Description

Your home can be a target for accidents, especially around the holidays. Consumer expert, Steve Filmer, stopped by to show us a few ways to keep your house a little safer this holiday season.

Transcript

Host: From those freak accidents to the uncle who tried unsuccessfully to deep fry the turkey, your home can be a target for a lot of accidents especially around the holidays but consumer expert Steve Filmer stopped by to show us a few ways to keep your house a little safer this holiday season. Hi Steve good to have you here. Steve: Good to be here. Host: We just talked a lot of the dangers. Where are primarily where the danger’s coming from? Steve: The things we already have in our home and the things we start doing at this time of year, probably the three worst are smoke, fire and carbon monoxide poisoning and that’s why I want to point out the importance of having alarms for those dangers in your home as well. As well as having at least one small fire extinguisher of some kind in your house this time of year. Host: But we’re going to get to these because I like them. They’re so much smaller and easier to use too. But as far as the alarms are concerned, they’re combining the two f them now. Steve: First Alert now has this one, the combined smoke and carbon monoxide alarm together in one and that’s a lot less hassle for installing stuff. The other nice feature of this is it talks. You see, it’ll tell you not only what is it alerting for, carbon monoxide or smoke. It’ll also even tell you where that danger is coming from. They’ve also got this one from First Alert. It just plugs into a wall outlet. You don’t have to climb a ladder, drill holes in the ceiling, just plug it in and you go. Host: That is so smart that it tells you where the danger is. Because you can waste so much precious time just trying to figure out exactly where it is and what’s going on. Steve: Absolutely and this time of year, we’re tightening up our houses, closing the doors and windows, doing some weather sealing. Maybe that reduces the inside to outside airflow in your house which increases your danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. Maybe you’ve got a faulty furnace that’s making carbon monoxide and maybe somebody parks a car in the garage to warm it up on a cold day. That creates carbon monoxide so these dangers can come from a lot of different places. Host: And those levels will increase very very quickly too without you knowing. Now, let’s go to the fire extinguishers because we’re so used to seeing the large ones. You’ve got to figure out what to pull out and what that— Steve: This is a reinvention basically. The fire extinguisher. It’s called tundra and what’s so appealing about this is we all know how to do hair spray or shaving cream. That’s how this stuff works. You’re not pulling out the pin, standing eight feet away and figure out all that other stuff. The other advantage of this, if you’ve got more than 30 seconds worth of material in there, so when you freak out in a real fire and you kind of need an extra moment to kind of get the product on target so to speak, compared to a typical fire extinguisher this size, that’s almost four times longer than you would have to get the fire out. Host: In this little bottle here? That’s good. Steve: Let’s move forward too, a lot of fires start on the stovetop. We’re also doing things like candles and we’re doing Christmas trees and we’re doing fireplaces. We’re just increasing our odds at this time of year. We’re going to spark a fire somewhere in the house. Host: Same type of, I don’t know if you know the answer to this or not but same type of expiration for this as you would the normal type of fire extinguishers? Steve: No actually, this is somewhat longer because it’s packaged up differently. They’ve really reinvented the fire extinguisher with this stuff. Host: Good deal, I like that. So are you making tea for us now, Steve? Steve: No, that’s red and that is new but that is not a fire extinguisher but it does have a connection to safety. This is from Hamilton Beach. It’s an electric kettle. The beauty here is if you’re occasional forgetful or maybe like I’ve got aging parents, you can plug this in. It heats up the water and automatically shuts it off once it’s at the right temperature. You’re not turning on a kitchen stovetop. You’re not going to accidentally leave a burning going with this and let’s face it, it is cute and red and it’s something new for the season. Host: Smart tools. We like these things. There’s just so much to have going on. If you get one little thing to help you out the rest of the day, now, this here, I’m not going to ask. Steve: World’s smallest bathtub. Speaking of older folks, a lot of times older folks find they’re in danger in their bathrooms because of slippery surfaces. This comes from a company called Bath Fitter. If you flip that over, you can see this is all modular. What Bath Fitter can do, we’ve got some real quick before and after pictures to show you as well is redo your bathroom and get it from ugly to pretty but also it’s a modular way of doing it. You don’t get a bunch of people coming in and smashing with jackhammers to break out all that stuff. That stuff like that, that bathtub just fits right over the top and on top of that, they have got great safety features particularly for older people. They’ve got grab handles, they’ve got slip resistant surfaces, both in the bathtub and outside the bathtub in the flooring and the other fun part of that is on the Bath Fitter website, you can go there pick color palettes, play designer, figure out how you want it to look but it’s not all gloom and doom. These are some safety issues that come along with the season. Host: I definitely learned a lot today. Hopefully, everybody else out there did too. Thank you so much Steve. Steve: Glad to do it. Host: Good to meet you. All you guys have to do is log on to bettertv.com, click on the links tab and you can find plenty of other products that can also help make your holiday a safer one.