Smoke alarms ‘wildly varying’

Testing has revealed large variations in the time British Standard-approved fire alarms take to sound, with one failing to go off at all.

The Which? investigation found that smoke alarms that have met the standard and received the Kitemark certification can have “wildly varying” response times.

The watchdog carried out four controlled fire tests involving smouldering wood, solvent, plastic and cotton fires on 15 smoke alarms, finding that the Devolo Home Control Smoke Detector failed to sound at all in two of the tests.

A pattern of British Standard-approved alarms having significantly varying response times was repeated across all types of tests.

Two approved examples of the First alert SA300Q and the EI Electronics EI3500S took more than nine minutes to trigger, while the Nest Protect Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm was more than four minutes quicker to sound.

Which? made clear that all the alarms tested met the BS EN 14604 standard for response times. But it said the safety consequences of a slowto-sound fire alarm could be significant and has called for a new, tougher standard that only rewards models that sound more quickly.