Best Smoke Detectors for 2025
When detecting smoke, time is of the essence. That’s why we designed a test that simulates a real-life emergency situation.
The first thing to know is that these products primarily target two types of fires: smoldering fires and open flames.
A smoldering (or slow-burning) fire is a combustion that occurs on the surface of a solid material. A smoldering fire produces a lot of smoke but is unable to sustain a flame. Imagine a cigarette burning slowly but never actually burning.
Smoke detection testing is underway.
A smoldering fire can and will turn into a raging conflagration if appropriate action is not taken immediately.
Open flames are the fires we are more familiar with. They are usually caused by the ignition of any flammable material, such as flammable substances, wood, paper, etc. These fires typically produce less smoke than smoldering fires but are more destructive.
We built a room to house the smoke detector to be tested and injected two different types of smoke into it through the chimney. We then timed the speed of the responses. The sooner a smoke detector’s alarm is triggered, the better.
To simulate the smoke from a smoldering fire, I lit 300 grams of charcoal and let it heat for 10 minutes before injecting the smoke. I wanted to make sure that most of the coal was ignited and the smoke was thick enough to set off the alarm.
Rekindling the flame is easy, just 30 grams of shredded paper is all you need. Again, I made sure there was plenty of smoke before it went through the chimney and into the combustion chamber.
In order to make my neighbors extremely uncomfortable having to endure having their smoke alarms go off randomly, and to which I sincerely apologize, I repeated the entire process three times for each smoke detector model and each smoke type to be tested, each Smoke detectors were tested a total of six times. Finally, I averaged the response times. You can view them in the chart below:
