Forget the candy. Your post-Halloween treat is an extra hour of sleep

Daylight-saving time ends this Sunday, November 1. Turn back your clocks—and sleep in.

Throughout most of the United States, daylight-saving time (DST) will end at 2 a.m. (your local time) on Sunday, November. 1. If you stayed up to too late on Halloween, you might welcome the extra hour of sleep you'll get after turning back the clock on Saturday night/Sunday morning. (Find out when DST will start and end in 2010 and beyond.)

In this previous entry on daylight-saving time, you'll find a list of smart moves that can enhance safety around your house and save you some money. "Is Daylight-Saving Time Costing Us Money?" provides more details on this seasonal time shift. e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: Be sure to read our latest report on carbon-monoxide and smoke alarms (available to subscribers). And if you're having trouble getting a good night's sleep, read "How Did You Sleep Last Night?" This feature offers expert advice, details on sound machines designed to enhance sleep, an interactive quiz, and much more.

In this previous entry on daylight-saving time, you'll find a list of smart moves that can enhance safety around your house and save you some money. "Is Daylight-Saving Time Costing Us Money?" provides more details on this seasonal time shift. e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: Be sure to read our latest report on carbon-monoxide and smoke alarms (available to subscribers). And if you're having trouble getting a good night's sleep, read "How Did You Sleep Last Night?" This feature offers expert advice, details on sound machines designed to enhance sleep, an interactive quiz, and much more.

Smoke and CO alarms are key safety devices for the home

A recent fire at a home in Ross, Pennsylvania, serves as a reminder that you need reliable smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms properly placed throughout your home.

According to this report in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 48-year-old Edward Stefanick remained asleep in his bedroom even as firefighters spent two hours battling a blaze in his home. "You would've thought that, by that time, he would've kind of rose and got himself out of there," Ross Fire Marshal John Reubi told the newspaper.

The layout of the home kept the bedroom largely clear of smoke, though Ross was disoriented when firefighters finally found him and was hospitalized in critical condition with a high carbon-monoxide level.

If you need to replace your existing (or buy new)  smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms, read our latest report on these devices and review our ratings of smoke and CO alarms and exclusive interactive (available to subscribers) to find the best models for your home. The highly rated First Alert OneLink SCO501CN smoke and carbon-monoxide alarm is shown.

Once you've bought your new smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms, be sure to install them in the right places.—Gian Trotta | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: Learn how to prevent kitchen and dryer fires.

What’s new in Consumer Reports: Home content from the November 2009 issue

Carbon-monoxide and smoke alarms: Daylight-saving time, which ends on November 1 this year, is the traditional date to check and change batteries on carbon-monoxide and fire alarms. If you haven’t replaced your carbon-monoxide alarm in five years or your smoke alarm in a decade, it’s time for a change. We also found that no one device, like a combination smoke-and-carbon-monoxide alarms, we found that can offer complete protection.

Cordless drills and tool kits: Prices are down and performance is up among these household mainstays, always a popular holiday gift. We found an excellent drill for $100 and a capable cordless drill set for $160. Watch this video to see how our tests show performance under real-world stresses.

Best products for the home: Whether you want to give a memorable gift or need to replace an appliances, it’s hard to go wrong by picking one of the many home or garden products that made it into the 398 Top Products special in the November 2009 issue of Consumer Reports. The story covers top-performing dishwashers, vacuums, coffeemakers, slow cookers, sewing machines, and more. (See the video above for more tips on smart appliance-buying.

Home(wreckers) for the holidays: Our experts offer advice and videos instructions for dealing with household spills and other miscues like furniture stains and dripping wax. Videos on removing cranberry, gravy and wine and soda stains and low-cost alternatives to expensive cleaners are also available.

Claim Check—Tide Total Care: We followed up our July 2009 report on laundry detergents by putting Project Runway star Tim Gunn’s TV-ad claims about Tide Total Care’s ability to retain colors to the test.—Gian Trotta | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: Discuss products you feel are worthy of recognition or reprobation in our revamped appliances and home-and-garden forums.

