Question: How do you set the amount of smoke an alarm needs to activate?

Amanda Lewin answered on 23 Jun 2013:

Hi there 🙂

We use different types of detector for different places in a building. For example in your hallway its not normally smoky so we use an optical smoke detector which will go off when there is smoke from a fire in the area. However if we put an optical smoke detector in a kitchen we would set it off if we burnt toast or even if we cooked something that smoked a bit like a stir fry so in a kitchen we use a heat detector which measures the amount of heat to see if there is a fire and ignores the smoke.

If we wanted to detect smoke in somewhere like a computer room where their could be lots of expensive stuff we could use an aspirating smoke detector which can detect even the tinest amount of smoke in the air. It would be set off much quicker than if we used an optical smoke detector.

This is just a few examples but basically part of my job it to make sure the right detection method is selected for every part of the building wide system.