Smoke alarms are an essential safety item for every home, but they aren’t all equally good. We lab test and review the latest models to help you find the best smoke alarms for your home. Our buying guide will help you decide which type of smoke alarm you need and where to install them, and how we test explains our testing rigour.

Our test covers photoelectric, ionisation and dual sensor smoke alarms. We include mains-powered and battery-powered models, including several with 10-year lithium batteries.

Our expert testers give every model a thorough workout to help find the ones that:

• are best at detecting real fire situations
• are not too sensitive to nuisance smoke and fumes (such when making toast)
• are easy to use and have useful features such as a hush button.

Our interactive comparison tool helps you find out how each model performs in a range of fire situations and which ones are priced to suit your budget. Our Recommended models will help you see quickly which ones come out on top.

Note that a high overall score in this test is not always enough to earn a recommendation. We recommend models that score at least 70% overall, but we also set a minimum score for the smouldering foam test: photoelectric alarms must score at least 80% in this test, as this is exactly the sort of smoke they should be quick to detect. Ionisation and dual sensor models must score at least 70% in the smouldering foam test. Ionisation models are less effective at detecting this sort of smoke, and for dual sensor models, fitting both types of detector into one unit may involve a compromise in the internal space; but in either case they should still be good at detecting this common fire type.

This review includes some models now discontinued or superseded: to see those, use the “availability” filter under Related products at left.