A house full of working smoke detectors didn't sound the alarm that helped save a Chester family inside their burning home.

Karen Taylor and her fiancé relied on alert neighbors and their own sense of smell.

"I smelled something, woke up and ran into his room and woke him up," Taylor said.

Around 2 a.m. Wednesday, the roof of their home on West End Street in Chester caught fire.

Next door, Sarah Edwards was just going to bed. She wouldn't have even noticed the fire if she'd left her bedroom light on.

"I laid down to go to bed, and I flicked off my light switch and noticed there was an orange glow outside my window," she said.

Edwards thought it could be an early Fourth of July celebration, then she saw her neighbor's roof. 

"The whole ridgeline of their house was on fire.  I ran over there and started banging on the door bell, then I was banging on the window.  I was about to rip the screen door right off to wake them and get them out," she said.

However, because Taylor had smelled the smoke, she grabbed her fiancé and headed for the door.  He tried to go back inside to save some things, but police stopped him.

Taylor said her house had five working smoke detectors.  However, because the fire started above them in the attic, there wasn't much smoke in the house at first to trigger any alarms.

"By the time the smoke would've gotten down, the ceilings were falling. We probably would not have made it out," she said.

Chester's fire marshal said investigators think the fire started in the wiring of a ceiling fan above Taylor's daughter's room.  However, the cause is still under investigation.

Fortunately, Taylor's daughter, Toni Garcia, was not at home Tuesday night.  She was staying with a friend.

"I probably would've died.  That was right over my head in my room," Garcia said.

By late Wednesday morning, the family was back at the house looking for whatever they could salvage.  Garcia was devastated about losing valuables that belonged to her late father.

"I'm not really worried about anything except for my father's stuff. My father's pictures, my father's jewelry," she said through tears.

The family is staying in a hotel thanks to the local American Red Cross chapter.   Late Wednesday, investigators didn't have a damage estimate on the home, which sits in Chester's historic district, and couldn't say if it was a total loss.

"Just got to start all over again. Just going to take it one day at a time," Taylor said.