Having a smoke detector in your home is important if there’s a fire, and you and your family need to be alerted to leave quickly. Smoke detectors can increase the chances of living through a fire by over 50 percent. So what types of smoke detectors are they, and are smoke detectors hard-wired?
Smoke detectors are either hard-wired or battery-powered. Hard-wired smoke detectors are harder to install since they need to be properly wired to work right. However, they’re more reliable since they’re always connected to power. If the power goes out, there’s a backup battery inside.
This article explains what hard-wiring is and what hard-wired smoke detectors are. Then, we explain the benefits and disadvantages of having hard-wired smoke detectors in your home. Finally, we detail the differences between hard-wired smoke detectors and battery-powered smoke detectors.
Hard-Wired Meaning
Hard-wired means that a product is permanently connected to something, usually a power source. A hard-wired object can’t be moved around or taken too far away from its power source, since it won’t function without the wires.
If something wasn’t hard-wired, it’d be easy to remove from the wall, ceiling, or another mounting area, and it would still work without having to be connected to the wall.
What Are Hard-Wired Smoke Detectors?
Hard-wired smoke detectors are one of two types of smoke detectors, the other being battery-operated smoke detectors.
Hard-wired smoke detectors are hooked up to your home’s electric supply. They also have a battery backup if the power goes out or fails in another way.
Hard-wired smoke detectors are connected to a power source using a 120-volt electric cable. The electric cable runs from the power source to a hard-wired smoke detector, and from there, it connects to all the other hard-wired smoke detectors in the house.
Every hard-wired smoke detector also has a 9 volt or lithium-ion battery inside, just in case the power goes out or something else gets disconnected from the electric cable and the power source.
The opposite of hard-wired smoke detectors are battery-operated smoke detectors. These can be removed from the wall or ceiling at any time, since they aren’t connected to any wires. Battery-operated smoke detectors can be placed anywhere since they don’t need to be connected to a wire as the hard-wired smoke detectors do.
Benefits of Hard-Wired Smoke Detectors
There are a lot of benefits to having hard-wired smoke detectors, including the ability to interconnect multiple detectors and your security system. Additionally, they’re less likely to die since they have constant power plus a backup source.
All Hard-Wired Smoke Detectors Are Connected
One of the biggest benefits of having hard-wired smoke detectors in your home is that you can connect them all into one system. So, as soon as one of them starts going off, it can send a signal to all the other smoke detectors, which’ll go off as well.
Having all of your smoke detectors connected is especially beneficial if you’re in a large home, and it would take a long amount of time for detectors on opposite ends of the home to go off without this connection.
Another benefit of having all the smoke detectors hard-wired is that most fires start in the kitchen or near the furnace or electric box. If it happens at night and your family is asleep, no one will hear the fire alarm in that room until it’s too late. By the time the alarm reaches you, the smoke will have to be in the bedrooms, and you’ll have significantly less time to get out to safety.
If all the hard-wired smoke detectors are connected, they’ll go off in the bedrooms as soon as the smoke detector near the fire alerts you. So even if you’re sleeping, and it takes a few beeps for you to wake up and realize what’s going on, you’ll have a lot more time to get out of your house and a much higher chance of surviving when you have the hard-wired smoke detectors to alert you right away.
Connectivity Helps if One Stops Working
Having all the hard-wired smoke detectors connected is also beneficial if one stops working. If one isn’t working, it’s fine because it’s on the same connection as all the other ones in your home, so the other ones can still go off, and you’ll still be alerted that something is burning in your home.
Connect Your Hard-Wired Smoke Detectors to Your Security System
Another way to connect your hard-wired smoke detectors beneficially is to your smart home or security system. If the detectors are connected to one of these, and they go off, they’ll send an alert to the fire department, and they’ll be on their way immediately.
When the fire department is alerted automatically, you don’t have to worry about calling 911. You can just focus on getting out of the house and keeping your family safe.
This YouTube video is all about smoke detectors, and they have some information about how hard-wired smoke detectors can work with your security system and other similar features:
Hard-Wired Smoke Detectors Die Less Easily
Another benefit of having hard-wired smoke detectors in your home is that they aren’t at risk of dying since they’re always connected to a power source. Even if your power goes out, your smoke detector will still work because hard-wired smoke detectors have a battery inside them in case something happens to the power supply.
So, you’ll always have protection even if you lose power or the alarms are somehow disconnected.
Disadvantages of Hard-Wired Smoke Detectors
The benefits of having a hard-wired smoke detector are nice, but some disadvantages come with having them. Not only are they difficult to install, but wiring mightn’t be an option everywhere in your home. They also need to be tested and replaced regularly, and fixing them if something goes wrong is difficult since all the wires are in the walls.
