Z-Wave Seeks to Save House Fire Losses
Learn how Z-Wave technology is being leveraged to enhance fire/life-safety efforts in the home.
Less well known are the home-control capabilities related to fire detection and prevention. While many of the current smart-home platforms offer some level of fire safety, Z-Wave – the most broadly adopted wireless protocol in the world for control and automation products and services – is arguably the best-equipped platform for containing fires and, in many cases, stopping them before they ever start.
Fire Prevention Starts With Reliable Equipment
Protection from fires begins, not surprisingly, with dependable, properly maintained fire detection equipment. Consider: fire deaths from fires in which no smoke alarms were present, or in which smoke alarms were present but did not operate, accounted for 60% of all home fire deaths in the five-year period from 2007-2011. Smoke alarms were lacking in 37% of home fire deaths, and at least one alarm was present but nonoperational in 23%.
While traditional smoke detectors can go a long way toward stopping fires and helping building residents get to safety when a blaze begins, their functionality can be greatly enhanced with Z-Wave. While a more traditional smoke detector sounds an alarm, that feature proves beneficial only if someone is inside to hear it. Conversely, many Z-Wave-enabled smoke alarms include functionality that allows them to send out alerts whenever smoke or excess heat is detected.
As a result, a homeowner can be made aware of a fire or smoke hazard while they are away from their residence, providing the opportunity to take immediate action – even if the homeowner is hundreds of miles away.
The importance of this capability cannot be overstated, given that time is the most precious commodity in a firefighting scenario. According to a TIME magazine article (July 14, 2012), firefighters used to have, on average, 17 minutes to get anyone inside out of the building before they succumbed to smoke inhalation. But in today’s fires, the synthetic materials used in walls and furniture burn hotter and faster, leaving firefighters with only four or five minutes of rescue time. A minute can literally mean the difference between life and death – a minute that a Z-Wave device can potentially provide.
The interoperability benefits of Z-Wave are especially key in fighting home fires. Unlike some other wireless standards, Z-Wave (an international communications standard ITU-T G.9959 for complete home control solutions) is built with interoperability in mind. This means that multiple components in the home – including smoke detectors, carbon monoxide (CO) alarms and CO monitoring – can all be included within one home automation network.
This can be achieved even if each component is made by a different manufacturer, as long as all three are equipped with Z-Wave functionality. In fact, Z-Wave is the only wireless control technology that’s interoperable at the product level.
One way in which such a system could work to prevent fires is that each of the three alarms mentioned above could work in tandem to provide both homeowners and firefighters a more complete picture of what’s happening inside a specific residence. While information collected from one node may not mean much on its own, that data may be more powerful if combined with readings from the other two detectors. Throw a Z-Wave-enabled home security camera into the mix and the chances of detecting a fire before it increases in intensity go up even higher.
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