Of course the CO2 detector installed in my apartment I-don’t-remember-when has to run out of battery power eventually, chirping loudly every minute announce this.
But couldn’t it have chosen to do so at a time more reasonable than five in the freaking morning?!
Luckily I’m a night person, and had a 24 hour Safeway nearby, but that still doesn’t mean I like having to go out in the cold to buy batteries (and get a faceful of ceiling dust when I take out the dead battery in the bargain).
And it sounds like all the batteries in all the CO2 detectors in my neighbors’ apartments ran out at the same time, for obvious reasons. Ah, well, at least I can ignore those more easily…
You know, you don’t have to go out in the cold and buy a new battery. You can just remove the old battery for the nonce, and get new one at your convenience. All you risk is the ceiling dust, and the chance of dying a horrible flaming death before you get a replacement battery.
Removing the battery from our smoke detector is SOP at our house, because, in addition to alerting us to possible fires, it also goes off to tell us that we’re making fried foods. Or are burning toast.
You know, I didn’t even think of that. Maybe it was because I had a cable modem that would continue to beep during a total power outage, and I just conflated the two somehow.
It’s a CO detector, by the way. I think CO2 is all around us, living in harmony with plants and animals. Take away that one oxygen atom and then you need a battery.
The feature of the detector alerting you that the battery is dying is actually the precise opposite of Murphy’s Law.
Murphy’s Law would be if your house filled with CO and you died because the battery ran out just before, and you didn’t know because the detector had no feature to alert you it was out of power. The point of Murphy’s Law is that you have to assume mistakes will happen (you forget to replace the batteries periodically) and so design things to ensure mistakes can’t happen (the detector screams when the batteries are dying.)
Which I found doesn’t work if your detectors are hard-wired (current code on new construction and remodeling in my area). Then you have to both take out the battery and unplug the detector from the current. It took me a minute or two to figure that out, that one time in the middle of the night.
This is a Co2 detector, not a smoke detector, right. So if it fails, it means you have slightly less chance of burning to death, I think. Wouldn’t an environment with a lethal amount of Co2 go some way toward suppressing a fire?
