Smoke detector with earth leak feature

So the alarm goes off at night and all the house lights are dead. The cordless phone's off, too. Such a thing doesn't, as far as I know, exist. I hope it never does.

John

It would be against code, anyway.

By the time an electrical fire is producing enough smoke to trigger the detector, it may very well be too late to just trip the breaker and hope all will be well.

There is a more effective method for detecting electrical faults. An AFCI breaker.

I have read from some magazine that some proapbly Finnish company had made a product pretty close to what you have. There is a whole house Earth Leakage Circuit Breaker on the main electrical panel. Then the fire detector system will make that to trip (cause intentional leakage or someting that is detected as leakage) when smoke detector detects smoke.

So every fire, whether electrical or not, cuts off all the house lighting. Clever or what?

John

Yeah burn the toast and out go the lights...

......

I will clarify:

The idea was meant to be used in areas where people normally don't live!

Obviously in case someone is around a good sounding alarm and lights on would be better. (ok the sounding alarm is always better than no-sound)

If the fire is of electrical origin, I'd say it would be better to stop electricity as soon as smoke is detected, than stopping it some 5-10 minutes later when the short circuit is so serious that the 3KW limit is passed.

Now the discussion can be on the basis of: what is the chance that the fire is already self-sustained when smoke is detected? If it is very high like 70% or more, then probably the object is useless (but not counterproductive). I am not totally sure of the sensitivity of smoke detectors, and of the time it takes for the smoke to spread.