Kidde Safety Equipment and First Alert were accused in a proposed class action Monday of misleading consumers into thinking their smoke detectors could adequately warn homeowners about slow fires.
The companies’ alarms were “ionization-only” devices and thus lacked the ability to detect and alert people to slower fires before they became too dangerous to escape, according to the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington.
Ionization alarms work by detecting very small particulates of gas that are responsive to an ionized current, and “smoldering combustion generates relatively larger and fewer particles, which have less ...