Fire Alarms and Cooking

This has happened while cooking in almost every NYC apartment I've lived in and at most friends' homes I've cooked in. You start cooking and the fire alarm gets set off.

A lot of NYC apartments don't even have stovetop range hoods to vent the smoked caused by cooking. Most of them recirculate the air instead of expelling it outside the home. (And most people don't bother to change the filters regularly or ever.)

Lifehacker offers some basic suggestions for how to deal with this. Placement is an obvious factor. Using a fan to blow smoke away from the smoke alarm while cooking is a fine ghetto solution. Taking the batteries out of the alarm can be the most tragic solution.

What seems like the best fix is to get a better fire alarm.

GOOGLE: "Photoelectric Smoke Alarm"

A comparison of "ionization" vs "photoelectric" detectors.

A decent way to err toward extra safety: use a photoelectric detector in/by the kitchen and use an ionization detector elsewhere.

And that's the tooth!