Jackson Fire Department begins free smoke alarm installation

JACKSON, Tenn. — Last week, the Jackson Fire Department hosted a smoke alarm drive for free smoke alarm installations. Tuesday, those smoke alarms got installed.

“It provides piece of mind and it also alerts you ahead of time that there is some smoke or fire present in the home,” said Latrell Billingsley, JFD’s public education officer.

Coordinator of public education for JFD, Errick Merriweather, says it’s highly recommended you don’t try to install them on your own.

“We think it’s more important for us to install them because we are trained on where they need to be placed at,” Merriweather said. “Often times, people may place them in a wrong position and that can cause more harm than good.”

Billingsley says smoke alarms are great in bedrooms to alert of smoke from a fire while sleeping but that’s not the only place you should have them.

“It’s important to have them strategically placed throughout the house,” Billingsley said. “If you have them too close to the kitchen, they are likely to go off more often, and it would be more like a nuisance alarm and alarm you for cooking smoke and not necessarily be an actual fire.”

“We try to install smoke alarms outside of each bedroom. We try to make sure that big rooms definitely have one inside of those. Just wherever they need to be located at. We try to make sure that they are in the right positions,” Merriweather said.

Billingsley cautions you to not remove batteries from your smoke alarms because of nuisance alarms.

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Billingsley said. “That is highly counterproductive as far as what the smoke alarms are meant to do. If they keep going off because the batteries are chirping, that’s one of two things: either the battery is about to go dead or their is some smoke present in the atmosphere.”

If you missed the pop-up smoke alarm installation sign ups, don’t worry. You can contact JFD any time to be added to the installation list.