Asklemmy

Just want to say: False positives for a firealarm ... are much better than a false negative, meaning fire without an alarm.

This makes it really hard to argue for anything other then the status quo without reducing security.

(<1% of the time) There is indeed a fire somewhere in the building and people take their time gathering belongings before leisurely walking to the nearest door

Watch the video of the Station Nightclub Fire. You'll be scarred, but you won't ignore fire alarms.

The problem is not the detection system or that people don't believe it.

The problem is that people don't seem to understand the utility of behaving like something is true while "knowing" it is not true.

E.g. let's say, I "know" the gun is not loaded, should I point the gun at a friend and pull the trigger? No.

Verifying information before acting in a way that would put people in danger, is worth wasting time for.

There is no technical solution. People don’t believe bad things can happen too them until it does.

Live through a single tornado and you will never ignore another tornado warning.

Live through one flood and you will never ignore another evacuation order again.

Same with a fire alarm.

IDK about you but I've always assumed any fire alarm might be real and will act accordingly. Sure most of the time it's a false alarm, but better to be inconvenienced by having to leave unexpectedly than die in an actual fire, "boy who cried wolf" style. Being annoyed by false fire alarms is a pretty good problem to have. It means the fire protection systems where you live are working so well you've never actually experienced or even heard about from your friends and family the horror of being in an actual building fire.

Also, there needs to be a distinction between an individual smoke alarm and a centralized fire alarm.

Individual smoke alarms are what you have in a single family detached house, at most they may be interconnected with a signal wire so all the alarms go off when a single one goes off. These systems are designed for a building small enough that a fire in any part of the building should be immediately noticeable and common mishaps that trigger smoke alarms like burning food can be very effectively communicated to everyone in the building. As such, they don't have a central control panel that you can use to see the status of the system nor do they automatically call the fire department. So yes, in your home (assuming it's detached) it can generally be safe to ignore a false alarm as long as you have inspected the entire house. I definitely wouldn't disable a smoke detector though, there are documented cases of families doing that because of a verified false alarm, followed by a real fire which burns down the house with them inside because they disabled the only protection system.

A centralized fire alarm is for multi family housing and commercial/industrial buildings. These buildings are large enough that it is impossible for any individual to figure out why a fire alarm is going off, but they also tend to have false alarm protection built in, for example, they may need both a smoke and heat detector in the same area to go off before issuing a general alarm for the entire building. In apartments and other attached housing, the smoke detectors in each unit are usually the former individual type and only the detectors in the common areas like hallways are apart of the centralized system. The logic is that smoke in a single apartment may not actually be a fire or at the very least it's being contained by the unit which usually has fire containment considerations as part of the design, but smoke in the common areas (meaning the smoke has breached the door) is more likely to be life threatening to everyone in the building. These systems are also the ones with the pull handles for manually triggering an alarm, and the vast majority of the time a centralized system has a false alarm, especially in a commercial building, it's because some shithead pulled one of the manual alarm handles. But, again, the nature of these buildings is that you literally cannot be sure there's no fire, and large buildings also have a ton of inaccessible space for wiring and ventilation and such, and if a fire is spreading through those spaces, you could be right next to it and not notice anything until the fire violently breaks through the wall (again, there are documented cases of this happening). So it's better to just GTFO and let the fire department clear it.

There is nuance in installing fire alarms, make sure you are using the correct detector type for each area, and installing it correctly.

I'm pretty sure strong drafts or dusty areas can set it off.

Also know that smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors are consumable items that should be replaced, usually 7-10 years but it should be noted on the device.

At the end of the day, it wakes you up to check, or causes you to observe for an emergency. Imagine your wake up groggy situation but you smell smoke. Personally I would like that chance to be able to evacuate.

It's a case by case thing. My dad worked in construction for 40 years, and half the stuff he did involved setting off fire alarms due to tools producing smoke or every other person smoking. One time when my mom was in labor, the fire alarm went off at the hospital, and he said "what's everyone worried about? It's just the fire alarm"

As a Californian, this is how I react to earthquakes.

That's a decently rational response you've described, though. If you were really at immediate risk, you'd probably know it, especially with an alarm going off to get you looking for signs of danger. And it's usually better to have a lazy, skeptical evacuation than a panicked stampede. Schools do fire drills to check the alarms, sure, but it's also important to make them a routine thing that all the kids know how to handle.

Your entire post sounds like user-problem? I've only experienced one false-alarm in my entire life... and that was because I had a guest who assumed I'd be okay with her smoking in my living room.