#PoweringSafety with a Simple, Life-Saving Household Update

How many of you are looking forward to enjoying an extra hour of sleep this weekend, thanks to “falling back” when Daylight Saving Time ends on Nov. 2?

As you’re changing your clocks back this weekend, you can also make a critical update to your home: changing the batteries in your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors.

We might take these detectors for granted as we go about our daily lives, but did you know that you are twice as likely to survive a fire in a home with working smoke detectors*? That’s why it is so important to make sure to test them and change the batteries regularly!

This month, The Motherhood has been working with Energizer® and the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) on a wonderful initiative called Change Your Clock Change Your Battery® to remind us all to get into this life-saving habit.

Through our work together, we learned about some eye-opening fire safety statistics from the National Fire Protection Association:

• Home fires take the lives of more than 2,500 people each year in the United States alone.
• On average, seven people are killed in home fires every day.
• Today, one of the foremost issues with fire safety isn’t installing smoke alarms, but rather, keeping smoke alarms working. Households with non‐working smoke alarms now outnumber those with no smoke alarms at all.
• And finally, 71 percent of smoke alarms that failed to operate had missing, disconnected or dead batteries.

The good news is that there is so much we can do to prevent these disasters. Join us in changing and testing the batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors this weekend, and take the time to make a fire safety plan with your family! You can find more resources here.

*Source: National Fire Protection Association