Difficult To Install
One of the major disadvantages of having a hard-wired smoke detector is that they take a lot of time to install. You can install them on your own, but you need to be very careful to follow the instructions exactly because if you don’t install them correctly, they won’t work if there’s an emergency.
If you want to avoid installing a hard-wired smoke detector on your own, you can hire an electrician to do the installation for you. You’ll have to pay to have this done, but it’ll keep your home safe and ensure that the smoke detector works properly to detect fire and smoke.
Electricians who can install hard-wired smoke detectors either charge by the number of detectors or hourly. If you have a large home, it’ll cost you quite a lot of money to have a hard-wired smoke detector installed in every room. The electrician will have to connect all the smoke detectors throughout the house, so the bigger the house and the more smoke detectors you need, the more expensive it’ll be.
On the other hand, if you’re in a small home with few rooms, the cost won’t be that high. The wiring will be easier since fewer wires need to be connected, and there are fewer smoke detectors that need to be installed.
The installation mightn’t be as expensive if you already have all the wiring done. Then, new smoke detectors would need to be hooked up to the wiring and tested.
Wiring Might Not Be Accessible
Another disadvantage of having hard-wired smoke detectors is that they’re hard to install if you don’t have wiring accessible where you want the smoke detectors to go. If you have to have your electrician add wiring within your walls and make it connect among all your rooms for the smoke detectors, it’ll be a lot of work and cost a lot of money.
Hard-Wired Smoke Detectors Are Harder To Maintain
You need to replace your smoke detector every ten years and check it every month to ensure it’s working. If anything is wrong, you’ll need to call an electrician to check it out and fix the issue. Additionally, when it comes time to replace your hard-wired smoke detectors, you’ll also need to hire somebody again to do so, unless you want to try to do it yourself.
When it’s time to replace your hard-wired smoke detector, it’s easier to do it yourself this time since all the wires are in place. You won’t have to do anything inside the walls or connect any new wires. All you have to do is disconnect the old smoke detector and hook up the new ones to the wires in the hole where the smoke detector goes.
If it’s time to replace your smoke detector, and you want to try to do it on your own, make sure you know what you’re doing before you try anything.
This YouTube video explains step by step how to replace a hardwired smoke detector:
After you’re done replacing each one, test it to ensure it’s working. If you have hard-wired smoke detectors that are all connected, test them all again when you’re done replacing them. Then, you can make sure nothing went wrong or got disconnected when you were replacing them.
Hard-Wired vs. Battery Powered Smoke Detectors
There are some differences between hard-wired and battery-powered smoke detectors. You can always have a combination of hard-wired and battery-powered smoke detectors if some areas in your home are more difficult to hard-wire, or you want a battery-operated smoke detector as a backup in high-risk areas.
The first way that hard-wired and battery-powered smoke detectors differ is through their ease of installation and maintenance. As we discussed above, hard-wired smoke detectors need professional installation or a lot of time and focus on your part to get them installed properly. On the other hand, battery-powered smoke detectors just need to have a working battery in them, and they need to be mounted to the wall.
Additionally, hard-wired smoke detectors take more to maintain because they need to be regularly checked inside the walls to make sure they’re wired properly. Battery-powered smoke detectors just need their batteries checked every month and changed every six months, and you can easily perform this yourself without the need for a professional.
Another difference between hard-wired smoke detectors and battery-powered smoke detectors is that battery-powered smoke detectors can’t be interconnected as hardwired ones can. When a battery-powered smoke detector goes off, the rest of the detectors in the house won’t go off unless the smoke reaches those rooms. You’re also unable to connect battery-powered smoke detectors to your smart home or security system.
As we mentioned above, hard-wired smoke detectors are much easier to install when the wiring is already set up within your home. If your home doesn’t already have wiring suitable for hard-wired smoke detectors, you’re better off going with battery-operated smoke detectors. You won’t have to worry about getting wiring set up in your walls or ceilings to connect all your smoke detectors with battery-operated ones.
Additionally, if you move house or need to move detectors into a different location, battery-operated smoke detectors would be the better option for you. Since they are more flexible to install, you should take this into consideration.
Final Thoughts
Hard-wired smoke detectors are one of the options you have to keep your home and family safe in case of a fire, with the other being battery-operated smoke detectors. Hard-wired smoke detectors are difficult to install, and you’ll likely have to hire someone to install them in your home.
However, they’re more likely to alert you in case of a fire, and they go off faster even before the fire expands outside one room. You can also set up hard-wired smoke detectors to alert the fire department immediately when they go off.
Related: How Long Will a Smoke Detector Chirp Before It Dies?
