Your garage needs a fire alarm with a heat sensor

Smoke alarms are great protections in the home, but in the garage, exhaust fumes or dust blown through a large garage door opening can set off false alarms. The solution is a heat alarm, a small device that issues an alert when high temperatures are measured. According to the US Fire Administration, installing a heat alarm in your garage is a good way to keep yourself safe without causing the false alarms you might get with a smoke or carbon monoxide detector.

“Car fires are relatively rare, but they do happen and lead to quite a few recalls each year,” says Gabe Shenhar, associate director of Consumer Reports’ Automotive Test Center. “So while most cars are safe, the potential is there, so a bit of caution is a good idea.”

More than 150,000 Jeep plug-in hybrids were recalled for fire hazards in October 2024, and more than 40,000 Ford SUVs were recalled earlier this year. In the last 12 years, more than 10 million Hyundai and Kia vehicles prone to fire were recalled. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 3,100 of these vehicles have caught fire since 2010.

When you compare those numbers to the hundreds of millions of vehicles registered in the US — Consumer Affairs says there will be more than 283 million in 2023 — a few thousand here and there doesn’t sound like a lot — until it happens to you. If the worst happens, you want to be prepared with a heat detection alarm. Preferably, you’ll have one that’s connected to other alarms in the house or can send an alert to your phone.

The number of wildfires in the U.S. has dropped 50 percent since 1980. However, there were 3,790 deaths and 13,250 injuries associated with wildfires in the U.S. in 2022, the latest year for which data is available, according to the National Fire Protection Association. a nonprofit that writes fire safety codes. About three-quarters of these deaths and injuries occurred in people’s homes, highlighting the need for reliable and redundant fire detection devices and fire extinguishers.