In this episode, Skip Walker joins Reuben and Tessa to discuss the current state of smoke alarms and the standards that govern their manufacturing. They delve into the UL 217 standard and the challenges of updating it. They also explore the role of manufacturers in the standards process and the impact on consumer safety. The conversation highlights the importance of photoelectric smoke alarms and the need for widespread adoption. They also touch on the changes in the market, with brands like Kidde focusing on photoelectric alarms. Overall, the episode emphasizes the need for continued advocacy and education on smoke alarm safety. The conversation revolves around smoke alarms and the debate between ionization and photoelectric technology. Skip Walker, an expert in the field, discusses the flaws of ionization alarms and the benefits of photoelectric alarms. He mentions the ongoing efforts to update the UL standards for smoke alarms and the resistance from manufacturers. Lawsuits against companies like KIDDE and First Alert are putting pressure on them to improve their products. The conversation concludes discussion of the importance of using photoelectric smoke alarms and the need for stricter regulations.
Takeaways
The UL 217 standard governs the manufacturing of smoke alarms in the United States.
The standards process involves a committee with representatives from manufacturers, academia, and the public.
Manufacturers can block changes to the standard, which has hindered progress in improving smoke alarm technology.
The current standard allows for both ionization and photoelectric smoke alarms, but there is a push for greater adoption of photoelectric alarms.
Changes to the standard can be delayed, leading to a delay in the implementation of improved smoke alarm technology.
Advocacy and education are crucial in promoting the use of photoelectric smoke alarms and improving consumer safety. Ionization smoke alarms have flaws and are prone to nuisance tripping.
Photoelectric smoke alarms are more effective in detecting slow-moving, large particles in real fires.
There is ongoing debate and resistance from manufacturers in updating the UL standards for smoke alarms.
Lawsuits against companies like KIDDE and First Alert are pressuring them to improve their products.
Using photoelectric smoke alarms is crucial for better fire safety.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Social Media Mishap
01:21 Introducing Skip Walker and His New Endeavor
03:17 Teaching Residential Building Codes
04:03 Creating the Curriculum for the Class
06:32 Reuben’s Support and Excitement for Skip’s Teaching
09:59 Revisiting the Topic of Smoke Alarms
14:38 The Challenges of Updating Smoke Alarm Standards
19:00 The Role of Manufacturers in the Standards Process
25:30 The Importance of Photoelectric Smoke Alarms
29:23 Advocacy and Education for Smoke Alarm Safety
29:26 The Flaws of Ionization Smoke Alarms
32:19 The Benefits of Photoelectric Smoke Alarms
35:26 Resistance from Manufacturers in Updating UL Standards
37:00 Lawsuits Driving Improvement in Smoke Alarm Technology
48:41 The Importance of Using Photoelectric Smoke Alarms
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host alongside building science geek, Tessa Murray. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom.
RS: Welcome back to the show. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast. Tessa, great to see you. I had to take a quick minute before we started the show and turn off our social media feed. I had no idea, but for the past, like six to eight weeks, I have been posting this to my Facebook profile. I happened to get on Facebook for the first time in, I don’t know how many months or whatever, and my whole profile was filled with you and I doing these live shows. I was like, oh my gosh, none of these are supposed to be live.
Tessa Murray: What?
RS: And all of them had zero views. So I clearly did something wrong. So don’t worry. Nobody saw any of that Tess.
TM: Oh God.
RS: Yeah.
TM: ‘Cause I didn’t even know who…
RS: Everyone had exactly zero. So it’s fixed.
TM: Well, now that…
RS: You don’t need to worry about it.
TM: Are they still on your Facebook page? So people are listening to this and they can go check it out?
[chuckle]
RS: I don’t think anybody could see them anyway, but no, I took them all down. They’re all gone. But all right, enough about that. Total detour. I just wanted to explain to you what I was doing in live time. We’ve got a special guest on the show today. Repeat guest. We’ve got code guru, home inspector, instructor extraordinaire, co-author of the Code Check series. And well, I’m not going to read his whole CV. This is just off the top of my head. We got Skip Walker on the show. Skip, welcome back. How are you doing my friend?
Skip Walker: I’m doing good. How are you guys doing?
TM: Oh, great. It’s an honor to have you on the show, Skip. And for anyone that’s new to the podcast, I think we had Skip on back in 2021. Was that the last time we had you on Skip? Has it been three…
SW: I don’t know if it was that, it’s been a while.
TM: Okay. Well, we had you on to talk about photoelectric smoke alarms and that was a very…
SW: Correct.
TM: Interesting podcast.
SW: Yeah.
TM: So I’m excited to dive into what we’re going to get into today. But before we do that, Skip, you had something kind of interesting that you were telling us before we started recording about a new endeavor of yours. A new almost another thing to add to your already ridiculously impressive resume, but what are you going to be up to this fall, Skip?
SW: Teaching in college. So first time actually being back in a college classroom formally since the 1970s. And this time, I’m on the other side of the table. So I’ll be teaching…
TM: You’re in charge.
