On Sunday, 2 February 2020 20:07:44 UTC, Mathew Newton wrote:

I am getting to the end of an extension to create a 'family room' - an open-plan kitchen/diner/lounge and am wondering what best to do about smoke/heat alarms.... Given the risk of false alarms I understand that a heat alarm is most appropriate for a kitchen however do they still perform adequately in a large room (9m x 5m)? There will be a defined kitchen area and so I was going to locate it there - perhaps above / to the side of the hob+oven?

Or should I be looking at something else? (Maybe some sort of best-of-both-worlds combined affair that I might not be aware of?)

The rest of the house used interlinked Aico alarms and so they would be my starting point, and perhaps finishing point too if alarms from different manufacturers cannot be mixed.

Heat alarms should be near the cooker as the most likely source of fire. They are of course the slowest type to detect, using rate of rise rather than fixed temp helps but they're still slow. 9m is far enough to also use an ionisation alarm as a warning - positioned correctly it'll alarm before any fire when things get to the point of needing attention, ie smoking cooking. Sensitivity with ionisation alarms depends strongly on how far they are from the cooking.


NT