Weekend Project: Fall cleaning tips for inside your home

Spring cleaning seems to get most of the attention, but fall is also a good time to get your house in order. Check out these fall-cleaning tips for the interior of your home and your yard and garden and those that follow.

Clean drapes, upholstery, carpeting, and floors. A canister vacuum is better equipped to clean drapes and upholstery, while an upright is better for deep-cleaning carpets. For your carpeting, use a carpet cleaner or schedule a professional cleaning. If your wood floors have taken a beating over the summer, see "Can This Flooring Be Saved?" to deal with worn finishes or damage.

Be a greener cleaner. Try these alternatives to store-bought cleaners. The video here shows more ways that everyday products cleaners can substitute for specialized cleaners.

Dispose of old paint and other hazardous products. Don't dispose of old paint, cleaners, solvents, pesticides, or other potentially dangerous products with the trash. Read our advice for proper disposal of  paints and finishes and common household items.

Also check with your municipality for collection dates for hazardous household materials. A feature on Earth911.com lets you search by location for dates. As a colleague recently discovered, you can save a ton of money carting refuse to a certified facility rather using a professional waste-disposal service.

Be wary of airborne and other problems. If your home has never been tested for radon or lead, read our report on home-use test kits to find those that work best. We've also found mold kits to be ineffective; use a professional if you see these telltale signs of mold.

There's also little evidence that air purifiers can help people who suffer from asthma and allergies. If you want to use an air purifier, use whole-house and portable models that rely on filters and that produce no ozone. (Ratings of air purifiers are available to subscribers.) Look for our report on carbon-monoxide and smoke alarms in the November 2009 issue of Consumer Reports, online and on newsstands in early October.—Gian Trotta | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: If you or another member are prone to accidents, watch this video on the best ways to handle spills from wine and soda. Before the start of heating season, get your heating system tuned up. And to save money on your utility bills, install a programmable thermostat, read our buyer's guides to furnaces (more details here), solar water heaters, and pellet stoves, and follow our overall experts tips for cutting your energy costs.

Q&A: When should I replace a carbon-monoxide alarm?

I've heard that carbon-monoxide alarms fail after seven years. Is that true?

Most carbon-monoxide (CO) alarms are backed by a five- to seven-year warranty, but they typically emit a chirping or signal when they're nearing the end of their useful life. This signal differs from the one that indicates a low battery. If there's a problem with the unit, a model with a digital display will show an error message, and one without a digital display might flash LEDs in a particular pattern.

Remember, the test button on a CO alarm checks only whether the alarm is working, not the sensor. To check the sensor, use a test kit that you can purchase at a local home center.

Essential information: Read our buyer's guide to CO and smoke alarms for more information on these important safety devices, and view a quick interactive to determine which alarms are best for your home. We've also got a report on an intriguing study on the effectiveness of a voice recordings versus more traditional loud tone alarms in awakening children.

Tip of the Day: How to avoid dangers at home

Along with the spring cleaning you'll do over the coming weeks, conduct a thorough safety inspection of your home to uncover and deal with home dangers related to the products, systems, or areas of your home below.

This information is adapted from ShopSmart magazine. Download a PDF of the entire story, which covers other products, inflatable pools, swing sets, and trampolines, and covers lead and radon test kits and includes items you need for a home-safety tool kit.—Ed Perratore

Cooking appliances
If you've got kids at home, unplug small kitchen appliances when not in use so curious toddlers can't turn them on. Be especially sure to unplug a toaster or toaster oven since some models have been known to turn on spontaneously or not turn off at the end of a cycle, posing a fire risk. We advise against running slow cookers, washers, dryers, and dishwashers when you're not home.

Dead bolts
Double-cylinder dead bolts can prevent burglaries but one might prevent quick escape if you can't find the key to the door during a home fire. If you can't keep the key in the lock or very close by at all times, replace the lock. Many municipalities ban double-cylinder locks for main points of egress.

Electrical outlets and wires
Outlets with a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) could prevent two-thirds of the estimated 160 electrocutions and thousands of burns and electric shocks that occur in U.S. homes each year. They're essential in bathrooms, the kitchen, and anywhere else near water. Adding a GFCI is an easy retrofit for an electrician. You can also purchase a GFCI circuit breaker that will protect all outlets serviced by that branch.