SW: Residential building codes at a local JC. I mean, I love teaching. I mean, I really, if there… If it wasn’t for the fact that, you could starve as a teacher, I’d be doing that. But when I first got into the business, I went to my first ASHI chapter meeting, I sat at a table and unbeknownst to me at the table next to me was Douglas Hansen and a guy named Jerry McCarthy. Jerry, you probably don’t know, but he’s like a JD Gruhl for California. He’s legendary or was. He passed away, unfortunately. So here I am 20 years plus years later and Douglas is the primary author on Code Checks. I’m working with him, and they both mentored me as I kind of grew up in the business. Both of them taught at the college of San Mateo for years. So I’m teaching in the same department that they used to teach in. It’s kind of one of these like karmic full circle moment things, really kind of neat.
RS: Oh, super cool.
TM: That’s very cool.
RS: And then let me ask you, you said you’re teaching building codes. Is it one class where you’re covering a whole bunch of stuff or are you covering… Are you doing more than one class where you really dive deep into these different things?
SW: I’ve got one class. I’m teaching the Intro to Residential Building Inspection Technology, I think is the class name. It’s basically the residential codes in California. So it’ll be a little bit of building, a little bit of plumbing, a little bit of mechanical, a little bit of electrical. These guys have no idea how much reading they’re in for.
[laughter]
TM: Skip, are you creating the entire curriculum for this?
SW: Yeah. Yeah.
TM: I mean, you’re creating all of the classes…
SW: Right.
TM: And topics and tests and all of that?
SW: Back… I want to think I started with the 2016. I taught an ICC prep class for Korea, and I would do it every year or every conference. So twice a year, basically. So I had a module for building that was 15 hours long. I had another module for plumbing, mechanical, electrical, all of them two-day classes. So I’m basically taking those, mushing it down ’cause I’ve got 51 hours of face time in the semester and kind of mushing that into this, and updating it to current codes…
TM: Yeah.
SW: And then trying to make it so that… Like, for example, the first class, I’ve got a local guy that used to be the building official at a city here. And this guy is like a legendary building official. He was one of the guys that… The whole idea of ICC, the International Code Council, he was one of the guys that helped found it. And he helped write the original IRC. So he’s going to come in and talk for a few minutes and kind of talk about his experience. He used to teach the class as well, so.
TM: Okay.
SW: I’m going to do that. I am going to get Douglas to come in. I actually was thinking about Reuben to do a little 15 minute Zoom thing, on exterior stuff when we get to that chapter. So…
TM: Nice.
SW: I want to try to put in a little bit of like, not just the book, but a little, tie it into the real world a little bit so people can start to kind of connect the dots.
RS: Well, I definitely don’t feel qualified to be teaching with the likes of you, but…
[laughter]
SW: Trust me, you are more than qualified.
RS: Anything you need I will be there for you Skip, you say jump, I’ll say how high. I will help you however I can.
SW: Yeah. Anyway, it should be fun.
TM: Those are some lucky students. Yeah, so what’s the degree that they are going for? Like what are these students enrolled in? What sort of programs?
SW: Right now I don’t know who I’ve got in the class. I mean, I know actually the class is on wait list. They don’t know who I am. I mean, they have no clue.
TM: Okay.
SW: It’s just… It’s an intro class. So these are people that are going to be going for an associates in this inspection tech section. And they would end up then in jurisdictions doing inspections or maybe for med techs. There may be some contractors, there may be some architects, there may be some home inspectors… I know there’s at least one home inspector. ‘Cause I know she’s a local lady that’s going to… That’s already signed up for the class. So…
TM: Wow. Cool.
SW: It’s a mix of people that are code geeks and/or want to get into the inspection side of the business, whether it’s something through the home or jurisdictional.
RS: Well, I’ll just say my two cents. That’s kind of how I cut my teeth into learning all about houses. Was taking a ton of classes through our local building inspection technology program through a couple of different community colleges. And those were extremely helpful. And we had classes, I mean, just dedicated to plumbing. We had one dedicated to electrical inspections, one on mechanical inspection. I mean, so many different… Fire suppression, that was absolute death. That was the worst thing in the world. But a lot of those… And man, they were fantastic and I wish there was some type of equivalent today. So I…
SW: They actually have…
RS: I applaud what you’re doing.
SW: They actually have a dedicated plumbing, dedicated electrical. They have one on accessibility. Our California ADA accessibility rules here are just incredibly tough. I mean, they literally will have… I mean, I’ve heard as many as 1700 people a year take the test in California and have literally, you can count the number of people that pass on one or two hands.
TM: What?
SW: It is really, really hard. Part of it, I think is because they write… The test is written poorly. It’s a lot. It is. I mean, I’ve heard talk of… I mean, you and me, Reuben, we’ve worked on the NHIE, so we worked with psychometricians and whatnot. These are not psychometric standard type tests. They’re testing on fun facts, like what year did so and so do such and such? Total nonsense.
RS: That’s awful.
SW: But you have got these state guys writing the test probably in the lunchroom. And anyway, there’s a full semester class on just accessibility.
RS: That sounds terrible.
SW: It… [laughter] That’s not my forte, I’ll tell you.
RS: Yeah.
TM: Wow. Well, congratulations, Skip, and best of luck to you. You don’t need luck. I hope you get to enjoy this next semester and that you have some fun doing it too.
