we call em Smoke Detectors!

My neighbor says YES!!! She & her family were sound asleep when their smoke detector went off in the middle of the night. She rushed & got her kids up & handed her husband his robe. They barely were out of the house when there was an explosion of flames in the rooms where they had been sleeping. So, she swears by her smoke detector!!!

I don't know the answer to that, but mine goes off every time I burn something on the stove in my tiny kitchen. It is so frustrating. We have to open up the doors, and fan the smoke away and wait for the darn thing to shut up. I was so bad for a while that my grandbaby would say whenever I headed for the kitchen "Please don't cook!" "DON'T COOK!" The whole family would burst out laughing.

Even without looking at factual evidence, one can see from their function alone that smoke detectors could certainly save countless lives. However, since that comment does not exactly answer your question, I looked into this a little more, and found a few figures for you. "Smoke alarms that are properly installed and maintained play a vital role in reducing fire deaths and injuries, and have contributed to an almost 50% decrease in fire deaths since the late 1970s." "no smoke alarms were present or none operated in almost half (46%) of the reported home fires" Source: http://www.nfpa.org/categoryList.asp?categoryID=278&URL=Research%20&%20Reports/Fact%20sheets/Smoke%20alarms "Smoke alarms are mandatory in ALL dwellings in New South Wales , Victoria and South Australia." "The data available in Australia supports the USA figures." (USA figures shown above) Source: http://canberraelectrician.com/smokedetectorinstallation.htm "fire and rescue service was called to only one in every five house fires in the UK... conclude that 'working smoke alarms do prevent fires on many occasions... the property damage is reduced." Source: http://www.buildingtalk.com/news/aic/aic129.html Hopefully these links provide enough evidence to prove to you that smoke detectors do save lives .