CHRISTINE: From The New York Times, you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.
CAIRA: Hey, everyone, it’s The Wirecutter Show. I’m Caira Blackwell.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin, and we work at Wirecutter, the product recommendation site from The New York Times.
CAIRA: Each week we bring you expert advice from our newsroom of 140 journalists who review everyday products that will make your life better.
CHRISTINE: This episode of The Wirecutter Show is called Fireproof Your Home.
ROSIE: Y’all, it is finally cold outside. I have got to tell you, I’ve been eyeing my fireplace for a few weeks now, and I’m so happy that I’m getting the logs going. We’re having cozy moments after I pick the kids up at school. There’s nothing to me more enticing than a warm fire in the middle of winter. I love it.
CHRISTINE: It’s so good.
CAIRA: Yeah. I love this for you, Rosie.
ROSIE: Thank you.
CAIRA: I just have radiators, and that’s just not the same vibe.
CHRISTINE: No, it gives a little warmth. Just put your socks on there. That’s totally nice.
ROSIE: Drape yourself across the top of the radiator.
CAIRA: Yeah. I don’t want to rain on your cozy parade, but actually Rosie, I don’t know if your fire safety stuff is up to snuff right now. But I just remember distinctly setting my parents’ living room rug on fire because I was making s’mores in the fireplace and I was having too much fun setting the marshmallows on fire.
CHRISTINE: Oh, my gosh.
ROSIE: Right.
CAIRA: And I was just waving it around and then it dropped right onto the carpet and it just went up in flames.
CHRISTINE: Oh, my gosh. What was the scene? Was there a fire extinguisher pulled out?
CAIRA: No.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. No?
CAIRA: We stomped on it.
CHRISTINE: It’s a good move if you have to, but that’s maybe not the most recommended advice that we have, right?
CAIRA: Yeah.
ROSIE: I have to say, for as much enthusiasm as I have for this time of the year inside and snuggling up by the fire and lighting those candles, I do have almost an equal amount of anxiety about fire safety.
CAIRA: And that’s healthy.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. There are more fires in December than any other month out of the year, and there’s probably a lot of reasons. It has to do with holiday decorations and candles and starting up that fireplace for the first time this season. So real reasons to be concerned.
CAIRA: Yeah, all of those elements, plus the fact that there really just isn’t anything to be done. If a serious fire breaks out in your home, the best thing you can do is just get out and let the real professionals deal with it. So we’re just going to be talking about the few key essentials you need to have in your house, and how to properly maintain them so you can be as prepared as possible for a situation like that.
CHRISTINE: Today we’re going to talk with Wirecutter’s resident fire safety expert, Doug Mahoney, who, if you’ve listened to the show for a while, you might recognize Doug’s name. He was on a prior episode about what to do if you have a rodent infestation.
CAIRA: So good.
CHRISTINE: It was a really good episode. And some listeners might remember that Doug lives in a very old house, and he heats with a wood stove. Doug tests all of the smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, and fire ladders that Wirecutter reviews and recommends. So today Doug’s going to talk us through what you need to look for in fire safety gear, and he’s also going to talk to us a bit about some changes in smoke alarms this past year, in 2024. So even if you have smoke alarms in your home right now, you may want to consider getting new ones.
CAIRA: Yeah we’re gonna phone a friend a little later in this episode. We’re gonna be speaking with our smart-home editor, Jon Chase, who’s gonna tell us a little but more about smart smoke alarms.
ROSIE: There are parts of this conversation I think that are unsettling and a little scary, but I do think this information is super important to be prepared, so I’m looking forward to hearing from Doug and Jon.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, it’s your little seasonal medicine. All right. We’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back.
CAIRA: Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. With us now is Doug Mahoney who is joining us to talk about fire safety. Doug is a senior staff writer on Wirecutter’s home improvement team. And before his time at Wirecutter, he actually worked on construction sites as a carpenter, a foreman, and as a job-site supervisor where one of his duties was supplying and inspecting the job site fire extinguishers. So he’s really set up for this job.
CHRISTINE: Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show, Doug.
DOUG: Thanks. It’s nice to be here.
CHRISTINE: It’s so great to have you back. Doug, the holidays are approaching. It is time for the wood fires, the holiday decorations, festive candles, all these things that can actually be fire risks in your home. And according to the National Fire Protection Agency in 2023, I think this statistic is crazy, in 2023, over 330,000 homes caught fire and that resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That’s so scary. Doug, what do you think are the most important things people need to know about the risks of house fires?
DOUG: I would say the most important thing to know about the risks from house fires is that homes nowadays are burning faster than ever due to synthetic materials. There are some estimates that 30 or 40 years ago if there was a house fire, you had approximately 17 minutes to escape, but now that number is down to about three minutes or less.