RS: Yeah, Yeah. Absolutely. So, Skip, I wanted to have you on the show again to basically come back to the same topic we talked about last time. Last time you were on, we spent a lot of time talking about smoke alarms, the differences between ionization alarms and photoelectric. I mean, the huge differences between the two. And you’re saving lives. You’re doing the Lord’s work by telling people about all this. I mean, you are surely the biggest proponent that I know of this. You’ve been beating this drum for a long time, and back when I first sat through your class on this, maybe, I don’t know, a decade ago, maybe more than that, at one of the national conferences, ASHI’s Inspection World Conference, that’s where it really opened up my eyes to the difference between the two. And ever since then, we’ve been mentioning this to our clients during home inspections, and I have been blogging and doing videos and all this stuff about it quite regularly, just advocating for the use of photoelectric smoke alarms.
RS: So the other day I am at Home Depot I don’t remember what I was there for. I am just walking past the smoke alarms, and I did a double take and I noticed two full eight foot bays of smoke alarms. Normally it’s like this big assortment, this brand, that brand, this type, that type, all that stuff. They were like all almost identical. It’s all this new… And make sure I am saying the name right, it’s Kidde, right? Kidde not Kitty.
SW: Correct. It’s not Kitty. Yeah.
RS: Okay. Yeah, Kidde.
SW: The company was founded by Walter Kidde.
RS: Good. Okay.
SW: After around World War I think if I remember my history correctly.
[laughter]
RS: I’m sure you’re right. So it’s…
TM: We will not fact check that.
RS: Yeah. I am not going to fact check you. I believe you. But it’s a huge wall of Kidde smoke alarms and they all say detect smoke alarm. It’s like they went away from having all these different flavors of them. And it used to be some would say ionization, some would say photoelectric, some would say dual sensor, but they don’t say any of that anymore. And then I… So I picked up the package, I am like, “Oh great. What kind are these?” And at first I was mad, ’cause I am thinking, oh, they are all ionization and they are not telling people. ‘Cause you turn the box over, you look at all six sides of the box, it doesn’t tell you anywhere on the outside of the package what type of smoke alarm this is. And I’m like, they’re just… That’s all they are selling now. And I was pissed. [laughter] But then I open it up and I… I open up the manual and I finally, I get to page seven of the user manual and it is a photoelectric smoke alarm. And then I was delighted. I’m like, okay, this is fantastic. They are just taking the choice away from people and they are saying, this is what you need.
RS: This is what you gotta get. If you wanna buy a smoke alarm at Home Depot, it’s gonna be a photoelectric. And I went, Ooh, okay. Big sigh of relief. That’s great. And so, I thought, okay, what is promoting this change? I mean, is it just Home Depot? Is it a buyer at Home Depot who’s deciding this is all we want? Or is Kidde driving this, where that’s all they want to sell now? And then I started digging into it more. I’m going to have a ton of questions for you, Skip, and I know you’re dying to jump in, but hold on, let me tell my whole… Let me get all this out here or I am gonna forget it. So then I go to Menards. That’s like a local home builder supply shop.
TM: Like a Home Depot.
RS: Kinda of like a Home… Yeah, it’s just like Home Depot. And they did something very similar. Most of their smoke alarms are the Kidde detect. Stop by Lowe’s. Not so much. They’ve got First Alert and they have got all flavors of First Alert. But I went to First Alert’s website, so what’s new with First Alert. And for all their smoke alarms, they’re saying they use this new technology, and they have that advertised for both their ionization and their photoelectric smoke alarms. And I remember when you were on the podcast years ago, you talked about a new standard coming out for smoke alarms that was being slowed to get adopted, but it was supposed to… Excuse me. It was supposed to make everything a lot better and potentially make it so that ionization alarms can’t even pass the testing anymore. And it just… I got a ton of questions about all this, so I thought we need to get Skip back on here and answer everything perfectly for us. So Skip.
SW: No pressure.
RS: Do you want me to ask you question by question or do you wanna just jump in?
SW: Well, the… Let me give you a kind of my view of the world and then you can pick me apart and…
RS: Alright, let’s hear it.
SW: Ask away. So for smoke alarms in the United States, they have to be manufactured to a standard and Underwriters Laboratory or UL, is the authoring organization of that standard. It’s the UL 217 standard for single station alarms, the ones that go in homes and whatnot. There’s another one that 268 that’s for things that are more like, central alarm based. So, an alarm going into an ADT security system, that goes in a home. Those fall under 268. Ones that go in a hotel would be 268. The single station, even though they are interconnected, the ones that go in a home are 217. There’s a committee that actually gets together. They call it a technical panel. They get together and they author and they develop the standard. And then once it’s adopted, then the manufacturers have to manufacture to that standard.
SW: So they put out the standard when they finally decide on what it is. And at that point, the manufacturers then develop a smoke alarm that meets the standard. So that’s kind of the process that we’re seeing right now, as we change over. The UL 217 standard has been… And I think if I remember correctly, I was talking about this change in standards in 2015, so basically, nine years ago. And here’s the trick with the standard. The UL is what’s called a Voluntary Standards Organization or a VSO, NFPA a National Fire Protection Association, another VSO, ICC another VSO. These are organizations that the government, the federal government has, and even state has delegated the authority to make rules in the case of ICC building standards, in the case of, NFPA, fuel gas, electric, and the like.
