At about 4:30 this morning, I was awakened by the dulcet tones of our smoke alarm. It beeped just a couple of times. A moment later, as we were trying to figure out what was happening, it did it again. The second time, I could distinctly hear that all the alarms (or at least several of them) were going off at the same time. I heard a fainter beep, probably from upstairs, then almost immediately, a louder one, probably in the hall, overlapping the first, and then right after that, the one above us. It was almost simultaneous, all in the space of a second or two, and then stopped.
We checked the whole house just to be sure, but there was no actual smoke or anything we could find that would have triggered the alarms. It was a normal night; no storms, not especially hot or cold or humid or dry. When I was a kid, our smoke alarm got set off occasionally by a bug crawling in, but since it was several alarms at once, a synchronized insect attack seems unlikely - and if that is what it was, we’ve got bigger problems.
Any ideas?
It helps make sure the alarm is heard by everyone in a multi-level home. FTR, mine is battery-powered. This is true of many line-wired systems but you can get them in battery-powered systems as well.