CAIRA: That’s so bad.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, that’s scary.
DOUG: It’s terrifying.
CHRISTINE: And when you say materials in the home, what do you mean? The furnishings are different? They’re made with foam and synthetics?
DOUG: Yep, they’re made with more synthetics. Even something, if you think of like a bookshelf, if you have an older-style bookshelf or a bookshelf made with natural materials, it’s going to be solid oak or solid maple, solid cherry. If you have something from, say, IKEA, I’m not trying to pick on IKEA here, but if you have some knockdown furniture like that, it’s going to be made of synthetic materials. So it’s going to be some kind of wood product compressed with an adhesive, which is just going to burn a lot quicker, probably produce a lot more smoke than a solid wood bookshelf.
CAIRA: So you’re telling me that Amazon table that I got is definitely not the best when it comes to lighter fuel, or maybe it’s too good at it?
DOUG: Potentially, potentially, yeah.
CHRISTINE: As part of our research heading into this episode, you sent us this horrifying video of a controlled burn that was meant to show the differences between how synthetics burn in the home versus how natural materials do. What’s the story behind that video?
DOUG: So UL, which is Underwriters Laboratory, they’re an independent testing and certification organization. They built two identical living rooms, and they furnished one with sort of older-style natural furnishings, and the furnished one with modern sort of synthetic. So one has a fiberboard MDF table, one has an oak table, that sort of thing. One has a polyester throw, the other one’s got a cotton one. And they light an identical fire, in each room. And after four minutes, the house with natural furnishings, it’s a fire for sure, but it’s something still kind of manageable, and the other room is just completely engulfed in flames. And it just happens so fast and there’s so much smoke. It’s terrifying.
CAIRA: So Doug, I am one of those people who lives in an apartment, and I don’t change the batteries on my fire alarm enough. And it’s a really cheap alarm, so it’s constantly going off when I’m cooking, so I end up disabling the alarms most of the time. I can only imagine that’s probably not helping when it comes to fires getting faster and it contributes to more people being hurt in these fires because they’re not aware of them.
DOUG: Yeah, that’s definitely not helping at all. Those are known as nuisance alarms, and they’re sort of a plague in the smoke alarm world. They can happen for all kinds of reasons. They can happen typically with cooking, cooking smoke will set off an alarm. Even an insect could come across the smoke alarm and set it off or just low batteries. But the result of those if they happen enough, people get very frustrated with them, and then they just take the smoke alarm off their wall, take the batteries off it, and then leave themselves with no early warning system at all.
CAIRA: I guess my follow-up question would be what’s the most important thing that you could do to prepare for a fire emergency? It’s starting from maybe don’t disable your fire alarms.
DOUG: Well, it would be to have a plan. The number one thing, there are all kinds of products that you can get. You should definitely have working smoke alarms, functional fire extinguishers, but the most important thing is to have a home plan with all the people who live in the home, where to go if there’s a fire. There should be an outside meeting place. If there are young children, there should be some sort of plan as to who will manage them through the process. So there’s definitely a knowledge element to it before you even get to any products.
CHRISTINE: I think that’s so interesting because I don’t have a plan in my own home, and I’m going to go home and make a plan. But any business has a plan, right? You have to have a plan if you own a business or a building to get out. So given that fires are getting worse and it’s really important as an individual, as a family, or with roommates or just by yourself to spend 10 minutes making that plan.
DOUG: Definitely.
CHRISTINE: And then, make sure you’ve got your fire extinguisher, which we’re going to talk about and your smoke alarm, right?
DOUG: Yep.
CHRISTINE: Yep. Okay, great.
DOUG: Yep.
ROSIE: I have a question about smoke detectors actually, Doug. Are smoke detectors and fire alarms interchangeable? Because I think I’ve used those terms interchangeably for years.
DOUG: They are not. A smoke alarm is what we’re going to be talking about, is what people have in their homes. A fire alarm is more of a comprehensive system. It’s something you’re typically going to find in a restaurant, in an institutional setting, which has multiple parts, one part of which could be a smoke alarm.
CHRISTINE: All right. So let’s get into the details of smoke alarms. When I go to a hardware store and I am looking at the smoke alarms, it just seems like there’s so many choices and I’m not really sure what I should be looking for on the label. And I know from reading our guide to smoke alarms that there are actually different types of smoke alarms. So can you explain what people should be looking for?
