For years, I’ve always wondered where news programs find their “experts” on various topics. Some of the things that these so called experts say sound like common sense to me. What makes these people experts? Dictionary.com defines expert as:

a person who has special skill or knowledge in someparticular field; specialist; authority: a language expert.

The key word, I guess, is “special”. Who defines special?

I’ve been to a number of conferences where people get on stage and talk about topics, usually technical topics and I’ve considered these people to be “experts” in their fields. However, I’ve come to realize that being on stage doesn’t make someone an expert. As part of my ongoing technical training, I’ve been watching all the videos from last year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). One of the sessions had a presenter whose name I’ve heard for years and considered him more knowledgable than me. However, after listening to the session and reviewing the code from the session, I no longer take for granted that the people presenting are “experts”. (I disagree with a number of things said in the session and thought that the code could have been written better.)

Am I an expert? I don’t consider myself an expert (if I did, I think my head would swell!), but I’ve been writing handheld software for the last 15 years, so I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in terms of code. Maybe I’m more confident now than when I started or maybe I no longer take things for face value.

The other day when I was running, I saw someone driving along with a Christmas tree dragging behind him. Instead of putting the tree on the roof of the Ford Explorer to take to the recycle site, the driver tied a rope to the trailer hitch and the other end to the trunk of the tree. This was absolutely one of the times that I would like to have used my iPhone for running instead of my Garmin Forerunner 405 so that I could have taken a picture of this. However, a picture didn’t tell the whole picture as the smell of burning wood (it wasn’t on fire) added to the humor of the situation.

Fire protection experts recommend replacing batteries in smoke detectors every year when you change your clocks for daylight savings time. So this year, I heard an ad that also recommended a carbon monoxide detector which we didn’t have. I started looking at combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, but quickly dismissed that idea as all the reviews indicated that the combo units ate batteries like crazy (my house is older and only has 1 hard wired unit). In addition, my reading suggested that houses have both ionization and photoelectric type smoke detectors. No combo unit had carbon monoxide and the 2 types of smoke detection.

Once I resigned myself to getting a separate carbon monoxide detector, I decided on a First Alert Carbon Monoxide Alarm. This was based on reviews by Consumer Reports, I believe. That was the easy part; I got one for upstairs and one for downstairs. Right now our son sleeps on a bed in our room, so we don’t need one in his room. When he moves back into his room, I’ll get one for his room.

The second part of this equation was finding ionization and photoelectric smoke detectors. Photoelectric detection is supposed to be better for smoldering fires and ionization is better for flaming fires according to the US Fire Administration (who even knew that this agency existed?). There are a small number of units that do both, so my choices were very few. It’s really surprising to me as the recommendation is to have both types. After going to Home Depot and looking at a few (after some research), I decided on the Kidde PI9000 Battery-Operated Dual Ionization and Photoelectric Sensor Smoke Alarm. I had to replace 7 smoke detectors and install another one, so this wasn’t cheap.

After I replaced all the units, I saw that most of the units were manufactured over 10 years ago. The US Fire Administration recommends replacing the entire unit every 8-10 years, so it was about time anyway to replace them.

So far, I know that at least one of the units works as it went off last night when my wife burned some pizza and opened the oven. Luckily the units have a hush button to temporarily shut them up (much safer than yanking the battery and forgetting to put it back in).

Why was this process so hard? Are my sights too high in trying to protect my family and my house? How many average homeowners learn so much about smoke detectors? My guess is probably quite few. I’ll just add this as another topic that I have more than cursory knowledge.

(Newer houses are required to have interconnected smoke alarms which sound all of the units when one goes off; retrofitting a house for this is not easy and there are only a few that offer wireless interconnect and none of those are both photoelectric and ionization. I did consider this for a few minutes, but quickly dismissed it.)