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Most everyone would agree that one of the most important things you can do is protect your family and make sure that they are safe and secure in their home and in their person. We do this in a lot of different ways. Most of us lock our doors at night; some of us keep a firearm in our home. Others buy burglar alarms and some even put metal bars around their windows, but perhaps the single best thing you can do to protect your family in your home is buy a smoke detector.

If you’re going to buy a burglar alarm to ward of thieves, make sure you get one that includes a smoke or fire detector as well. You are far more likely to suffer damage from a fire than you are to ever have your home burglarized. If you don’t have a burglar alarm system or don’t have one with fire-alarms built in, you should go out and buy a number of ceiling mounted smoke detectors.

In many states, modern building standards state that you should have one in each of the home’s bedrooms as well as any of the other major rooms in the house. This is a good rule to go by. There shouldn’t be any major parts of your home that aren’t covered by a smoke detector. The sooner you know about a fire, the sooner you can get out and alert the fire department of your problem. If the fire department knows about the fire in your home a few minutes before they would otherwise, this can mean the difference in saving and losing your home.

Of course, a smoke detector won’t do you much good if the battery dies on it. Get a smoke detector with a 10-year battery so that you know it’s in working condition. Once every 3 months go through all of the smoke detectors in your house and make sure they are in proper working order. All modern smoke detectors come with a test-button you can make use of to ensure they are in proper working order.

Along with making sure your smoke detectors are in good working order, you’ll want to make sure you have a sufficient amount of insurance on your home. Many people have homes that are very underinsured and their policies would not cover nearly enough to replace all of the items in their homes if a fire were to destroy it. You’ll also want to make a video recording once a year of all your possessions in your home as proof of ownership for insurance purchases. And keep this video at work; it won’t do you any good if you lose it in a fire in your home!

Smoke detectors are very inexpensive and well worth the time and effort to install them throughout your home. They will help you and your family gets out of your home quicker in the event a fire, and make sure that the fire department knows about the fire as soon as possible.