DOUG: Sure. There were different types of smoke alarms. Things have recently become a lot clearer and a lot easier for consumers as far as smoke alarms go. So UL, they set performance standards for smoke alarms. Previously, there were two different technologies of smoke alarms. There were photoelectric smoke alarms and there were ionization smoke alarms. And they each sort of had different strength and different weaknesses. Ionization alarms were better at fast flaming fires and photoelectric alarms were slightly better at slow, smoldering fires. They were both decent alarms, but I think a lot of people probably didn’t even know that there were two different types of alarms. They would just sort of go and pick up whatever. Ionization alarms were a lot less expensive, so a lot of people may have ended up with those.
So now the new UL standard, it’s a much higher performance standard, and it’s a standard that’s actually geared toward these new faster burning homes that we’re living in. There’s a test now that a smoke alarm has to have a certain sensitivity to burning polyurethane foam. As of earlier this year, all smoke alarms that are manufactured have to be manufactured to the new standard. There may still be some left on the shelves that are compliant with the old standard, but everything being manufactured at this point going forward is to the new UL standard.
CHRISTINE:
So these are really new, these alarms that people can get that will be sensitive to these faster burning fires. If you have an older smoke alarm, should you get one of these newer ones instead?
DOUG: Due to the fact that these are sort of tailor made, the newer models are tailor-made to the burning polyurethane foam, it’s not a bad idea certainly, given like I said earlier, that this escape time has gone from 17 minutes down to less than three minutes.
There’s a lot of things in the new standards that are new. One is the increased sensitivity to burning polyurethane foam, also an attempt to reduce these cooking nuisance alarms. And so, what these tests do is they create, because there’s sort of this push and pull with smoke alarms. You want it to be highly, highly sensitive to one smoke, but you want it to not be very sensitive at all to another smoke. So it sort of sets a baseline for nuisance alarms, and then it also creates this high sensitivity towards burning polyurethane foam.
And there’s also smoke alarm options for people with hearing issues. A regular smoke alarm sounds off at about 85 decibels, which is plenty loud for most people. But if there are any issues or if someone is just an extremely heavy sleeper, there are other items. They all sort of have the same technology where it’s something you put by your bed, and they will pick up the alarm sound from a standard smoke alarm and then set off a little vibrating capsule that could be under your pillow or start to set off like a strobe light.
CAIRA: So if you’re in the store and you’re just looking at all these smoke alarms, how can you look at the label and tell that it’s the newer standard? Say that they still do have some of the old ones just at the back of the shelf. How do you sort through that?
DOUG: Well it’ll have some language to the effect of that it reduces nuisance alarms from cooking fires.
ROSIE: This is an interesting point to pause on, because I think a lot of people have experienced nuisance alarms and have reacted to nuisance alarms, Caira, you mentioned earlier.
CAIRA: Mm-hmm.
ROSIE: I have some dear friends who live in Philly who are pod listeners. I was at their house recently, and went into their kitchen and, I knew we were preparing for this episode, immediately clocked that they had Saran Wrap covering their smoke alarm in their kitchen. And it was specifically because they have this nuisance alarm going off quite often. And so, the idea is that these new alarms are going to be more sensitive, so they’re not going to pick up every single smoke from a burning piece of salmon.
DOUG: Well, actually, another organization did an independent study on the new alarms. And they found that the new alarms actually were not any less prone to nuisance alarms, but rather what the new standard does is it sort of creates a baseline so that as the smoke alarms become more and more and more sensitive to the burning polyurethane foam, they’re not also becoming more and more and more sensitive to a cooking fire.
CHRISTINE: So the baseline is the same for some of these older fire alarms for the nuisance?
DOUG: That appears to be the case.
CHRISTINE: Okay.
ROSIE: Can you explain what polyurethane foam is? Where are you going to find that? What is that going to be? Your mattress?
CHRISTINE: Your mattress.
DOUG: Yeah, you’re going to find that, yeah, a mattress and a couch cushion.
CHRISTINE: Pretty much any upholstered furniture, newer upholstered furniture at this point.
CAIRA: That’s everything in my apartment.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, anything from Wayfair. Sorry, Wayfair.
CAIRA: Amazon.
ROSIE: All right. So we have this new guidance, we have these new improved ideally smoke alarms. Where should people be putting these smoke alarms in their homes to make sure that they do what they’re supposed to be doing?
DOUG: There should be, at minimum, you should have a smoke alarm in every bedroom, every sleeping room. You should have one in the area outside of the sleeping rooms, like say if you have a second-floor landing that all the bedrooms are off of, you want a smoke alarm in that area also. A good idea to have one in the kitchen, one on each floor, and then in the basement also. And you should also have a CO detector in the basement and on each floor.
CHRISTINE: What is a CO detector?
DOUG: That is for carbon monoxide, which is a odorless poisonous gas that can come from furnaces, heating systems.
CHRISTINE: Which can basically make you pass out and die.
CAIRA: Just to put it lightly.
DOUG: Yes.
