smoke & heat detectors interlinked with co detector neccesarry?

Sparkingchip:

One of my lady customers said her eighteen year old son had told her that he thought the house landline phone was not working, she asked him if there was a dialling tone and he asked what’s that?

I was brought up to wait for the dialling tone before dialling, but that was in the days of party lines. OMG, I'm a fossil!


(Mrs P may not be used to the concept being used to modern 'phones, but she does speak Portuguese. ? )

Yep I remember party lines, you had to except one or no connection if that was all the local exchange could offer at that time = Good old post office telephones (before they became BT).

Back in those days you got the bill and paide pretty prompt or they cut you off, no haggle just a cut off. No pay by installments on DD etc back then

No, dont interlink CO and smoke/heat.

As stated above, you will not know which one has sounded first.

I've got 19000 houses at work, we had one recently where the fire brigade and Centrica/Gas supplier had to attend to a faulty alarm.

As above, the tenants have no common sense. A smoke detector was faulty. It was full alarming randomly for a few minutes at a time, and all the alarms were going off. 

When they were installed, the fitter had wrongly connected the link from the CO to the smokes. This is social housing, so you will not get a gadget telling you which one sounded first.

The tenant was worried, so called the fire brigade to see if something was smouldering.

They didnt find anything, so called the gas board as they suspected the CO alarm was causing the problem, through detecting CO in the air from a faulty appliance. BG didnt bother inspecting, they just turned the gas off and told the tenant to get all of their appliances tested.So no hot water/heating for 2 days.

As you can imagine, this caused an awful lot of paperwork.

And all becuase the CO was linked to the smokes.

And all becuase the CO was linked to the smokes.

If people are that dim they're not going to be able to tell the difference between a CO and smoke alarm anyway - regardless of how many are bleeping (To Joe Public they're all just round white boxes on the ceiling that bleep when there some kind of fire-related danger).


I guess the question is: can CO spread beyond the room with the CO detector into other rooms (especially bedrooms)? If so, I can see the benefit of units that are adjacent to those rooms sounding as well.


  - Andy.

I have a  CO alarm in my  bedroom,  it is above the boiler. 


Some time ago I was in  an electrical wholesaler and a guy was trying to buy a box of fire alarm call point break glasses. 


A tenant in a three storey HMO with a full fire alarm system had broken the glass on every call point "trying to find the one that had set the alarms off".


These systems are installed in student and other HMOs where the tenants have never ever done any DIY and have very little life experience, because their parents or others have always sorted problems out for them, additionally they may be from other countries and may never have seen equipment of this type before; and English may not be their first language, so even if concise instructions are included in the HMO house file they may not fully understand them.


Andy Betteridge

"A tenant in a three storey HMO with a full fire alarm system had broken the glass on every call point "trying to find the one that had set the alarms off" "


Andy, that is priceless, and I can believe it. I have met people who have "quirky logic" , the mind boggles

I retrofitted a Aico control switch for a customer to allow them to stop the alarms sounding easily.


The husband passed comment his wife plays it like a piano when she said it did not work properly. 


Andy Betteridge

according to this https://www.gov.scot/publications/fire-and-smoke-alarms-tolerable-standard-guidance/

only the smoke and heat detectors need to be interlinked

CO alarms can be battery operated.

Legislation comes into effect in 2021, although early adoption is recommended