SW: And then UL, there’s hundreds of standards. Carbon monoxide, window blind safety falls under a UL standard, smoke alarms as well. So the reason they do that is because they don’t have the staff to develop these. It’s a pretty complex process. There’s actually an ANSI standard on how to develop a standard and ANSI is another VSO. So the way the standards process works is there’s… In the case of the 217 standard, I think there’s like 42 people that sit on that committee. And a third of them roughly come from manufacturers. A third of them come from academic and professional, and a third of them come from public. So it’s a little like NHIE is developed. And I think you could consider, EBPHI could be considered a VSO to an extent.
RS: And for anybody who doesn’t know the acronyms, Skip is talking about the National Home Inspector Exam.
SW: Yeah, exactly. Sorry I… So NHIE is National Home Inspector Exam. EBPHI is Examining Board of Professional Home Inspectors. So if you look at the EBPHI board, which I know Reuben you are or were part of.
RS: Yeah, I am a director there. Yep.
SW: Yeah. So, there’s public members on that board, and those are people that are not home inspectors. They are actually third party. And the idea is they bring a little bit of… A little bit different perspective to the process. So, like Loretta is a public member on the EBPHI board. The same thing happens on the 217 committee. There’s people that are just like Joe off the street. And then there’s a couple members that are non-voting. That would be Consumer Product Safety Commission, the UL person that chairs or organizes the committee. And I think there’s one other one. So, this all sounds really great because it’s gonna be this big love fest, get together, develop a standard. The standard’s gonna help save humanity. The reality is, there’s politics involved in this.
RS: Stop.
TM: What?
SW: So it takes a two thirds vote to pass a change to the standard, which seems like that would be a good thing. But the problem is, there’s a third of the standard committee that’s manufacturers. So, for all intents and purposes, they can block anything that they don’t want to have happen. And in fact, that’s what’s been happening for the last multiple decades. No one that made ionization smoke alarms wanted to legislate themselves out of the business of making alarms, because it’s a multi-billion dollar a year business. And I’m trying to think how to say this politely.
RS: Just say it.
[chuckle]
SW: Yeah. So, but it takes all the manufacturers to line up plus one and all of a sudden the standard doesn’t change. So there’s been some games. I think that’s probably the correct… The nicest word for it involved in not letting the standard change. And then there’s the ability of people to game the standards process. So, for example, when right now the eighth edition of UL 217 has been published, so you go on the website and you can buy it. $800 to 11 or $1200 bucks will get you a copy of this little document, so it’s not… So I’ve never bought a copy of it because my wife would shoot me.
RS: Yeah.
[overlapping conversation]
SW: I’ve actually gotten a couple copies, because I actually… I’m not on the committee. I’ve actually applied a couple times and they’ve rejected me out of just like immediately. I think I might know why.
RS: Sure. You’re a trouble maker.
SW: Anyway. Because I go in and I comment in the public forum public, not like the public members, but there’s actually a public area where you can comment, because I’ve commented in there. Sometimes I’ll get copies, draft copies of the standards so I can see kind of what the standard looks like. So the point being is, they game the process. Once the document is published, the manufacturers have two years before it actually goes into legal effect. So if I publish today, two years from today, that becomes the rule. And in between then I can make stuff to that standard, but I don’t have to. So between now and two years from now, if the standards committee makes any change to the standard, then it resets the two year clock.
RS: Okay.
SW: And that’s what’s been going on since 2015.
RS: Wow.
SW: I actually remember I was at a… I think it was 2017, 2015 rather. I was at a conference and I was talking about how I think I… It was like a smoke alarms and a new hope, a Star Wars, a theme to the title. And at the end, when I explained to people kind of I just told you how the standard process works, somebody said, the standard in theory was supposed to go into effect… Like IW is always in January. The standard was supposed to go into effect like March. And that was the two year period. And someone said, well, what do you think the odds are they’re actually going into effect? And I told him, I said less than 50/50. And sure enough in February, like less than three or four weeks later, a change got filed to the standard and it pushed the date out. So here we are nine years later and the standard still has not taken effect yet. Not from the mandatory standpoint.
RS: Wow. Okay.
SW: I actually pulled up some of the… I get emails because I, again, I’m on this mailing list for the standards committee. So here’s an email I got from UL and it says, “Optional requirements to temperature test section 47, opened 2024, April 12th,” of that date. And it’s open for comments. So if that were to get approved… That was opened in April of this year. If that were to get approved, then that would push the implementation date out, even though this is a public standard. There’s also UL 217, ninth edition that is under proposal review right now. And that actually is another thing that could push the implementation date is if right now eighth edition has been published before eighth edition hits that two year mark.
SW: If ninth edition gets published, then it’s two years from the published date for ninth edition to get to the point where it actually becomes for real. So there’s games that get played in terms of this. And until that actually goes into mandatory adoption, then you’re under the previously adopted standard that allows for ionization alarms, because that’s the most recent one that was enforced for like legal, has to be manufactured to this standard in between Kidde and now BRK First Alert, have started to manufacture alarms. And I think that’s actually a good sign. Before back in 2015, ’16, they manufactured… Only Kidde was manufacturing alarms to the new standard. They actually kind of jumped the gun. And if I remember correctly, they call them TrueSense alarms. But they didn’t say they were photoelectric. They said they were optical sensors…
RS: I remember that, yeah.
SW: Which were photoelectric. But what they had done was they manufactured to the, I think, it was probably the seventh edition standard. And part of that standard, I actually got a copy of it. And there’s a trigger level in that standard. At this level, the alarm has to sound when the smoke gets this thick. And when it’s below that, it doesn’t. So to try to get ionization alarms to actually pass the standard, what they had done is they’d set that threshold really high. It was actually high enough that by the time the smoke alarm would trigger, firemen were required to have Air-Paks on. So it was 10… I think 10% was the number if I remember my smoke alarm history well enough. So Kidde manufactured these alarms. They were dual sensor photoelectric alarms with different light sensitivities. That was sort of the gist of that standard.
SW: And they got 450,000 of them out in the field and they found out they weren’t going off in real world fires. So they pulled 450,000 smoke alarms from the market and went back to manufacturing good old fashioned photoelectric and ionization alarms until this new standard, the eighth edition, things come out. So here we are with eighth edition. It looks like there’s gonna be changes. Some of these changes are, what I would consider to be non-substantial, but it doesn’t matter. A change is a change. One of the ones they had before that kicked the can down the road was literally how high off the ceiling the carbon monoxide sensor in the test environment was placed, whether it was 12 inches or 18 inches kind of stuff, which wouldn’t really… It’s important to have those numbers nailed down, but it doesn’t affect whether or not you can make the alarm or not.
SW: So there’s all kinds of nonsense that goes on behind the scenes. And in the meantime, about 2,000 people a year die in the US needlessly over smoke alarms they either have been disconnected ’cause they nuisance trip, meaning their ionization alarms that went off ’cause somebody burnt toast and they pulled the batteries out or their alarms that simply failed to go off in a real smoldering fire and people died.
RS: Sure.
SW: So corporate profit, I know it’s shocking that corporate profits would take precedent over people’s lives, but in some worlds that actually does happen, not that I’m being facetious or anything. But anyway, so that’s kind of the standards process is there’s a lot of good attributes to it because they pull from a variety of perspectives, whether it’s academic, there’s… Jay Fleming is on that committee and he’s the former Deputy Fire Chief and was one of the brightest people on life safety stuff in the world. Russell Ash is on that committee. He was the one that got the legislation, photoelectric legislation passed and now I’m flaking, New Hampshire, no, Vermont.
SW: It was Vermont. Dr. Vito something or other up in Seattle is on there. He’s one of the first PhDs in fire science in the US. These are all really strong proponents of photoelectric technology. So they’re on the committee. I tried to come on as a public member once and they declined saying that the rationale was we need to maintain proper balance on the committee. I’m not sure what that was. I’ve applied twice.
TM: You checked too many boxes, Skip.
SW: I know. I wasn’t expecting them to embrace me with open arms, but I’m sure all they did was Google Skip Walker and smoke alarm and they got bad news. But anyway, so they’re… At the same time though, I actually looked in the public section. This is back… I think I first applied maybe 10 years ago. In the public section, there was a lady in there who was a public member who suspiciously her name… And it wasn’t like, Jane Smith. It was some name that was pretty unique, happened to be the same name as the vice president of marketing for a small ionization only smoke alarm manufacturing company. And she was in the public section of… Which means she should have been over in the manufacturer industry side.
TM: She’s that two thirds vote plus one.
RS: Yeah, exactly.
SW: There’s your plus one, exactly. So games get played. It looks like they’re finally starting to maybe let it happen. I’m not hopeful. I mean, in terms of 8th actually getting adopted as is, I think it’s gonna get… I think there’s gonna be a change made. Either they’re gonna adopt, they’re gonna publish ninth edition or they’re gonna publish a change to it and that’s gonna kick the can down the road. But in the meantime, if Kidde and BRK, First Alert start manufacturing these eighth compliant alarms, that’s gonna be a good thing.
RS: Yeah.
SW: It doesn’t mean people should take their existing photoelectric alarms down. I talked to Fleming back when, I don’t know when it was, probably late last year sometime. And he’s the guy that’s the deputy or was Deputy Fire chief in Boston. And he said the difference between these new alarms and the photoelectric alarms that are in the market now is maybe about a 10% improvement. So photoelectric alarms give you about a 96% success rate in a real fire. Meaning, if you have a fire, you’re gonna have enough time to get out 96% of the time. So 10% of 4% is the improvement. So not a lot.
RS: Sure.
TM: Can I just ask a clarifying question?
SW: Sure.
TM: So the type of smoke alarm that Reuben is seeing sold at stores like Home Depot now is, it’s not technically like the photoelectric smoke alarms you could get five years ago. It’s actually a slightly better technology…
SW: Correct.
TM: And is it called something different?
SW: I’m not sure what name Kidde gave to them. They got a different name.
TM: Okay.
SW: It’s not TrueSense anymore. They came out with a new name, marketing name, First Alert calls them Precision Detect, I think, alarms and…
TM: Okay.
SW: If I… Assuming… Yeah. Okay. So that’s their… That must be their new name for it.
RS: Detect.
SW: So if I remember correctly, the seventh and eighth standard required dual sensors with different light wave sensitivities. One of the kind of the achilles heels of a photoelectric alarm is because it does light scattering, darker colors can fool it a little bit and slow it down. Not a lot, but it’s still way better than a ionization alarm, which ignores the smoke and in a lot of cases. And so, they came up with this rationale that if we go with dual sensors and we tune them to different wavelengths, that that’s somehow gonna give us a better read on what the smoke profile is and help identify it sooner.
SW: So there’s that, in the new standard. And then the other thing in the new standard that’s key is there’s finally a nuisance trip test, which is literally, they have a standard that defines what kind of electric range you use, what kind of pan you use, and the fat content of the hamburger that you fry in the pan. And for how long? I mean, seriously, all this stuff gets nailed down because unless you can repeat the test, in a scientific way, then the test doesn’t have validity. So a lot of thought went into this. I mean, I give them complete credit for that.
SW: But it’s just this whole, let’s keep kicking the can down the road thing that just drives me nuts. Let’s let the thing take effect and then make mid course corrections later on rather than keep making mid course corrections and never letting it take effect. Anyway, I could literally talk for days on this stuff. It just, it’s very, very irritating is the wrong word. I mean, it’s disappointing. This is like the worst of capitalism in my opinion. And I’m a capitalist at heart. It’s the worst, it’s corporate greed gone amok. One man’s opinion. Others may disagree with me and that’s fine.
RS: Now, Skip, let me just ask you, what… I mean, why do you think it is that Home Depot is switched over? Or not even… Let’s not say Home Depot. Kidde why do you think that this is, like all that’s in Home Depot and all they’re selling now seems to be photoelectric? Do you think they’re just doing that to not give people a choice, ’cause they’re doing the right thing?
SW: Yep. Well, they’re doing the right thing, I think for probably the wrong reasons. They’ve been getting their brain sued out. There’s a law firm in Alabama, their whole practice is suing First Alert and Kidde over wrongful death suits on ionization smoke alarms.
RS: Okay.
SW: To the best of our knowledge, there’s never been a lawsuit of wrongful death suit against a photoelectric alarm.
TM: On electric.
SW: There’s only been wrongful death suits on ionization alarms.
RS: Okay.
SW: Sorry.
RS: And then do you have any idea what this new technology is? That First Alert or BRK is advertising?
SW: I’m sorry. My phone started ringing and I hopefully that didn’t make noise, but…
RS: No, I didn’t hear it.
SW: So I missed the question.
RS: Oh, I’m just wondering, do you know what the new technology is that First Alert/BRK is advertising? ‘Cause they say that all their smoke alarms have this new technology. Do you know what it is?
SW: They’re photoelectric alarms, they’re photoelectric.
RS: So it’s… But they even advertise it…
TM: Is it that dual sensor, like you said, Skip?
RS: But they advertise it for their ionization too?
SW: I haven’t seen the BRK First Alert…
RS: Okay.
SW: To know that.
RS: Okay. Got it.
SW: But The last standard I looked at was requiring these dual light sensing devices.
TM: O-beams you said.
SW: They call them optical, but they were photoelectric alarms. So I have not actually opened a BRK First Alert box up. And I’ve done that before, I’ve actually gone to Lowe’s and Home Depot and bought Kidde and First Alert alarms and taken a hammer and popped them open to look inside. So if they found a way to get by the nuisance trip test on the ionization alarms, I’d still be suspicious.
RS: Okay.
SW: Because the physics doesn’t change on an ionization alarm, they… Ionization alarms detect fast moving submicron particles, photoelectric alarms detect slow moving micron plus particles really well, and real fires are large slow moving particles. So the physics is what it is. I don’t know what to tell you on that one.
RS: Okay. Alright. No, just curious. So it sounds like this new standard has not been adopted, I thought maybe there was a new UL standards that had gone into effect that people were forced to…
SW: It’s been published, but it’s not mandatory yet.
RS: Okay. Alright. Cool.
SW: So if you go back to the UL website, which I think I had up here in another tab so I could answer this question. Let me see if I can find it. So publish date was January 2nd, 2020, which in theory that’s past the two years, but the last revision date was May 8th, 2024. So, guess what? That’s May 8th, 2026 would be the mandatory date.
RS: As long as nothing else changes.
SW: As long as nothing else changes in between.
RS: And it probably will.
SW: And it probably will.
RS: Okay, okay. Alright, alright.
[laughter]
SW: Well, they’ve already got…
[overlapping conversation]
SW: There’s already proposals queued up. I read one of them to you that was put out for discussion on April, whatever it was, 12th of this year. So that’ll get kicked around in the back room in the standards committee for some period of time it’ll either get approved or not. And there’s another one, and then there’s ninth edition. So if ninth edition gets approved before, and published before 2026, it becomes the new standard two years after it’s official. So this is…
TM: Skip, what standard are we working on… What standard is in place right now? Is it from the 1990s? At this rate…
SW: No, it’s not that…
TM: How does anything ever get…
SW: But it’s…
TM: Updated.
