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Purpose of silencing function of smoke alarm

S

sunyaer

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Apr 21, 2022
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338
Location
Toronto
Ontario building code
3.2.4.22. Smoke Alarms
…
(10) Except as permitted by Sentence (11), a manually operated silencing device shall be incorporated within the circuitry of a smoke alarm installed in a dwelling unit so that it will silence the signal emitted by the smoke alarm for a period of not more than 10 min, after which the smoke alarm will reset and again sound the alarm if the level of smoke in the vicinity is sufficient to reactuate the smoke alarm.

What is the purpose of the silencing function of smoke alarms? To overwrite false alarm?
 
The purpose of a silencing function on an alarm is to keep people from disabling them to get them to stop beeping when there is no real fire. If they can't silence false alarms, people will generally disable the smoke alarm, which then does nobody any good.

The silencing function will work even if there is real smoke - the smoke detector does not know the difference between a false alarm or a real one. If your house was burning down, and you decided to take an extra 30 seconds to silence the smoke alarm on the way out while holding your breath, you would be able to do that because the smoke alarm does not know the difference between a house burning down and steam from your shower or burned dinner.
 
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