Smoke Alarms

Each year, the New Zealand Fire Service attends over 3,500 house fires. In over 80% of those fires, smoke alarms were either not installed or not working. Most fire fatalities occur in homes, mainly while people are sleeping when they can’t smell smoke. Smoke alarms are the best possible defence you and your family can have from dying in a fire.

Where should I put smoke alarms?

Smoke rises and moves along the ceiling. It will move up stairwells and vertical openings. When it can’t rise anymore it will build up, working its way down again. It’s because of this that it’s important to place smoke alarms on the ceiling to get the earliest warning. If you must position it on the wall, put it 100mm away from the ceiling to avoid dead air pockets.

For optimum smoke detection, long life photoelectric smoke alarms should be installed in every bedroom, living area and hallway in the house - on every level. However, this is not always practical. That’s why we suggest, at an absolute minimum, that a long-life photoelectric smoke alarm should be installed in the hallway closet to the bedrooms. This should be supplemented with other alarms as soon as circumstances permit.

Where not to put them.

Don’t install smoke alarms in the kitchen, garage or bathrooms unless they are specially designed smoke alarms for those areas. Heat detectors are available for the kitchen.

What sort of smoke alarms should I install?

The New Zealand Fire Service recommends you install long-life photoelectric type smoke alarms in your home. They may be a bit more expensive, but the benefits are significant: They provide a minimum of 10 years smoke detection.

They remove the frustration of fixing the ‘flat battery beep’ at inconvenient times. The cost of replacement batteries for standard alarms means the long-life one effectively pays for itself over its lifetime

Elderly don’t have to scale ladders to replace batteries annually.

But, at a minimum, you should install one standard photoelectric alarm in the hallway closest to the bedrooms.

Copyright information: NZFS owns the copyright to the information available on our website including images, text, hyperlinks, screens, and web pages. If there is any inconsistency between this copyright notice and the copyright notice found on any of the information available on our website then the notice attached to the information will take precedence over this notice. The information available on our website may be copied for personal use without further permission provided that it is not altered, and you clearly acknowledge the source and copyright status on each copy. You would like to use the information available on our website in any other way you must obtain written permission. You must also obtain our written permission if you wish to create a link to or from our website, or any part of our website. For Copyright queries, including requests for permission, please contact the Corporate Communications Manager, New Zealand Fire Service Headquarters, PO Box 2133.