Used to do a two-day charity bike ride. We’d rent a large house to sleep everyone. Not on my floor, so I slept thru it but one of the detectors had the low battery beep-once-a-minute in the middle of the night. However, for whatever reason, it was not on the ceiling; maybe it was a CO detector? We were dying laughing at my one, quite-exhausted teammate the next morning with his tale of trying to echo-locate this thing that only beeps infrequently in the middle of the night & how he was getting madder & more frustrated with each single beep.
Each year we have a massive Disaster Recovery exercise involving about 30 people on a 3 day WebEx meeting. Last year one of the vendor’s technicians was clearly working from home and had a smoke alarm chirping in the background. Everyone in the meeting noticed it, but she didn’t even hear it any more. I actually included a line in the post-mortem notes that technician X needed to change her smoke detector batteries for the next test. The vendor was pretty embarrassed.
Also, if you have an attached garage with a regular (not EV) car. If your car is running in the garage, especially if the door is closed, CO can make it’s way into your living space.
And devices (levers, pull-rods, buttons, whatever) that a human in the space can manually activate. Which is often done by mischievous students.
As a side comment.
Fire alarms are often activated by breaking a glass cover over a button. My sister-in-law had a job, working at home for a while, scratching a line on the glass so it would break cleanly. Once the glass is broken, the button pops out.
In the US, the distinction between “smoke alarms” and “smoke detectors” is extremely important. Both International Building Code and The National Life Safety Code (NFPA 101) consistently use the terms to specifically describe which type of units are required in an occupancy type.
Smoke alarms are devices listed under UL Standard 217 (“Standard for Smoke Alarms”) and are normally used for dwellings and sleeping areas.
Smoke detectors are initiating devices listed under UL Standard 268 (“Smoke Detectors for Fire Alarm Systems”) and are (unsurprisingly) used in fire alarm systems for non-residential occupancies.
There are, of course, other listings and standards, usually outside the US, and other terms and conditions may also apply.
A very large number of fire alarm design questions I receive have to do with whether a smoke alarm or a smoke detector is required in THIS situation, which baffles me a bit. Codes are, I think, pretty clear about the matter.
I acknowledge that anything with backup power is better than anything without. But when I recently replaced my expired smoke detectors with new combined smoke+CO detectors, I explicitly opted for the no-battery versions.
Why? Because there’s a trade-off between risking my life falling off a stepladder to replace the battery in a squaking smoke detector and the possibility of a power outage, which is exceedingly rare and usually only lasts a very short time. And I also have two plug-in CO detectors, one of which has battery backup.
I think whenever I leave this earth, it won’t be for lack of adequate fire alarms. And, thankfully, it won’t be from falling off a stepladder trying to replace a freaking stupid battery!
Call the non-emergency phone # of your local FD; they may very well come our & replace the battery for you for free
There’s a familiar sign in hotel rooms cautioning guest against using clothes hangers on the fire sprinkler heads. As I understand it, they’re similarly sensitive to nicks.
A horizontal sprinkler head in a motel room can put out as much as 32 gallons per minute, which is a lot of water
What you’re ignoring there, and IIRC we’ve talked about this before, is that a fire in your residence very often quickly kills the power as a result of wiring damage (insulation damage mostly) triggering shorts that trip breaker(s).
So the fire promptly disables your non-battery fire detectors. Oops.
The fact a sizeable fraction of house fires start from electrical sources only “improves” the odds of a power failure early in the fire development timeline.
& not so much fun when you’re trying to plug one to stem / stop the flow.
As I said above, that is precisely what happened in my home in 2016. At the time all I had was battery operated alarms, and I only barely heard the one going off downstairs where the fire was. By the time I got downstairs to investigate, the power was already out.
The thing that saved my life and that of my 2 dogs that night was that my smoke detectors had fresh batteries in them. The thing that kept my house from burning to the ground was that I got enough fire training in the Navy to shut all of the doors on my way back upstairs to get the dogs out of the house (I did try to use an extinguisher, but by that time the room was too hot to get close enough to the fire in my bathrobe). Even as quickly as I acted (the dogs and I were outside less than 10 minutes after hearing the alarm) I had inhaled enough smoke to be hospitalized for CO poisoning. If I hadn’t let the EMTs talk me into letting animal control take my dogs and transporting me to the hospital, I would be dead now. CO prevents oxygen from binding to hemoglobin, so even though you are breathing fine and feel fine, your blood isn’t getting enough oxygen. This is why people die only days after surviving a fire.
These days all of my detectors are hard-wired and connected with battery backups, and all are located in spots easy enough to access with a small household step ladder that has actual steps instead of rungs. And I still replace the batteries twice a year. Living through a house fire is very different from worrying that one might happen someday. I would literally rather jump off a ladder than experience that again.