Thursday, September 18, 2008

Burning Up

I just read my friend Gina's blog about emergency preparedness. It reminded me of a presentation Dennen and I went to on fire safety a couple weeks ago... Basically all we wanted was a free dinner, so we went to hear the shpeel. Dinner was awesome and they did have some really good fire safety tips. The guy presenting was amazingly good at striking fear into me about burning up and dying. Let me just say that when I worry about stuff like this, I can't go to sleep and it's all I think about.



At the end of the presentation, we handed in a slip that said when we would be available for one of their guys to come over and tell us what type of fire alarm system we would need in our house. "Okay," I'm thinking, "We need someone to come over tonight because who knows, we could have a fire tonight!"

One of the sales guys arrived at our house shortly after we got home from the presentation. Keep in mind that we live in an 800 square foot basement apartment, the time it takes to walk through the entire thing is 10 seconds. We sit down with him as he proceeds to tell us how much all of the stuff is going to cost. "How much do you think it will be," he asks us. "$250," I say. "Oh, our products are much more expensive than that," he says. He then handed over the sheet with the estimate on it... $1300!! No contemplation about whether we wanted it. Needless to say, I quickly got over my fear of burning up.

We did get a free fire extinguisher and fire bat (to bash out the windows), plus a free dinner. Overall, a very productive night.

4 comments:

Derek said...

Hey guys, we're glad to see you updating your blog.

We've been to the same fire safety class (free dinner) twice now. Ours was Masterguard. Funny, our 850 sq ft condo was going to be $2500.

Did they give you same sob story about the family who went to the class and then lost a child in a fire the next day after they turned down the home inspection?

They also asked us to promise not to tell anyone the price because we shouldn't scare them off.

I did some research before the guy came over and I found out that they funded the study that they keep quoting in the presentation. I asked for some other studies or comparisons and the guy said his boss would call me back. He never did. There are no legitimate comparison studies with these smoke detectors.

At least the class has some useful fire safety information. It got me to research fire alarms. We ended up buying some First Alert smoke detectors. They have the dual sensors that detect both smoldering and flaming fires.

Here's their webpage: http://www.firstalert.com/smoke_alarms_item.php?pid=3

They also cost about $20 versus $500 each for the Masterguards.

Wow, maybe I should make my own blog post about smoke detectors.

Unknown said...

Yup, it was Masterguard alright. I went on the internet before the guy came over to our place and I couldn't find a single price for any Masterguard products. That's when I realized the price was probably going to be through the roof. I was worried at first that I was going to cave in to sales pitch because all the "protecting-your-family-so-they-aren't-burned-alive" propaganda was fresh in my mind but when he passed us the price, it was the easiest "No thanks..." of my life. It was informative, though. And yes, he ended the presentation with the sob story about the family that lost a child. But like Hilary said, we got a free fire extinguisher (with a metal handle) and won the drawing for the fire bat to break out the windows.

The Kynastons said...

haha, I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets paranoid. As part of our emergency preparedness enrichment they were talking about how we should store different types of fuel for emergencies - gasoline, butane, propane, etc. - but then they kept talking about how its really dangerous to store it cause it could basically blow up your whole garage/house. I think I'll choose NOT to store too many gallons of fuel. :)

Marissa Jeanette said...

Yeah my sister in law got sucked in and bought like one for every room in her house that had to been a pretty penny now im glad we didn't go to the dinner with them Im always a sucker for stuff like that.