looks completely different underneath
as it now uses a light source and a light detector
not radiation to pick up smoke
Under normal conditions an LED creates light
which bounces off the dome and away from the light sensor
but if we add a little smoke
the light scatters and the sensor can detect more
and more light until it passes a threshold
triggering the alarm
Remember the large, but few particles in smoldering smoke?
Now, it's easily seen and easily detected
and those pesky cooking particles?
They remain invisible until you start burning your food
which means you'll have far less
false alarms that come out of nowhere
So all those ionization haters were telling everyone
Ban Ionization!
Photoelectric is the way to go!
There's opposition though
other experts and manufacturers who were like
woah, hold on
slow your roll
Photoelectric sensors have a weakness
they take longer at detecting flaming fires
compared to ionization
as visible smoke needs to build up first
Trouble was, no one in the 90s really knew
who was right as the current studies were inconclusive
The government, caught in the middle
feeling the heat and were like
"Fine, I'll do it myself!"😤
In the early 2000s a few agencies came together
and forked over a million dollars to NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology
They bought buildings and wired them up
with fancy equipment and set different kinds of fires
to understand how that affects smoke alarms
For example
how a smoldering chair in the living room
will produce a different result
from a flaming mattress in the bedroom
or cooking oil in the kitchen area
In the end 50 tests were run looking at variables like type of detectors
their location
and whether doors were open or closed
That study produced this
396 pages worth of documentation
that only nerds would love
Luckily for us
There's an official Q&A that summarizes
"do ionization detectors provide enough time to save lives?"
And here's what they found:
in flaming fires
both types of alarms provided enough time for you to escape
with ionization being a little faster
In smoldering fires,
ionization still gives you enough time to escape but this time
Photoelectric is faster…
By 30 minutes!
HUGE
BIG
This was the smoking gun for ionization critics
<gun cocking> See you in hell
They used this data to lobby
And require photoelectric alarms to be used in a few states
but unfortunately for them
the study came to a different conclusion
that both types of alarms are safe
Most states kept the status quo
legally you can use any alarm
but they recommend in the fine print
you should really have both types for the best protection
Of course barely anyone knows this
and it never fixed the real problem
Why can't we go to a store
and buy a smoke alarm that works against all fires
Well good news!
That finally exists
you just need to look for the
new 8th generation of smoke alarms
To understand we need to talk about
who actually decides what's safe
You see
I used to think the government
handled all safety standards
But by the powers of the federal government
private companies like UL are given the authority
to set safety rules on some products that manufacturers have to follow
This includes smoke alarms
and in America that standard is called
UL 217
and starting June 30, 2024
all newly produced alarms must follow
the new 8th generation standard
which finally fixes the problems found
in the government test
The first deals with false alarms from cooking
A hamburger is broiled and these new alarms
have to resist the smoke created
until there's a dense amount of it
Second, it needs to quickly detect smoldering polyurethane foam
Remember this?
That's polyurethane
and over the last 40 years it has become
the primary cushioning material
in things like your mattress
pillows and sofa
It's also the deadly reason behind the 30 minute delay in ionization alarms.
When polyurethane foam smolders
it produces 10x less particles than the paper and wood used in UL's older tests
and ionization alarms
which rely on detecting particle numbers
are incredibly slow at detecting this new
common, and dangerous type of fire
But all of that has finally been fixed
with these new 8th generation alarms
and they're available right now just like one...
Wait, what?
This is an ionization alarm?!
It passed the new standard?!
Weren't we just talking about how ionization
was no good?!
Well, I did some research
and the solution is ingenious!
In 2015 UL commissioned this enormous study
on the characteristics of smoke,
most importantly documenting what different types of smoke
look like to different sensors
Like this graph
Which shows how an ionization sensor
sees smoldering wood and foam
as being very different than broiling hamburgers
manufacturers used data like this to create new detection algorithms
for 8th generation alarms
Which are far more complicated than older generation models
that set off the alarm once smoke goes over a programmed threshold
In comparison
In 8th generation alarms
as smoke levels approaches the threshold
it starts a giga-brain mode
It’s analyzing the data coming in
seeing how fast it's rising
the smoothness, etc
to see if it's a real fire
or cooking smoke
This is a simplified explanation of how decades of science and engineering
finally came together
to finally fix the problems with smoke alarms in America
We can finally stop waving the white flag
So you might be wondering should you rush out
and replace your alarms with these 8th generation models?
First of all
Check if the ones you have now actually work
An old model is better than nothing
On what to replace, here's my thoughts
If you have ionization-only alarms in your house
if any are older than 10 years
or they go off while you're cooking
It's time to replace them
You can check if your alarm is ionization
by looking at the back, seeing if it has an "I" logo
or says ionization or radiation.
As of May 2024
only three companies offer 8th generation smoke alarms
and if you're looking to get one,
I've put together a comprehensive guide
with my personal recommendations
and additional research
that'll save you time and energy
helping you to decipher critical features like interconnection
which links up all your alarms in your home
You can find that guide in the description below
Finally, check out our sponsor Novium
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Thanks to all of you who are still watching
this has taken months to put together
and I hope this makes a difference in your life
See you in the next one
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