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Don’t worry, not a proper one.
But we did have a couple of firemen round this week and they parked their big red fire engine right outside.
It started when Boy Two went to the fire station on an outing with scouts. A week or so later I found him white-faced and wakeful in his bunk. He was fretting about the horrors of house fires, specifically in our house.
The officers had done such a good job of highlighting the dangers they had properly put the willies up this scout.
So, because I couldn’t calm his fears with vague reassurances that I once bought a smoke alarm, I got in touch with our local fire station and asked for a safety check and to check our fire alarm systems.
Not only did the officers make lots of safety suggestions, they installed some smoke alarms – properly stuck to the ceiling with batteries in, not shoved in a drawer.
The main things we learned were:
- You need a plan. Having got the smoke alarms, you need to know what to do if they go off at night. In our case we’ll congregate in one of the bedrooms at the front with a big window.
- Shut the doors. In an ideal world every door in the house gets closed at night time. Really though bedroom doors stay open and we try very hard to remember to shut the downstairs ones.
- Don’t get overloaded. Make sure that the things running off an adaptor bar don’t add up to a greater wattage than they should be. Or maybe it’s the ampage… Whatever. Check on the plug of your thing and it’ll tell you. Add up everything that’s plugged into one place and make sure it’s not greater than the amp limit of the adaptor.
- Off charge. Don’t leave chargers on when the gadget is juiced up or leave the charger on when you unplug the device. That one’s especially for the Panther.