ASHWAUBENON, WI (WTAQ) – As you’re changing your clocks this weekend for daylight savings time, take an extra few seconds to make sure some potentially life-saving equipment is working properly.
Change your clock, change your batteries is the message being stressed this weekend.
Officials are urging everyone to change their smoke alarm and carbon monoxide batteries as they go around the house and change the clocks.
“We always think the best time to do that is when you’re changing your clock,” says Captain Jody Crocker with Ashwaubenon Public Safety. “It’s an easy reminder to change those batteries twice a year, both in the spring and in the fall, when there’s daylight savings time.”
And right now is a perfect time to do it, with the increased amount of fire hazards around the house during winter.
“We especially recommend it at this time of the year when we’re rolling into the winter heating season,” says Captain Crocker. “Furnaces are running and people are burning those types of fuel and it may cause a problem within your household.”
It’s important to change the batteries, but also make sure they are properly installed and most of all, existent. Captain Crocker says it’s all too often for people to forget that they took the batteries out of their alarm.
“If they have smoke in their kitchen from cooking they will pull their batteries and maybe forget that they pulled the batteries out,” he says.
According to the National Fire Protection Association, 71% of smoke alarms which malfunctioned were either due to missing, disconnected, or dead batteries.
Officials remind everyone that the carbon monoxide detector is just as important to check over, though.
“Carbon monoxide is an odorless gas, you don’t know that it’s there,” explains Captain Crocker. “So it’s even more important to make sure that the carbon monoxide detector is working.”
We turn the clock back an hour at 2 AM on Sunday, November 4 for daylight savings time.
