Finnish startup Innohome, a maker of fire prevention technology for kitchens, has announced a supplier agreement with Electrolux to bring the company’s products to North America.
As I’ve written before, cooking equipment is the leading culprit when it comes to home fires. Nearly half (46%) of home fires in the US are started in the kitchen.
And the biggest cause of kitchen fires is unattended cooking, something many of us have done in this era of constant distractions.
Unlike the typical approach in the US that focuses on alerting us about a fire once its already started, InnoHome and similar products focus on preventing the fire before it starts by shutting off the stove when it senses a possible fire.
InnoHome has had significant success in Europe, particularly Finland, where the government encourages installation of fire prevention equipment. To date, the company has sold 400,000 of its fire prevention products into homes.
According to InnoHome’s head of North America, Eero Vartiainen, the first product Electrolux will bring has been optimized for the North American market.
“We have tested and tuned our products to meet the wide-ranging needs of the North American kitchen,” said Vartiainen, “and the first solution will be a smart sensor that alerts when the cooking surface gets too hot too fast or the temperature is unsafe.”
The product will likely be based on similar technology from InnoHome’s flagship product, the SKG5010, which includes a sensor and a control unit. The battery powered sensor is installed in the overhead in the cooker hood, and the control unit, which plugs into a home’s power supply, cuts off the power to the stove if a fire risk is detected.
Vartiainen also hinted that the Electrolux rollout will leverage smart home technology, which makes me wonder if we could eventually see some voice control or alerts through integration with Alexa or another voice assistant.
Back when I interviewed Vartianen in 2017, he hinted this type of integration was on their roadmap:
“Products like Amazon Echo and Google Home are giving every consumer an option to add other products, thus, making our homes more accessible through voice-controlled or other connected technology,” said Vartianen. “Fire prevention systems, such as Innohome’s StoveGuard, will integrate with these platforms and will allow customers to get real-time updates on the status of their cooking equipment.”
Hopefully we’ll know soon. Vartianen said the company will have more announcements in the near future.
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