CHRISTINE: The Cliff Notes, yeah. Okay.
DOUG: No odor or anything.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
DOUG: You have no idea it’s happening.
CHRISTINE: Right.
ROSIE: The number-one anxiety from my entire childhood.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: I don’t know why. I didn’t know anyone that was affected, but I think I heard this once when I was eight and I was like, “Well, this is it. This is how I’m going to go.”
CAIRA: You’re like, “This is the way I die.”
CHRISTINE: Well, honestly, like PSA, if you are renting an Airbnb, make sure that Airbnb has a CO detector. I actually rented a place in Mexico a couple years ago, and three months later a family died in the same condo complex from CO poisoning. The pilot light on the water heater would go out. It happened to us in our unit while we were there, but we had all the windows open because it was December. But when these folks went, it was warmer, and they had the windows closed. And this family of 4 died.
CAIRA:Doug, I’m interested to hear how you were testing your smoke alarms and which ones you came to recommend through the testing.
DOUG: What we did is we isolated a number of features that we felt were essential, and there really were not that many models that actually had those features, so we sort of boiled it down that way.
CAIRA: Okay. And the one that you recommend in your guide is the First Alert SM-500V.
DOUG: Mm-hmm.
CAIRA: And to my understanding, this is slightly more expensive than some of the other models that you might see at the store. Are you paying for more because you’re getting more out of it? Or is the baseline still pretty much the same?
DOUG: As far as the actual alarm technology you’re getting, it’s about the same or it will be the same. But there are sort of some added features that make this a much better smoke alarm. For one, it has its own interconnected system, so that when one alarm sounds all of the other alarms in the house will sound. And it does this, you don’t need hardwired smoke alarms, you don’t need a smart-home system. It sort of has its own little mesh network so when the one in the kitchen goes off, then the one in the living room will go off, which will then signal the one in the bedrooms to go off. Which is very important because if you live in a larger home, if you’re a heavy sleeper like I am, I would not hear a smoke alarm in our basement. So that’s probably the most important feature.
The other feature of these that is very appealing is that when you install each one, you can set a location to it, so it will give a voice alert as to which alarm is the one that triggered all of the other alarms. So it’ll tell you that there’s smoke in the basement, it’ll tell you there’s smoke in the kitchen, so then you can have a very, very fast response time. You don’t have to sort of run around trying to figure out which one is going off. You can go right to the basement with your fire extinguisher or as far as you want to go with that.
CAIRA: We’re going to break in just a moment but before we do, I want to call up another one of our other colleagues, Jon Chase, editor of Wirecutter’s smart-home coverage, to tell us a bit more about— specifically—smart smoke alarms that can be integrated into smart-home systems.
SFX: Phone dialing
JON: I’ve always wanted to say: “Long-time listener first-time caller!”
CHRISITNE: Hi, Jon, how are you?
JON: I’m great, delighted to be here!
CHRISTINE: So we have some questions about smart smoke alarms. You know a ton about these. What are the advantages to going smart in this department?
JON: So the Nest protect is our top pick. We have all agreed, you know, on staff and on my team, that the most important smart device there is is a smart smoke alarm. They kind of do all a lot of things that a traditional smoke alarm can’t do, which is they proactively reach out to you when you are at home. And that’s a really big deal. It proactively reaches out to you, like if you aren’t home and an alarm goes off at your house, you’ll get a notification on your device and it will say, Hey, there’s smoke detected in this particular room. That allows you to, if you’re lucky, you might be able to call home or you could race home or you might be able to tell a neighbor to go and check on it, that kind of thing. At a base level, that makes them really, really useful. And it’s a huge difference. So it’s something you can get with a traditional smoke alarm.
CHRISTINE: We were talking with Doug about some of the new standards that are going into the newest smoke alarms. Are those also effective in these smart alarms?
JON: Yeah. They completely comply with all of the newest standards.
CHRISTINE: And when you say it’ll notify your device, is that beyond your phone? Like, would it notify other devices as well?
JON: You can also set it so that it calls someone you can set it to that. That could be a fire department. It could be in farm and it could be your neighbor. It could be you. Imagine if you were like at your parent or someone who lives alone and you want to keep tabs on them. It’d be amazing to get an alert every time someone gets off at their home. So that’s really, really useful. On top of that, when you are home, it doesn’t just start wailing, which a traditional detector does. You get this really excellent alert that goes, I’m going to do my best robot voice impression. But because alert smoke is detected in your kitchen. The alarm will sound. The alarm is loud.
CHRISTINE: So it’s like walking you through blow by blow the sounds, but just in a voice.
CAIRA: It’s just giving you a slight warning, Christine. A warning before the body warns you.