SW: I wanna say it’s either fifth or sixth edition and it’s the one that…
TM: Which would be roughly what year?
SW: Does not have nuisance tripping and it’s set up so that ionization alarms. The standards are rightfully technology agnostic. They don’t tell people what sensor to use, they tell them how it has to react and you figure out the tech. And that’s… I’m totally okay with that, that makes…
TM: Yeah.
SW: ‘Cause if something new comes along, you don’t wanna have a standard that says you have to use X when Y is way better, if Y meets the standard.
RS: The performance standard. Sure, as it should be. I agree.
SW: Yeah, exactly. Absolutely as it should be. The problem is when you keep degrading the standard of the point simply so that something that really shouldn’t be in the market gets allowed into the market all because I think… I don’t think there’s any nice way to spin it, it’s because people don’t wanna stop making money, because they make… These are multi-billion dollar a year companies, so there’s a lot at risk. And when you get paid based on this quarter’s earnings do you really wanna be the one that goes to the board and says, “We’re gonna take a loss for the next year, because we wanna be nice guys”?
RS: Do the right thing. Yeah.
SW: Yeah. I actually one time I inspected a house for a guy who was the northern California regional sales rep for Kidde. He’s the one that called on people Home Depot and whatnot. Guess what kinda smoke alarms he had? They were all photos.
TM: Ionization?
SW: They were photos.
RS: Of course they were photoelectric, yeah.
SW: He could have bought anything he wanted, they promoted their dual ion photo as being the best, these are all photo only alarms. And I didn’t know he was…
RS: ‘Cause he knows better.
SW: He was a Kidde employee until after, ’cause I always give people the smoke alarm speech and he… [laughter] When I was far way through, he said, “Sounds like you’ve been talking to that fire chief over in the East Bay.” A guy named Mark McGinn who’s retired now, he’s the one that told me. Anyway. And I said “Well, yeah, I know Mark really well.” [laughter] And…
TM: Small world.
SW: He said, Well… He started… I said, I see what kind of alarms you’ve got and clearly you could buy anything, you’d probably get them for free. You get anything you want, you’ve got photo only that just speaks like volumes.
RS: Yeah. That’s telling.
SW: So anyway, it was just, it was one of those funny moments where that what are the odds of me running into that guy selling his house?
TM: So Skip, would you say that a lot of these changes that like what Reuben is saying, what he’s seeing in the market now and being sold at Home Depot is because of these lawsuits that are happening against these companies?
SW: I got a feel that they’re finally feeling the pressure, ’cause these are not small lawsuits. You never know what they settle for ’cause they’re all under NDAs. But I know Jay Fleming has done expert work. The Dean Dennis, who’s the father out of Ohio, he’s done expert work, Vito up in Seattle, he does EW work, and they all seem to say kind of the same stuff. They’ve seen the discovery stuff, like the Alabama guys are, I think it’s Beasley Allen is the name of the law firm. They have a database because they’ve done so many lawsuits, they’ve got all these emails, internal emails from Kidde and BRK, and there’s no doubt that they know that they gotta… That they’re making alarms that kill people, there’s just no doubt. They know what’s going on, and they’ve known and they’re slow walking this as long as they can. So maybe they’ve decided now is the time to make the transition.
SW: I don’t know what the rationale, but I gotta feel that, if you get stung with enough 10, 15, $20 million lawsuits, that sooner or later that’s gotta affect the bottom line. And there’s enough people out there making noise, Jay Fleming has been beating this drum since the ’90s, like late ’90s, I think, in Boston. There’s good research that says that the photos save lives. Boston did a study, I wanna say it was like early 2010 to ’14. They’ve had a law since the ’90s in the greater Boston area that said photoelectric only alarms. So for at that point for 15 years, you’ve been required to have photoelectrics. And when they did this study, they started looking at, they meaning, the Boston Fire Department, not just whether somebody died and whether they had a smoke alarm, but what kind of smoke alarm. So at that point, 90% of fire deaths, which the number was really low because they put in photoelectric and their fire death rate dropped 50% over the next umpteen years, as the population change from ionization to photo.
SW: But of the people that died, 90% of them were in homes that had ionization alarms. And of the 10% that were in photoelectric homes, most of those people were incapable of self-preservation or they had something else going on, like they were an elderly person in a wheelchair and they could not self-extricate themselves from the house or they were drunk and passed out on a bed. So the very few people that died in photoelectric instances probably would have died anyway. There was no alarm that was gonna wake them up or get them out of there. The other people, 90% of the fire deaths, they were ionization. It was… There was always the… If I read the research correctly, there was always the possibility of self-preservation, they just didn’t get enough warning and/or the alarm didn’t go off at all.
RS: Well, so the bottom line here is photoelectric smoke alarms are still the only thing that people ought to be putting in their houses. Ionization alarms don’t go off fast enough, they’re prone to nuisance tripping. And dual sensor doesn’t give you any added benefit, there’s no reason to get a dual sensor alarm. You should be getting photoelectric and if you don’t have them, check your smoke alarms. All you need to do is give it a little twist, look at the backside and it’ll say right on the back which type it is. If it mentions some type of radioactive material like americium, something or another, it means it’s ionization. Yeah, that’s the one that you don’t wanna have. So, that…
TM: And if you go to a big box store and it doesn’t say photoelectric or ionization on it and it just has…
RS: And it’s made by Kidde.
