Fire Prevention Week is October 5 -11

While it’s essential to always think about fire safety, Fire Prevention Week­—October 5-11—is a good time to make sure you and your family prevent a tragedy from happening at your home.

A 2006 fire in my suburban New York town illustrates just how quickly disaster can strike: A local family had gone out to dinner, leaving behind a teenaged houseguest. After the kid started to heat up some food in a skillet, he went upstairs to take a shower. The teenager forgot about the food, and within minutes, the charming Arts & Craft home was in flames. The house and everything in it were destroyed; luckily the teenager escaped uninjured.

Last year, fires in homes across the United States killed about 2,900 people and injured 14,000 others, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Cooking fires are the leading cause of fires in the home and fire injuries, according to the NFPA.

About one-third of cooking fires happen because nobody is keeping an eye on the stove. So stay in the kitchen whenever you fry, grill, or broil food, and when you leave the room, even briefly, turn off the stove. In other words, to quote from the NFPA’s current fire-safety campaign, “don’t be a doofus.”
Fire Prevention Week is a good time to develop a fire escape plan and practice it with your family. Also follow our basic safety tips for smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms and the advice on the NFPA site.—Kimberly Janeway

Essential information: Read our buyer’s guide to smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms.

Tip of the Day: Check your dryer vents

As the owner of a multiunit brownstone in Brooklyn, I’m used to troubleshooting problems and dealing with malfunctioning appliances. Recently one of my tenants e-mailed me, writing, “The dryer doesn’t seem to be working correctly; we have to run it for hours to dry a single load.”

Visions of dryer fires and carbon-monoxide poisoning sprang to mind, along with possible causes of and solutions for the problem. Did a clogged venting system need cleaning? Was the 12-year-old Maytag washer/dryer combo unit near the end of its service life? I asked the tenants not to use the unit until I could stop by over the weekend.

When I got to the building a couple of days later, I immediately checked the lint screen and the area below it on the dryer. Both checked out clear. (Being able to remove two screws and gain access to the area below the lint screen is a nice feature of some older washer-dryer units.) Pulling the dryer away from the wall revealed that the vinyl vent had sagged with age, and a fist-sized ball of lint had collected at the base of the U-shaped depression.

Installing new metal ductwork cured the problem, and I was spared the high expense of replacing the unit. While my building was completely up to code, I put the money I otherwise would have spent on a new washer-dryer on the following safety upgrades:

• I deployed new smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms throughout the building to provide the highest level of safety. (The existing alarms were due for replacement.)

• I replaced the original hoses on the washer with Floodchek hoses, which are supposed to be burst-proof and were recommended to me by other landlords and property managers in my area. (Consumer Reports has not tested these hoses.) I also ordered the Flo n Stop flood-prevention system, a product we covered at the 2008 International Builders’ Show.

• I added fire extinguishers in every hallway and in every apartment.

It turns out that my dryer has a built-in sensor that prevents the unit from working if it senses a blockage in the vent. To avoid late-night phone calls or endless e-mails, I now check the dryer vent every time I visit the building.—Gian Trotta