JON: Yeah, It’s basically like you’re about to get, you know, I’m about to send in the cavalry. But that’s super useful because you don’t want to just have the alarm go off because people panic, right? Yeah. And that’s also why people, they rip out the battery because it goes off too often.
CAIRA: That’s awesome. That’s great. I think that’s all of our questions about smart smoke alarms. Thank you so much, Jon, for fielding them.
CHRISTINE: Thanks, Jon.
JON: Absolutely. I’m so glad to speak with you guys.
CHRISTINE: We’re going to take a quick break, and then when we’re back we’ll talk about what you really need to know about fire extinguishers—how the find the right ones, and how to use them properly. Plus we’ll get Doug’s take on some of the most viral safety products you might have seen on any of your social feeds.
CAIRA: We’ll be right back.
CHRISTINE: Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. This episode is all about fire safety with Doug Mahoney. So we have covered smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Now let’s talk about fire extinguishers. I think that this is the type of purchase I know personally that I have never overthought. I have one. I picked up the first thing I saw, and I paid for it and then I walked out of the store. I did not steal my fire extinguisher. But there are a lot of different types, right? There are the white ones, there’s the red ones. They seem to come in a variety of sizes. What do you need to know about shopping for a fire extinguisher? Are there specific types that you really should have in a home?
DOUG: Yes. There’s basically one fire extinguisher you should have in a home, and it’s called an ABC fire extinguisher. So there’s five types of fire. There’s Class A, and that’s going to be like wood and fabric and some plastic, sort of what we normally think of when we think of combustibles. There’s going to be a Class B fire, and that is burning liquid. And then there’s Class C fire, which is an energized fire, like an electrical fire, say if your breaker panel is on fire. There’s also Class D, which is burning metals, which is something we thankfully don’t need to worry about in our homes. And then, there’s Class K, which is burning cooking oil. And Class K is really only if you have an industrial-sized frialator. It’s not really for residential cooking oil. Residential cooking oil can be handled with a Class B extinguisher.
So you really want an extinguisher that can handle all of Class A, Class B, and Class C. And you want to do it in one unit so there’s no guesswork so you don’t have to run around and try and figure out, “Is this my B, C fire extinguisher, or is this my Class A fire extinguisher?” You just want an ABC fire extinguisher.
CAIRA: And is that the typical red one that we see on TV and everything else?
DOUG: Yep. They’re generally the red ones.
CHRISTINE: What happens if you have the wrong type of fire extinguisher?
DOUG: Like I say, if you have just a Class A extinguisher, it may be a water-based chemical, in which case you would not want to spray it on burning oil. You would just spread it and you certainly wouldn’t want to burn it on an energized fire like an electrical panel.
CHRISTINE: Okay. All right, that makes sense. I have a question about how you’re supposed to use fire extinguishers. I’ve never personally used one. I was recently at a friend’s house and they actually had a grease fire in there.
CAIRA: No.
CHRISTINE: Yes. They had a grease fire in their outdoor grill. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and we were like, “Oh no.” One of my friends went inside and grabbed the fire extinguisher and they put it out. But if I had been in that situation, I’m not sure I would’ve known what’s the right way to use a fire extinguisher?
DOUG: You’re supposed to aim at the base of the flame. You’re supposed to aim it at what is on fire.
CHRISTINE: Okay.
DOUG: And it’s something that it’s definitely, it’s not easy to do. But if you can get yourself in a situation where you can practice with one or you could potentially get a rechargeable fire extinguisher and practice with it and then have someone recharge it again, it’s a pretty unique experience to use one and it’s worth practicing. It’s worth practicing if you can.
CHRISTINE: It sounds like my kids’ dream to go outside and use the fire extinguisher. Is it expensive to recharge them?
ROSIE: What does that actually mean?
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
DOUG: To refill it. If you use a fire extinguisher once, you really shouldn’t use it again without refilling it.
CAIRA: Nobody wants to hear that.
DOUG: Yeah.
CAIRA: Every use?
DOUG: Nope, every use. The ones that we recommend, they’re actually rechargeable so they can be refilled. There are ones that cannot, they’re just single-use items. I think it’s less than what a new one would cost.
CHRISTINE: That was basically my question. Is it worth refilling, or should you just go out and buy a new one?
DOUG: It’s worth refilling, because also with the rechargeable one, you’re going to get metal valves. You are going to get a tool that’s going to be a little more reliable. There have been a number of recalls done on single-use fire extinguishers with plastic valves.
CAIRA: So, Doug, now we know we should be getting the classic red fire extinguisher. Where should we be putting it in our homes?
DOUG: So fire extinguishers, you should have one fire extinguisher on every floor. You should have one in your garage if you have a garage. And then, you want to put them sort of towards the exits of the house. You want it to be something that you’re grabbing while you’re getting out of the house. You don’t ever want to be in a position where you’re running deeper into your house to get firefighting capabilities. You don’t want to put it under your sink.