TM: And it’s made by Kidde then it’s probably a newer type of photoelectric technology that’s good.
RS: Yeah. Those Kidde ones, those are great. Yep.
SW: And I’ll have to look into the BRK First Alert ones. I’d only gone as far as looking at their web, I don’t think I’ve got it up anymore. Before I got on this morning, I actually tried to take a peek and I saw they had some kind of precision detect thing and thought that was their new latest, greatest, eighth compliant version.
RS: Okay.
SW: The early on back in 2015, Kidde was the only one that had alarms that were new standard compliant. That’s the ones that got all recalled. At that point, I think part of the reason they were reluctant to adopt, and it turned out to be a good thing they didn’t, because Kidde ended up recalling almost half a million alarms, was because they didn’t wanna effectively give one company a monopoly on the market. They wanted competition. So if they had approved that standard then it would have put for all intents and purposes, put First Alert out of business.
RS: Sure.
SW: Unless they could quickly come up with a new tech. And First Alert is actually a much smaller company than Kidde. So anyway, I think there might have been some competition kind of decisions made to push it or slow walk it. And what I don’t know is whether BRK was intentionally slow walking their research to help that delay actually occur. At some point, I sound like a conspiracy theorist, right? [chuckle] I get that I had a guy come up to me after an ASHI conference and… ‘Cause I’d actually at the end, I said, “I’m not a not some conspiracy theorist whack job.” And he said, “You’re not a conspiracy theorist if there’s really a conspiracy.”
[laughter]
RS: I think that was the title of our last podcast. Yep.
SW: I think it was something like that. But anyway, that just stuck with me that, yeah, if it’s really bad stuff going on, I guess, maybe all you’re doing is calling them out. But, anyway. My opinion, I’m not privy to Beasley Allen’s discovery stuff, I’ve read pieces of the standards and looked at the conversations going on in the open public part of the UL 217 standards forum. I’ve been following this since 2010, I think that’s when I first heard Mark McGinn speak at our ASHI Chapter, on this topic. And to be just really blunt about it just pissed me off that we were allowing people to die, those are somebody’s kid’s and moms and grandmas, and it just… And it’s totally preventable. You’re not gonna save a 100% of the people, but in that last 15 years, we could’ve saved 30,000 people.
RS: We could do a lot better. Yeah.
SW: We can do so much better.
TM: Yeah.
RS: Well, Skip, I appreciate you beating this drum, and I appreciate you coming on. Thanks for sharing all your wisdom and all the insight, it’s good to hear about all this. And it sounds like we’re moving in the right direction, Kidde is moving in the right direction, I hope First Alert follows suit, but Skip…
SW: Yeah, they may be. With any luck, those ionization alarms either they figured out a way to circumvent the physics, which I kind of doubt. I don’t think us folks have much control over laws of nature, but if they did, bless them. As long as people don’t die, I’m happy.
RS: Well, Skip, if people wanna get a hold of you, can they reach out to you directly?
SW: Yes.
RS: You wanna throw out an email address or something for people or would you rather [0:54:31.3] ____?
SW: No. It’s homeinspection@sanbruunocable.com, which is a mouthful. If you Google Skip Walker smoke alarm, you’re gonna come up with a bazillion pages. Skip Walker Home Inspection, you’ll find my website.
RS: Cool.
SW: So I’m not terribly hard to find.
RS: Alright. That sounds good. Thank you. And if anybody’s got any questions, thoughts, comments for us, feel free to reach out, we read all your emails. It’s podcast@structuretech.com. Thank you all for listening, and Skip… Oh, yeah.
SW: One quick comment. There is a lawsuit going on right now, and it’s actually filed in federal court in San Francisco. And I’ve actually talked to the attorneys that are on the plaintiff side of this. I haven’t seen the complaint, but I’ve given them… I gave them all of my… I’ve got a folder on smoke alarms and it goes back into the ’70s research stuff. I gave them everything for use in their discovery process. But if I understood it correctly, they’re actually suing UL for slow walking this.
RS: Oh, wow.
TM: Wow.
SW: And I think that’s the gist.
TM: Interesting.
SW: That’s the short version. I’m sure the legal discussion is way more complicated than that, but I believe it’s UL is just taking the brunt because they’ve known that there’s a problem for decades and they haven’t been letting these things out in the wild, the new tech out in the wild kind of. So it’ll be interesting. I actually talked to the attorney before I came on here and he wants to see the podcast when it’s released, so.
RS: Cool. Well, this one will be released, not this come… This is coming up on the 19th, it’ll be August 19th.
SW: Okay.
RS: Happy birthday, Anna. That’s my wife’s birthday. Alright.
[laughter]
TM: Bye.
RS: Cool, Skip thanks again. Tessa, great to see you.
TM: Yep. Good to see you too.
RS: And we will catch you next time.
SW: Bye-bye.
[music]