Thank you for visiting our website. We have added our 'Home Maintenance Tips' page to assist homeowners by providing helpful tips for your home. Over the next few weeks we will be adding useful information to help prepare your home for spring. Please feel free to come back as often as you like or give us a call if you need assistance.
Thanks,
Dan Contillo
Trust Home Improvements, LLC
The end of daylight-saving time on Nov. 2 can be a life saver.
Fire-safety experts say the time change is a convenient reminder to change the batteries in your home smoke detectors.
Approximately 3,000 people die in house fires in the U. S. every year. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) reports that nearly half of those deaths occur in the 4 percent of homes that do not have working smoke detectors. The NFPA also says that 20 percent of home smoke detectors do not work because of dead or missing batteries.
The importance of smoke detectors is underscored by a statistic from the Consumer Product Safety Commission: your chance of surviving a house fire doubles if there are working smoke detectors in your home.
Although smoke-detector batteries might last as long as a year, the experts say they should be changed twice yearly: at the return of standard time on the first Sunday in November, and then again when clocks are changed to daylight-saving time on the second Sunday in March.
Even if your smoke detectors are "hard wired" into your home electrical system, they probably have backup batteries to make sure the detectors work during a power failure. It's also important to use the right kind of batteries. Ordinarly alkaline batteries are best. The "Ni-Cads" and other rechargeable batteries designed for high-tech electronics are not suited for smoke detectors.
Besides changing the batteries twice a year, it's also important to check smoke detectors monthly by pressing the test button.