CHRISTINE: Guilty. Guilty.
CAIRA: Oh. Where then?
DOUG: Well, a place like a coat closet would be good, top of the basement stairs if there’s a spot there. They usually come with some kind of hanging device, so you can put it on a wall. If you have a set of basement stairs, you can put one on a wall there.
CAIRA: But that messes up the feng shui.
DOUG: Well …
ROSIE: Just say it was a really expensive Warhol.
DOUG: You’ve take your sacrifices.
ROSIE: “Oh, this?”
CHRISTINE: Frame around it.
ROSIE: “This old thing? It’s on loan from MoMA.”
CHRISTINE: Its art. It’s art.
CAIRA: Okay, good to know. You also mentioned in your guide that you should be getting your fire extinguisher checked or inspected every six years or so. Where can you even go to get that done?
DOUG: Sure. Well, first of all, you should take it upon yourself to inspect your fire extinguisher every so often. You could do it when you change out your smoke alarms at Daylight Saving times when you change out your batteries. And that’s just a matter of looking at it, making sure the gauge is where it should be, making sure it’s still in an accessible place. But yes, it is a good idea every six years or so to have a professional look at it. You can do that, there may be a local fire safety company near you. I’ve also heard of people just going to the fire department and having them inspect it.
CHRISTINE: I’ve done that. I went to my local firehouse, and they looked at it and gave me a thumbs-up.
DOUG: Perfect.
CAIRA: Is it free?
CHRISTINE: Yeah, it was free.
CAIRA: Oh, nice.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: You get a sticker and a lollipop too.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. My kids loved it.
ROSIE: So what to know, you’re going into the hardware store, you’re trying to find a fire extinguisher. ABC, get an ABC fire extinguisher. That’s going to cover you in most cases. If you ever have to use this thing, aim it at the base of the fire.
DOUG: Mm-hmm.
CAIRA: Okay, Doug, now we want to talk about fire ladders. These are collapsible products you keep in your home to escape out a window in the case of a fire.
ROSIE: This is another deep anxiety. We’re really getting into my psyche here. I used to live in an apartment that was the parlor floor in a brownstone. And the level I was on didn’t have fire escape access for whatever reason. And so, sometime into my tenure there, I sort of woke up with a start in the middle of the night in a panic. I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out if I needed a fire ladder and how was I going to propel myself like a sort of spy or something into the garden. And I now have a fire escape in my apartment, and so I don’t have to worry about it so much. But for folks in this situation, what’s the guidance here?
DOUG: Well, the guidance here is that really have two ways out of every bedroom. So one way is going to be the door and the other way is going to be likely a window. So in most cases, that would mean some sort of a way to get out the window safely, whether it’s a fire ladder that’s already attached to the house or getting a portable one, a small one that you can keep in a closet. Those which are the ones that we reviewed, you can hook them right over your window sill, and then the ladder drops out the window and then you can theoretically climb right out and down to safety.
CHRISTINE: I personally don’t even like regular ladders. And these fire ladders seem kind of precarious to me. What do you need to look for in a good fire ladder?
DOUG: First of all, you are absolutely correct. They are very difficult ladders to use. I was in construction. I’ve spent a lot of time on ladders. And there’s nothing harder than trying to climb down a fire safety ladder. It’s basically a rope ladder. They typically have very uncomfortable rungs.
So what you want to do is you want to look for one that’s as easy as possible to use. When you’re using it, you’re likely to be in an extremely high-stress situation. There may not be lights available, so you want something that’s extremely intuitive. You also want to practice on it as much as you can, especially kids, people with mobility issues. Again, like with everything with fire safety, just getting the item is really only part of it, especially with fire ladders, I think. You really need to understand how you’re going to use it and the situation that you’re likely to use it in.
CHRISTINE: Doug, we like this ladder, the X-IT, it’s X-IT.
DOUG: Mm-hmm.
CHRISTINE: Right? Why do you like this ladder?
DOUG: That one, like I said, it all comes down to how intuitive it is. It’s a very simple hook, comes in a bright yellow bag. It’s sort of easy to spot in a low-light situation. But all you do is you just take this hook and you just hook it right on your windowsill, and then just dump the rungs out the window.
The other models we looked at, the hook section kind of had these folding hinges. You had to unfurl it a certain way. One of them, the rungs, we hadn’t even gotten the ladder out the window and the rungs had sort of fallen in this tangled bundle at our feet. So the X-IT is extremely easy to use. While I was testing, I actually went in and out of my house a number of times with all these ladders. I actually had my, I think he was like seven at the time, my son …
CHRISTINE: Oh, my gosh.
