New Oven & Smoke Detectors

[onelilspark]

We just moved into a new house on Monday. Today I decided to cook for the first time. So I made Chicken Parmesan. I turned the broiler on to melt my cheese and when I put the chicken under the broiler, the smoke detectors started going off.

Some helpful things to know: when I say a new house, I literally mean new. It was just built and we're the first occupants, which means tonight is the first time the oven has been used...and it means that the smoke detectors are all new (what I found online kept saying that it was because the detectors were old...) There was a chemical smell (which we expected) but no smoke (I swear, no burnt chicken!) It is an electric oven. And the smoke detectors we think are all ionization ones. It's also a typical Florida house: high ceilings (so I can't even reach the darn things) and all one floor.

So...experienced DIS cookers, do you think they went off because of the chemical smell? Or will this happen every time I use my stove/oven?

And if it's going to happen every time I use my stove/oven, what do I do to fix it? Because I love cooking

ETA: It's been a good 40 minutes since we finished eating and it just beeped again.

 

[pepperw23]

We just moved into a new house on Monday. Today I decided to cook for the first time. So I made Chicken Parmesan. I turned the broiler on to melt my cheese and when I put the chicken under the broiler, the smoke detectors started going off.

Some helpful things to know: when I say a new house, I literally mean new. It was just built and we're the first occupants, which means tonight is the first time the oven has been used...and it means that the smoke detectors are all new (what I found online kept saying that it was because the detectors were old...) There was a chemical smell (which we expected) but no smoke (I swear, no burnt chicken!) It is an electric oven. And the smoke detectors we think are all ionization ones. It's also a typical Florida house: high ceilings (so I can't even reach the darn things) and all one floor.

So...experienced DIS cookers, do you think they went off because of the chemical smell? Or will this happen every time I use my stove/oven?

And if it's going to happen every time I use my stove/oven, what do I do to fix it? Because I love cooking

ETA: It's been a good 40 minutes since we finished eating and it just beeped again.

We had the same problem if it is hard wired by a security company it will need to be set to a less sensitive setting. With ours it was the heat sensor. I googled it and found lots of good advice. every time I opened the oven the alarm would go off because of the heat.

 

[onelilspark]

We had the same problem if it is hard wired by a security company it will need to be set to a less sensitive setting. With ours it was the heat sensor. I googled it and found lots of good advice. every time I opened the oven the alarm would go off because of the heat.

Thanks. It is hard wired to our security system (but we haven't called to have anyone monitor it yet.)

 

[pepperw23]

Thanks. It is hard wired to our security system (but we haven't called to have anyone monitor it yet.)

Yea ours is too. They will fix ya right up. In the meantime I read that pointing a fan at it while you are cooking helps. I found that keeping the oven under 400 helped

 

[onelilspark]

So my husband is apparently better at Google than I am...he discovered we needed to reset it, which is why it was still going off. And since they are all hard wired, it tripped one and all of them went off.

We can also silence it for 10 minutes if it happens again...so that's good I guess.

I'll have to look at adjusting the sensitivity. Hopefully we can do that with ours too!

 

[SandrA9810]

You can also ask about installing ones that are designed for kitchens. They have different sensors (not sure if that's ionized ones or not).

I took the one out of the bracket (the simple kind) in my apartment. I couldn't even fry an egg without setting it off. I'm more concerned with the monoxide since it's gas heat, and there's an alarm for that on the farthest wall.

 

[Disnydad]

From the National Instutie of Standards and Technology:

Dealing with kitchen nuisance alarms
There is no single solution to deal with kitchen related nuisance alarms. A
February 26, 2004 National Institute of Standards and Technology, United States
(NIST) news release, Current Smoke Alarms Save Lives If Properly Used states
the NIST tests showed that normal cooking activities cause nuisance alarms in
both photoelectric and ionization type alarm. Neither type of detector was
demonstrably better in reducing nuisance alarms. There is no statistical data to
support one technology over the other.