When people hear the smoke alarm going off, it can be annoying to listen to and shut off. However, that’s your alarm system going off to tell you to change the batteries on your smoke alarm.
Check Your Batteries Day aims to teach people about the importance of changing batteries, why it is important, and how you can share this information with people everywhere.
History of Check Your Batteries Day
Taking place during Daylight Savings Time, Check Your Batteries Day hopes to serve as a valuable time to check your batteries on your smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, radon detectors, and other electronics. Why is this important?
Detectors like these can save lives. Before the invention of these electronics, detecting smoke and carbon monoxide was practically impossible until it was too late.
Smoke detectors, for instance, were invented around the late 1890s. Because of the invention and patenting of the smoke detector by George Andrew Darby and Walter Jaeger and later improvement of the smoke detector by Duane Pearsall in the 1960s, smoke detectors would respond faster than heat detectors.
Smoke, carbon monoxide, and radon detectors have significantly saved more lives and changing the batteries on them can continue to save lives. According to the ServiceMaster Restore, 57% of Americans have followed best practice and done so in the past six months.
Changing the batteries each month and replacing the smoke alarm every 10 years can help protect homes, families, and save expenses. Because of smoke alarms, the average escape time went from 17 minutes to just three minutes or less over the past decade due to synthetics in furniture and better home construction, according to UL, a company centered around safety science. So, change your batteries this month and change out your smoke alarms!
How to celebrate Check Your Batteries Day
Celebrate this day by learning about how to maintain and care for your smoke, carbon monoxide, and radon alarms. Do so by keeping an eye on the manufacture date, upgrading your smoke alarm to lithium batteries, and use interconnected alarms so that way any smoke alarm you have in your home will all go off.
If you’re passionate about this topic, create flyers showing the statistics of what smoke alarms have done for people everywhere and post them around your local town. Teach your children about fire safety and teach them how to change out the batteries in a smoke alarm.
Share this holiday on social media using the hashtag #checkyourbatteriesday and keep your families safe by replacing the batteries.