Every 4.5 minutes, firefighters in the United States are summoned to homes to extinguish kitchen fires. Peter Thorpe, FireAvert's founder and a firefighter himself, witnessed numerous families' lives turned upside down as a result of unattended cooking fires. He contemplated, "if only there were a way to eliminate the heat source before the fire even began." Thus, FireAvert's Automatic Stove Shutoff was born.