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PROVO -- After responding to dozens of kitchen fire alarms, Provo City firefighter Peter Thorpe came up with a plan to prevent them.
Here's the scenario: there's a pan on a blazing hot electric range. The homeowners forget all about it and leave the house. And then it begins: things get too hot, and flames can break out. It happens all the time. Thorpe says in Provo City alone, firefighters are called out once or twice a week because of unattended cooking.
"We get there and there's no one home! The homeowner has left. Sometimes we'll get a call from a neighbor who says the neighbor's smoke alarms have been going on for hours, can you come check it out?" Thorpe said. "Last year I had the idea of, ‘Why can't the smoke alarm tell the stove to shut off in the event that no one's home and it's smoking a lot?'"
So Thorpe called up a few friends who have backgrounds in mechanical engineering, electronics and design, and they got to work in a garage. After many prototypes with circuit boards, resisters, wires and relay switches, they came up with a small gadget that responds to any smoke alarm.
"It's always listening. There's a microphone built in that's always listening for that unique sound and cadence of a smoke alarm," Thorpe explained.
Kitchen Fire Statistics
<li> Unattended cooking fires occur every 3 ½ minutes in the U.S.<li> 155,000 homes catch fire every year because of stoves left on<li>Kitchen fires cause $700-million in property damage each year<li>500 people die in these fires each year</li>When the gadget hears the alarm, it gives the homeowner 3 minutes to clear out the smoke. If the alarm continues beyond the 3 minute mark, the device shuts off power to the stove.
To use the product, you just plug the stove cord into the device, which then plugs into the wall outlet. That's it.
"We talked to a lot of different fire marshals, since they are the gurus in fire protection, and one of them came up and said, ‘I don't know why we didn't have this years ago,' and thought this was a great idea," Thorpe said.
Now he and his friends, who have spent thousands of dollars of their own money to get to this point, are ready to begin the manufacturing process. It's not cheap for a start-up, but they're hoping the public will see the value and help get the product into homes.
"So right now, we're doing a campaign where people can place pre-orders for these, and we're hoping to raise enough money to cover those manufacturing costs and make this readily available for everybody," he said.
The initial goal is to raise $30,000 to get the first products out to the public.
Thorpe and his friends are also working on a version that will work with gas stoves, though the majority of kitchen fires are caused by the electric ranges.
