Can I Use A Smoke Detector In The Kitchen?

Using a smoke detector in the kitchen is not recommended due to the heat, steam and smoke a kitchen will produce whilst cooking. Instead, a heat detector should be installed in the kitchen area.

Installing a smoke detector in the kitchen area will produce multiple false alarms, and you’ll experience these alarms mainly when you’re frying food in a saucepan, using a toaster or using a kettle.

In this article, I’ll go more in-depth on why you shouldn’t use a smoke detector in the kitchen, including what happened to me many years ago when I mistakenly installed a smoke detector in my own kitchen.

Below is a handy table of contents. Clicking on any of the article headers below will jump you straight to the place you are interested in on this page.

Table of Contents

Why You Shouldn’t Use A Smoke Detector In The Kitchen

Many years ago, when I bought my first house, I made the mistake of installing a smoke detector in my kitchen.

And here’s what happened:

Near enough every time I used the toaster, cooked a chicken stir fry in a pan, or boiled the kettle, the alarm went off.
I then started opening the door or window when doing these things, and although less frequent, the smoke alarm still went off.
I got so annoyed one day, I flipped the cover off the smoke detector, and removed one of the batteries temporarily.
Removing the battery ‘temporarily’ turned into months later, leaving me with no fire alarm protection in my kitchen area, until I installed a heat detector in its place.

Of course, this is what you will do, and you also will be left with no fire alarm protection in that part of your home.

I was young back then. But I was also lucky because if a fire had broken out in that part of my house, I wouldn’t have been warned until the smoke had reached the smoke detector in my hallway.

It has been proven time and time again, that the earlier you are warned about a fire in your home, the greater chance of you getting out of your safely with zero injuries, including zero smoke inhalation.

Here’s What You Should Do Instead

You should fit a heat detector in your kitchen area.

For the best and cheapest heat detectors for your home, click here: Best Heat Detectors For Your Kitchen (UK top 3)

It’s so easy to put these things off until tomorrow.

Make sure you do it now.

Go to that article, order your heat detector, and it will be with you tomorrow ready for you to install.

Why A Heat Detector In My Kitchen?

In simple terms, a heat detector detects rapid heat change in a specific area (like your kitchen), whilst ignoring smoke produced by cooking related activities.

It will also ignore the heat produced by cooking, which means you won’t have to suffer from any more false alarms in your kitchen whilst you’re trying to cook a meal.

And it completely eliminates the most dangerous thing of having a smoke detector in the kitchen; when you find your smoke detector goes off whilst cooking, and you subsequently remove the batteries ‘temporarily’, without ever putting them back in.

I go more in-depth on how a heat detector works in another article on this site.

Gold Standard Alarm Protection For Your Home

The absolute gold standard of alarm systems is an interlinked alarm system that incorporates both smoke and heat detectors.

In fact, it is law in Scotland that all homes are fitted with interlinked smoke alarms and heat alarms.

An interlinked alarm system is Gold standard because each detector in the network talks to all other detectors, meaning that if the heat detector alarms in your kitchen while you’re asleep at night, the heat detector will then send all other detectors into audible alarm across your home.

This reduces the risk of you and your family being unable to hear an alarm because it’s too far from the sleeping area.

Summary

A heat detector will cost you the equivalent of:

2x Large Starbuck Coffees and a couple of muffins, or,
2x large Big Mac Meals with a McFlurry, or,
1x monthly Sky Sports subscription.

Whilst it’s a fair observation to state that you won’t get as much enjoyment out of a heat detector as any of those three things, it’s an equally fair observation to state that the heat detector will allow you and your family to keep enjoying those 3 things well into the future.

If your home doesn’t have a heat detector installed in your kitchen, jump across to the article on the best heat detectors for kitchens, purchase one, and then install it tomorrow.

Questions & Comments

If you have a question or a comment on this article on using a smoke detector in the kitchen, please use the comments box below.

I’ll try my best to reply to each and every one of your questions, comments and suggestions.

Stay Safe. Stay Secure.