It's National Safety Month Which Means It's Time To Upgrade Your Home!

As I told you earlier in April, I joined #TeamKidde in March. As someone who has been affected by fire in the past, I know first hand the importance of having a plan in place for fire safety and having a home that is equipped and functional so that no matter what happens you are ready to react.

With that being said and seeing that it is National Safety Month, I reached out to Kidde to talk to them about upgrading my home’s fire safety equipment.” As a part of #TeamKidde, I have learned a lot and I have been sharing some of my learning on Twitter and hope that you have been following along. One of the things that I learned early on that I did not know is that smoke alarms should be replaced every 10 years.

Our home is almost 20 years old and I do not believe that any of our smoke alarms have ever been replaced. Let’s not even talk about the lack of in our home. Needless to say, our home was greatly lacking in its’ preparedness for a fire and for warning us if there was a CO emergency.

So my friends at Kidde sent me a mixture of Worry-Free hard-wired smoke alarms as well as Worry-Free combination for National Safety Month and make it a place that was safer for my whole family.

Now, of course, I had to find time to do this and I assumed that it would take me half the day to accomplish the task. However, when I did find a Saturday, I found that I was able to complete the task of changing out 8 existing smoke alarms with new ones in only about an hour – wiring and all – not too shabby for me!

I came to find that the installation of these new alarms was quite simple. When working with electricity, you should always turn off the power first as to not get a little jolt. Once this is done though it is a simple task of removing the old and hooking in the new and then testing the alarms themselves. Watch out though, as these new alarms are loud. Personally though, I loved the voice feature of the Worry-Free smoke alarms, as they were very cool and I could see this helping dramatically in a fire situation where you might have smoke filling the home!

On top of the smoke alarms Kidde has just released a great new product called Monitor that I am very excited about. This new remote notification device is small, inconspicuous, but really packs a punch. RemoteLync by Kidde provides peace of mind when you’re away from home. The device listens for the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms installed in your home, and if any of your alarms sound while you are away, it will alert you via your mobile device of the potential issue.

This is great for us, especially with some summer trips that we have planned and now that I have both new smoke and carbon monoxide alarms for my home, I know that my home is covered! RemoteLync was simple to install in my home and on my mobile device and the alerts really work too!

So this June, celebrate National Safety Month to upgrade your own home. Check your alarms and determine what you may need to do to better prepare you and your family for an emergency that may arise in the future!

To help you with that, below are a few resources that I wanted to share with you!

• Kidde’s Simple Steps to Safety page

• Kidde “Share Your Story” YouTube playlist

• SafeKids: Home Safety

• SafeKids: Fire Safety

• National Safety Council: National Safety Month