Finally, A Smoke Alarm That Ignores Your Bad Cooking

The smoke alarm is one of the most annoying home devices of all time. It dwells above our direct line of sight, silently sniffing for fire. We forget it exists, save for the bi-annual battery change (You do change your smoke alarm batteries twice a year, right?). Suddenly that systematic caterwaul is piercing our eardrums and sending us into a frenzy over… seared bacon.

Luckily there’s  a solution to this first world problem of grappling with a tool that saves our lives. Thank Oak Ridge National Lab physicist Bruce Warmack. Using a microcontroller; a mini-computer with a memory of data transmitted from actual fires, he’s created a smart alarm that won’t interpret kitchen mishaps and steamy hot showers as the real deal.

“The important thing is, if it is a nuisance, it knows that… then it knows to be quiet,”  Warmack said according to WBIR.com.

That innovation, along with a carbon monoxide sensor, temperature gauge and low frequency alarm for those with hearing loss make Warmack’s technology steps ahead of anything currently on the market. Literally. Warmack’s smoke detector recognizes smoldering fires a half an hour earlier than that alarm in your house.

Fast Company reported that he has been shopping his prototype in hopes of offering it commercially soon.

“We want to make this knowledge public for the manufacturers to compete with one another and to present the public with the best technology that’s out there,” he told WBIR. ”I’d love to have a hand in saving a few lives, and this has a really good potential of doing that.”