DOUG: … used all the ladders, just sort of to see. I was just curious. And the only one he just immediately could use was the X-IT ladder. He just looked at it, he knew exactly how to use it. He hooked it on the windowsill, dumped it out the window, and then just crawled out the window. Whereas the other ones were just so much more difficult, he couldn’t figure them out.
CAIRA: Yeah, so that’s one that you want to get, for sure.
DOUG: Definitely.
CHRISTINE: Does your son think that you have the funnest job ever?
DOUG: Yeah. He does. He does. Yeah, he thinks it’s pretty cool.
ROSIE: Doug, let’s pivot to some of these fire safety-related products that we have all seen on social media. I, of course, Caira is laughing already, I was served ads for the fire safety blanket and immediately purchased one. These things look enticing because they’re seemingly not as complicated as more traditional fire gear. But I’m wondering are they a legitimate alternative? Could the blanket, for instance, be a replacement for a fire extinguisher?
DOUG: Sure. Those blankets that, yeah, we’ve all seen those in our social feeds lately. So they are a potential secondary option. The blankets in particular, it’s a fiberglass blanket sometimes coated with silicone. They’re typically sized for about the size of a range, so that’s basically what I would think of them for. You put it over a fire, it smothers the fire out. They’re not going to deal with a very large fire at all.
And if you’re ever in a situation where you only have time to grab one thing, I would not grab the fire blanket. I would always grab a real fire extinguisher. There could be some difficulty with using it. For one, it’s an item that to use, you typically have to step closer to the fire, which isn’t necessarily something you want to do. If you throw the blanket over the fire, you could fan the flames. There’s some trickiness, there’s some knowledge involved. If you have a little bacon grease fire and it’s something that you have time to deal with, you could use a fire blanket. But like I said, if you only have time to grab one thing, I would not grab the fire blanket.
ROSIE: Not a quick fix, not a fun sexy thing to grab when you have a fire. Get the fire extinguisher, but an extra thing that you might want to have on hand because extra is maybe better?
DOUG: Yeah. It’s not going to hurt to have one, but you just need to sort of know its limitations. One thing with a regular fire extinguisher is they’re extremely messy. If you have a little cooking fire and you use a real fire extinguisher, your whole room will be covered in this powder, which for one, it’s a small price to pay if you stop this fire. But if it’s a really small fire and it’s something that you can manage with a blanket, but it’s got to be really small, then you could try it. But if it’s a fire that’s getting out of control, and like I said, you only have time to grab one thing, I would not grab the blanket.
ROSIE: What’s the deal with the fiberglass in some of these blankets? Is that anything to kind of be concerned about?
DOUG: That is a complaint that we saw for a lot of these. It’s that the fiberglass sort of comes off the blanket, so once you grab it, you get these little shards in your hands. That was the case with one of the models we tested. Other models have more of like a silicon coating, so that doesn’t happen as much.
CAIRA: I’m assuming this might also be the case for this other thing that we’ve been seeing a lot on our social media feeds. It’s kind of like an aerosol spray can fire extinguisher type. The one I’ve been seeing is called the EZ Fire Extinguisher Spray. Could you throw out your fire extinguisher if you get one of these?
DOUG: Absolutely not, absolutely not. If there’s one takeaway from this entire conversation, it’s not to replace your fire extinguisher with an aerosol can fire extinguishing spray.
CAIRA: No, not a good idea?
DOUG: It’s not a good idea at all. For one, their capabilities are much, much smaller. It really comes down to about the same thing with the fire blanket. It could be helpful with a very, very, very small fire. If you have one pan that’s kind of acting up or something in your microwave has caught fire and you want to put it out quickly. But in general, it does not replace a fire extinguisher. And to all the manufacturer’s credit, it even says it on the can. “This does not replace a fire extinguisher.” They come in an aerosol can, which are sort of notoriously a little unreliable. We tested five of them. One of them when we pulled the cap off, the little nozzle fell off.
CAIRA: No.
DOUG: Yeah. Yeah.
ROSIE: I’ll tell you what.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: What do you not want to happen?
CHRISTINE: Essentially, would you be better off just reaching for the lid of a pot to put on the fire or some baking soda baking?
CAIRA: Some baking soda.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
DOUG: Yeah. Well, actually, interestingly, a number of the experts I talked to, they said as far as a cooking fire goes, the best thing you can do is just turn off the heat and put a lid on the pot.
CHRISTINE: Okay. Yeah.
