well its a damn good thing they have PARENTS to wake them up and help them escape probably. God forbid a child doesn't panic anyway if they did so happen to wake up. What a dumb news report...thanks Hank, for investigating that for us, you useless heap.

Just because the parents are home, that doesn't guarantee they'll hear it either. Depends on the house; for example I live in a 3-level town home. Our room is on the uppermost level, my daughter (who sleeps like the dead) is down two floors below in the basement. I don't know if any of us would hear the alarm...

Firefly has a good point about multi level houses... if there is a fire is on a floor other than the one people are sleeping on, chances are they won't hear the alarm going off until the smoke makes its way to an alarm closer to the bedrooms, and by then... well, thats a considerably larger fire.

amazing that nobody did this experiment before... buy a smoke alarm, live forever... your wallet will protect you...

When I was a kid the smoke alarm would wake me up. We had one that decided to go off in the middle of the night for no reason, it scared the crap out of me. We did have a fire one time when our fridge caught fire, the one in the kitchen went off and woke us all up. It was a small electrical fire, lots of smoke, not much fire, but it probably would have gotten worse if it didn't wake us up. The fire went out as soon as my dad unplugged the fridge. I didn't sleep for days after that I was so scared of burning in my sleep.

We have had some problems with our fire alarms recently, going off for no reason.

* It did not wake up our son. Not even close.
* They're all hooked together via the alarm system so if one goes off, they all go off. That's good to know.
* You can not remove any of them from the ceiling without setting off the alarm on all of them. That was a surprise. We don't turn our alarm on so we didn't even know the alarm code, had to like go hunt it down. At 2am.
* The builder of our house installed regular smoke alarms (standalone) and the integrated smoke alarms. They're all RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER. Why. WHY??

In college, I lived in the dormitories for four years. Since I am mostly deaf (not 100%) without my bone conduction hearing aid, I can still hear the dorm's high pitch alarm quite loudly when I am awake.

Well one time, the alarm went on but I slept through the whole thing. Thanks God, it was a false alarm. None of my roommates woke me up and I could had be burned/smoked to death. It doesn't help if I a heavy sleeper (can sleep through since I can sleep through almost anything!

Link to one version already on the market.

http://www.safemart.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=6407&roiid=1586&gclid=CI7C-Iup1o8CFQltZQod6VzQ9g

^ thanks for that link, QM!