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What surprises me is how people think it seems like a reasonable idea to electrically connect catastrophe detection devices together to ensure a common point of

by dusted 5y ago

What surprises me is how people think it seems like a reasonable idea to electrically connect catastrophe detection devices together to ensure a common point of failure to begin with, anyone care to tell me how that's supposed to be more secure than each device being disconnected, offline and entirely self-reliant ?

pjc50 5y ago
This is now mandatory in Scotland: https://www.gov.scot/publications/fire-and-smoke-alarms-in-scottish-homes/ https://www.gov.scot/publications/fire-and-smoke-alarms-in-s... Feels like an over-reaction to me, especially in response to a disaster that killed "only" seventy people, or a third of a day's UK COVID deaths.
- dusted 5y ago
  seems like a good way to introduce additional failure modes, hopefully the law also mandates that the alarms be made in such a fashion that the individual alarm will function regardless of whether the "smart" part of it is getting hit with 200 kV over the wire, or if the smart part is wireless but the radio crashes due to.. I don't know.. overheating issues?
- matthewmacleod 5y ago
  To be clear, this has already been a requirement in the UK as a whole for any new or modified construction for quite a while. This new regulation mandates installing a similar system in existing homes.
matthewmacleod 5y ago
This is common and standard practice. It's quite possible that an alarm positioned at the other end of a house, with several closed doors in between, could easily fail to wake someone up. The goal is then to ensure that if one alarm triggers, they will all do so. Since they'll already likely be connected to the same electrical circuit anyway, this usually takes the form (in the UK at least) of a third core that connects the alarms together – and is a very simple system. I won't speak to the "online" nature of any detectors, but I would expect standards mandate that they function fully and independently by design regardless of connectivity.
bananapear 5y ago
They're typically mains-powered but with a backup battery. "Interlinked" doesn't necessarily mean there's a wired connection, the basic ones are triggered by the sound of another alarm.
- dusted 5y ago
  If it's mains powered, there's your opportunity to fry everything during the same episode that's likely to start a house fire (if not from the actual fire alarms bursting into flames in a fit of cosmic irony). If they're linked by radio, hopefully the circuitry is independent of the operation of the basic "detect smoke -> make noise" circuit, so for instance, when your radio shorts out, it does not blow out the power supply to the detector and noise making mechanism. Yeah, it's too hard to design this to trust that commercial options are safer than dumb alarms.

by dusted 5y ago

pjc50 5y ago

This is now mandatory in Scotland: https://www.gov.scot/publications/fire-and-smoke-alarms-in-scottish-homes/ https://www.gov.scot/publications/fire-and-smoke-alarms-in-s... Feels like an over-reaction to me, especially in response to a disaster that killed "only" seventy people, or a third of a day's UK COVID deaths.

dusted 5y ago
seems like a good way to introduce additional failure modes, hopefully the law also mandates that the alarms be made in such a fashion that the individual alarm will function regardless of whether the "smart" part of it is getting hit with 200 kV over the wire, or if the smart part is wireless but the radio crashes due to.. I don't know.. overheating issues?
matthewmacleod 5y ago
To be clear, this has already been a requirement in the UK as a whole for any new or modified construction for quite a while. This new regulation mandates installing a similar system in existing homes.

matthewmacleod 5y ago

This is common and standard practice. It's quite possible that an alarm positioned at the other end of a house, with several closed doors in between, could easily fail to wake someone up. The goal is then to ensure that if one alarm triggers, they will all do so. Since they'll already likely be connected to the same electrical circuit anyway, this usually takes the form (in the UK at least) of a third core that connects the alarms together – and is a very simple system. I won't speak to the "online" nature of any detectors, but I would expect standards mandate that they function fully and independently by design regardless of connectivity.

bananapear 5y ago

They're typically mains-powered but with a backup battery. "Interlinked" doesn't necessarily mean there's a wired connection, the basic ones are triggered by the sound of another alarm.

dusted 5y ago
If it's mains powered, there's your opportunity to fry everything during the same episode that's likely to start a house fire (if not from the actual fire alarms bursting into flames in a fit of cosmic irony). If they're linked by radio, hopefully the circuitry is independent of the operation of the basic "detect smoke -> make noise" circuit, so for instance, when your radio shorts out, it does not blow out the power supply to the detector and noise making mechanism. Yeah, it's too hard to design this to trust that commercial options are safer than dumb alarms.