DOUG: And that’s going to put it out. But if there’s something, like I said, that you can’t do that with, a very small contained fire, you can maybe use one of these. Because to test them, I built a small campfire maybe using five or six pieces of wood, and I used an aerosol can to put out the fire. And you have about 30 seconds or so of this spray. What’s nice about them is that it’s a fairly contained spray. It’s just a liquid. I did get the fire out, but the fire was still pretty crackly by the time I was done, looking to sort of reignite itself. And then, I built the same fire and I used the regular fire extinguisher, and in one instant, one single puff, the campfire was out.
CAIRA: All right, Doug. Well, before we wrap, we usually ask all of our guests one final question. What’s the last thing you bought that you really loved?
DOUG: The last thing I bought that I really loved, so I work on my house a lot. I have a construction background. And there’s a tool bag, it’s actually a tool bag that we recommend. It’s called a Veto ProPac. And it’s wildly expensive, but it is so useful. It’s such a helpful tool bag. Most tool containment systems, you just kind of dump all your tools into a box. But this thing, it almost looks like a suitcase. It stores tools vertically, so everything sort of has its place. So it’s extremely organized. You can load it up with a ton of stuff. It has this big waterproof bottom to it. You can zip it closed. It’s so indestructible. It’s so strong. And there have been some other companies that have sort of backfilled less expensive models that are similar, but nothing can beat this tool bag.
ROSIE: I love that.
CAIRA: Cool.
ROSIE: The unbeatable tool bag.
CAIRA: The unbeatable tool bag.
ROSIE: Doug, thanks so much for joining us. This was really helpful I think, not just for this time of year, but I think this is a lot of information, great information that we can all revisit as a good baseline to sort of think about our homes, apartments, wherever we live, and trying to be as prepared as possible for fire.
DOUG: Great.
ROSIE: So thank you.
DOUG: You’re welcome. I think it’s important information.
CHRISTINE: All right. Are you terrified after that conversation with Doug?
CAIRA: Ask Rosie. She looks scared.
ROSIE: Yeah. I’m stricken. I think honestly, the takeaway is preparedness, obviously.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: Really just being rigorous and intentional about it. And not living in anxiety and fear, but recognizing that these are really things in your home, apartment to have ready to go should you ever experience an emergency, a fire emergency.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
CAIRA: Yeah. I think it’s really important to be mindful about what you’re putting in your home. That’s always the point, but geez, I just think about all the synthetic materials I’ve just been stuffing to my apartment, and how flammable it makes it.
CHRISTINE: To a point, I think at this point you can’t avoid it. Even nice furniture is made with polyurethane foam.
CAIRA: Really?
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: Totally. I think that’s why you’ve got to be ready.
CAIRA: Yeah.
CHRISTINE: I think similar to the episode we did a while back on emergency prep, this is just even more acute. You need to put some thought into how to prepare. And once you’ve got all your stuff, you’re good, but then you also probably need to just check in periodically to make sure that everything is set up in the right way.
CAIRA: Yeah. Nobody’s going to be surprised to hear that I don’t have a fire extinguisher in my apartment.
CHRISTINE: Ooh.
CAIRA: There’s one in the building. I don’t know where, but I’ve seen it.
CHRISTINE: That’s not going to help.
ROSIE: That does not help you.
CAIRA: I’ll be leaving my apartment to go look for it, so it gets me out of the fire zone.
CHRISTINE: Do you have two ways out of your apartment?
CAIRA: No.
CHRISTINE: Oh. All right. Well, you’ve got a checklist.
CAIRA: So I need to move and then get a fire extinguisher.
ROSIE: In your new place, yeah.
CHRISTINE: This seems like probably a good plan for you.
CAIRA: Yeah.
CHRISTINE: I think that I am going to be looking into getting new smoke alarms, because I definitely have the older kind, and I think I want to have this newer kind that will better detect these polyurethane foam fires.
CAIRA: Yeah.
CHRISTINE:Yeah.
ROSIE: Similarly, ABC fire extinguisher.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: Those are the letters to look for, ABC, and that’s going to provide pretty safe coverage and putting it not underneath your sink.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. Caira, you and I can go shopping for fire extinguishers.
CAIRA: Okay.
CHRISTINE: Or we could just go to a site called Wirecutter and buy the one that they recommend.
CAIRA: I’ve never heard of it, actually.
ROSIE: If you want to find out more about Wirecutter’s coverage, or if you want to check out the products Doug recommended today, you can go to nytimes.com/wirecutter, or you can find a link in the show notes as always. Until next week, thank you so much for listening.
CHRISTINE: Here’s what’s coming up next week on The Wirecutter Show.
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CHRISTINE: Make sure you’re following the show on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss it. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie and produced by Abigail Keel, editing by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddie Masielo and Nick Pitman. Today’s episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and interim general manager. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor in chief.
CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin.
CHRISTINE: Thanks for listening.