Also have an electrician house any exposed or dangling wires in an electrical box that's covered with a plate.

Floors and steps
While it's pricey to replace a stairway, any step that's taller or shorter than the rest is a stumbling hazard. And any portion of a floor that's uneven could cause a fall; leveling the floor is the only way to solve the problem.

Glass doors and tables
You know to put large stickers on sliding glass doors to keep people from walking or running into them. But glass tables can also break and cause cuts, a particular hazard for small kids. Replace glass tables with nonglass ones or buy a table with tempered safety glass. Tempered glass can greatly reduce injuries. Read this post from the Consumer Reports Safety blog for more details.

Garage-door opener
Automatic door openers should have an electric eye that causes a closing door to reverse if an object, or a toddler, gets in its path. If your garage door lacks this safety feature, replace the opener with a new, safer one that's properly adjusted.

Hand rails
You can prevent falls by installing secure hand rails all the way up any stairway that has only a partial hand rail or lacks one. You'll find prefab rails at local home centers.

Lighting
Be sure stairways are well lighted at the top and bottom. If household members regularly bump their head against a chandelier, shorten the chain or replace the chandelier with a ceiling fixture.

How to avoid carbon-monoxide poisoning

Last week's hospitalization of more than a dozen children in Dallas and the recent deaths of seven Kentucky residents illustrate the real dangers of carbon monoxide.

Keep your family safe with the safety measures below as well as this advice.

1. Maintain your gas furnace or other fuel-burning heating appliance, like a wood or pellet stove. Beyond doing the usual maintenance and cleaning, you should check all flues, vents, and chimneys that carry the burned gases for proper operation and signs of corrosion or leaks. Repair or replace the vent system as needed.

2. Be cautious when using a propane- or kerosene-fired space heater or portable generator (see the video for more on using a generator).

3. Install smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms. Replace smoke alarms that are more than 10 years old and CO alarms that are more than 5 years old. Check the unit's housing for a manufacturer date if you are not sure of its age.

4. Check your gas-dryer vent for blockages and replace any vinyl tubing with rigid metal ducting. Also seal all joints. A properly vented gas or electric dryer will dry your clothes faster and reduce the chance of a fire.—Gian Trotta

Essential information: Be prepared for any weather emergency.

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

Stove Guard appliance timer and motion detector lowers the risk of range fires

An estimated 47,000 residential fires a year start on rangetops, injuring more than 2,400 people, killing about 80, and causing $135 million in property damage, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Many of those fires start when someone leaves the kitchen with food still cooking on the stovetop.

For many years, representatives of Underwriters Laboratories, Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of this magazine, and appliance makers worked together with the CPSC to find a technological solution such as heat sensors that would turn off burners before the food in a pot or pan ignited. But according to a CPSC spokesperson, the agency has refocused its efforts on other “high-priority flammability projects.” The CPSC did add that it would revisit the issue in the future when it has sufficient resources.

Meanwhile, a small distributor of security products in Saskatchewan, Canada, is making and selling a safety device that serves much the same purpose, at least for owners of electric ranges and cooktops. The Stove Guard, a $299 automatic timer and motion detector, shuts off the elements and the oven if there is no motion near the appliance after a preselected time period.

How it works. Stove Guard has three easy-to-program settings. The first, “on/auto,” turns power off to the burners if there is no motion near the range after a specific period of time. You set the time, anywhere from 1 to 39 minutes. The second setting, “on/timer,” turns power off after a preset amount of time, up to 99 minutes, regardless of motion. An adjustable sensing level keeps the device from turning the range back on because of a child’s or a pet’s movement. Pressing the “off” setting returns the range to its regular use.

In our tests, the Stove Guard worked exactly as advertised. But proper installation and maintenance are crucial. Mount it too close to the stove and steam from boiling liquids in pots can interfere with its use, as it did in our tests. Once mounted, simply unplug the electrical cord to your range and plug it into the Stove Guard. Then plug the electrical cord from the Stove Guard into the wall outlet. It’s also important to periodically clean the sensor to minimize grease buildup, which diminished the Stove Guard’s sensitivity in some of our tests.