What is UL 217 8th Edition Standard for Smoke Alarm

The latest 8^th edition of UL 217 for residential smoke alarm device made many significant changes to the previous existing standard.

One of the main requirements is to prevent false alarm resulting from cooking nuisance. Often this non-fire event will cause the user to turn off the alarm and thus disabled its true intended function. 

Another requirement is that new smoke detector needs to be able to differentiate between fast moving fire & slow smoldering burn. From the study, most furnishings in the past were of natural material which takes longer time to burn and has an escape time of 17 minutes. However, many new furnishings nowadays are made with synthetic material which has much more fuel loads and decrease the escape time to 3 minutes.

UL, a global leader in fire protection & safety testing, announced these criteria as mandatory and to be implemented across all products in 2021 June as the final deadline.

These changes were implemented after National Fire Protection Association, or NFPA, found that many smoke detectors were uninstalled or disconnected because of the nuisance of false alarm during cooking. For this new standard revision, a special 800-square-feet facility was constructed to meet these new 250+ requirement, which would be combined into 50 lab tests to ensure the safety qualities are met.

With these new requirements, new smoke sensors on the market would be equipped with advanced sensing technology that can differentiate a cooking event and real fire.

For any OEM/ODM projects regarding UL 217 8^th edition smoke alarm, please contact one of our specialists for more information.