When you reset your clocks back one hour on Sunday, it was the ideal time for your smoke alarm check.

Please change the batteries in your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms. The most common cause of non-working smoke alarms is dead or missing batteries. The peak time for home fire fatalities is between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., when people are sleeping.

Smoke alarm maintenance is a simple, effective way to reduce home fire deaths. Working smoke alarms cut in half the risk of dying in a home fire.

The National Fire Protection Association recommends that smoke alarms be tested monthly.

Install smoke alarms on every level of your home, both inside and outside of sleeping areas, installing both ionization and photoelectric smoke alarms or dual sensor alarms, which detect slow, smoldering fires as well as fast, flaming fires. It’s also recommended to have interconnecting smoke alarms, so that when one sounds, they all sound.