Best Smoke Detectors of 2025

When it comes to detecting smoke, time is the essence. Therefore, we designed a test to simulate a real emergency.

The first thing to know is that there are two main types of fires that these products are designed for: smoldering fires and fiery fires.

Smoldering (or slowly burning) fire refers to the combustion that occurs on the surface of a solid material. Smoldering fires produce a large amount of thick smoke, but they cannot maintain the flame. Think of a cigarette that is slowly burning, but it doesn’t actually explode into flames.

A smoldering fire can become a fiery fire if proper action is not taken immediately.

Fluffy fires are something we know better, and they usually arise from the ignition of flammable materials, such as flammable materials, wood, and paper. These generally produce less smoke than smoldering fires, but are more destructive.

We built a chamber to house the smoke detectors under testing and fed two different types of smoke through the chimney. Next, we timed the quick response. The faster the smoke detector alarm is triggered,

To simulate smoke coming from the smoldering fire, I lit 300g of charcoal and heated it for 10 minutes before feeding the smoke. I wanted to make sure most of the coal was lit and the smoke was thick enough to cause an alarm.

It was easy to replicate the fiery fire, with only 30g of shredded paper doing the trick. Again, before feeding the chamber through the chimney, we made sure there was a considerable amount of smoke present.

To the great discomfort of my neighbor who had to randomly endure the smoke alarm, and to the person I sincerely apologized, I did the whole process three times per smoke detector model under test and per smoke type I repeated it. Detector. Finally, response times were averaged. You can check it on the chart below.