Mayor Nutter signs bill requiring 10-year batteries in smoke detectors

Mayor Nutter signed legislation Tuesday that will require one- and two-family homes to have smoke detectors with built-in batteries that last for a decade.

The detectors, which would be required as part of the city's fire code as of Jan. 9, cost a few dollars more than traditional smoke detectors, but residents would save money over 10 years by not having to replace batteries.

The fire code has required smoke detectors on every floor of one- and two-family homes since the early 1980s. Fire deaths have declined from an average of 90 a year during that decade to an average of 32 in the last three years, fire officials said during a hearing on the bill this year.

In 2011, at least a quarter of the city's fires were in homes that did not have working smoke detectors, fire officials said.

Nationally, two-thirds of fire deaths happen in homes without properly functioning smoke detectors, according to the National Fire Protection Association. The most common reasons smoke detectors fail are missing and dead batteries.

The city's organization of small landlords, HAPCO, enthusiastically endorsed the bill.

The 10-year smoke detectors are tamperproof and cost between $18 and $20 - about $5 more than traditional smoke detectors, said Tom Sri, government affairs manager for smoke detector-maker Kidde Safety.

In earlier testimony, he said residents would save between $40 and $60 on batteries over the alarm's decadelong life span.

Apartments and one- and two-family units built after 1988 are required to have hardwired smoke detectors and are not affected by the fire code changes.

Majority Leader Curtis Jones Jr. was the primary sponsor of bill to update the fire code. He noted this year that Philadelphia has a tradition of checking batteries when clocks are reset in the spring and fall.

"I think a 10-year battery makes that obsolete and that we can just kind of rest assured, at least for a decade, that these alarms are operating," he said.