How to keep your Home Safe from fire
1. Keep your smoke detectors in working order: Less than 20 percent of fire-related deaths occur in buildings with smoke detectors because they are the fastest and most accurate fire detection devices. Make sure you have at least one smoke detector on each floor of your house and one outside the door of each bedroom. You should test your detectors once every month and change the batteries twice a year.
2. Maintain your heating appliances: Stoves, dryers and furnaces are common accidental fire starters. Unless you’re an expert yourself, you should bring in a professional once a year to ensure your appliances are in proper working order.
3. Be careful with electricity: When charging multiple computers, phones, cameras or other rechargeable devices, beware of tangle and clutter. Webs of knotted cords are electrical fire hazards. Also you should minimize the number of extension cords and power strips you use to avoid overloading your outlets.
4. Clean and organize regularly: Organizing piles of paperwork and breaking down and throwing out extra used boxes isn’t usually the most exciting item on the priority list, but large amounts of those things can serve as kindling for house fires. Filing your papers in cabinets and getting rid of your extra boxes and paper bags will make it harder for potential fires to spread throughout your home.
5. Purchase fire extinguishers: In case an unfortunately timed spark happens to ignite something in your home, it’s always good to have a fire extinguisher on each floor of your home. It’s best to keep these devices near potential sources of fire like the aforementioned stoves, dryers and furnaces.