‘Fall Back’ Means Time To Check Smoke Alarms
Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend, and "Fall Back" often comes a reminder to change the batteries in your smoke alarms. However, it's getting to be a little more complicated than that.
"Basically we've run into problems where we simply don't have operating smoke alarms in homes," says Captain Justin Smith of Casper Fire E.M.S., "and so the message has evolved and we want people to take stock of their smoke alarms and make sure they're less than ten years old, and if they're not we want to encourage them to replace them with a device that has a ten year battery. That way we no longer have that problem with the batteries not working in them."
Captain Smith says there are typically two reasons your smoke alarms might not be working. "One is that they've had some kind of false alarm in their house whether it be burning the toast or the bacon or something and so they've taken it off the wall or the ceiling or disabled it in some other fashion," he says, "or they've got that chirping battery syndrome that occurs every once in a while and they just simply remove the battery all the way to make the chirping go away. That's another reason why the newer devices that have both a hush button and a ten-year battery help to solve those problems and make sure we have functioning smoke alarms."
If you have any questions about your smoke alarms, Captain Smith says there are a lot of M.S. at 235-8222.
Daylight Saving Time ends this Sunday at 2:00 a.m. so you want to turn your clocks back an hour before you go to bed Saturday night.