Smoke alarms are great savers in the home, but in the garage, exhaust pipe fumes or dust blowing in through a large garage door opening will likely trigger false alarms. The solution is a heat alarm, a small device that beeps when high temperatures are measured. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, installing a heat alarm in your garage is a good way to keep yourself safe without causing false alarms that you would get with a smoke or carbon monoxide detector.

“Car fires are relatively rare, but they do occur and lead to numerous recalls each year,” says Gabe Shenhar, deputy director of Consumer Reports Auto Testing Center. “So while most cars are safe, the potential is there, so it’s a good idea to take some precautions.”

more than that 150,000 Jeep plug-in hybrids It was recalled in October 2024 due to fire risk, and more than 40,000 Ford SUVs were recalled earlier this year. More than once in the last 12 years 10 million fire-prone Hyundai and Kia vehicles was recalled. More than 3,100 of these vehicles have caught fire since 2010, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

When you compare those numbers to the hundreds of millions of registered motor vehicles in the U.S.—Consumer Affairs says there will be more than 283 million by 2023—a few thousand doesn’t sound like much here—until it happens to you. If the worst happens, you want to be prepared with a heat-detecting alarm. Preferably, you will have an alarm that connects to other alarms in your home or can send alerts to your phone.

The number of fires in the United States has dropped 50 percent since 1980. Still, there were 3,790 deaths and 13,250 injuries related to fires in the U.S. in 2022, the last year for which data is available, according to the National Fire Protection Association. A non-profit organization that writes fire safety rules. Nearly three-quarters of these deaths and injuries occurred in people’s homes; This underlines the need for reliable and redundant fire detection devices. fire extinguishers.