Foolishly, we neglected to change the smoke alarm batteries in a timely manner and the damned thing started giving alert beeps at 2 in the morning. As I was changing the battery I tried to remember a single time in my near 40 years that the batteries died other than in the middle of the night, and couldn’t. Has anyone ever had their smoke alarm start beeping in the daytime?
Never. It’s always the middle of the night in our house, too.
Ours is now wired, but yes. Always the middle of the night.
Google is your friend, and personally I just beat the heck out of it when does it to me.
Agreed, most annoying.
“A battery about to fail anyway will fail when the room temperature drops at night.”
As Cabin_Fever notes, batteries depend on chemical reactions which are inherently somewhat temperature dependent.
You can solve this problem by moving to some place where night is warmer than day. Or by replacing the batteries on a schedule.
Speaking of which, when we lived in an apartment we heard that the man in the unit below us had had a heart attack, and then this infernal beeping started down there, which we heard all night every night. We pictured him on some kind of monitoring machine, hooked up to hoses and oscilloscopes, his glazed eyes staring at the ceiling just below our insomniac butts while his wife fussed wearily around him. Turns out he had already died and she had left to stay with relatives, and it was their damn smoke detector. So, the batteries have long, lingering deaths over many days and nights. Especially nights.
I can’t recall the batteries failing at any time other than at night and I keep the temperature in my house at a constant temperature year 'round.
I want to add a pox on the builders who put the smoke alarm on those high, high ceilings and stairwells where you need the fire department to come with their ladder truck to change the damn battery. I visited a house that had 4 batteries beeping at various, irregular intervals. They said “Oh, you get used to it.” I don’t think I ever would.
I bought some detectors with 10 year batteries.
At least, they claim 10 years. You replace the whole unit when it dies.
http://www.amazon.com/First-Alert-SA10YR-Lithium-Detector/dp/B00002NBSF
I’m in my 4th year. fingers crossed that I make 10.
Hard to see how this is better than simply replacing the lithium battery and getting another 10 years.
At least some smoke detectors say they can’t be used for many years because the radioactive source decays or the area around it and the detector accumulates contamination.
I guess I’m the outlier here. The last time the battery died it was around noon. And it’s most definitely colder at night here than during the day.
For serious. I have ten foot high ceilings, and the smoke detectors in both the front and back hallways are positioned over the stairs. WHY? Did the person who installed them just enjoy the irony of people risking their damned lives to replace a smoke detector battery?
In a hotel room, I had one fail early in the evening. It took 2 hours for maintenance to change the battery, but at least it was before I went to sleep.
And I’ve had at least one at home beeping when I came home from work. It’s entirely possible the one in the guest bedroom that I didn’t hear until late was actually beeping earlier in the day, but I didn’t hear it because we keep the door closed and the room is pretty far from our living space.
But I’ve also had the middle-of-the-night beeping.
the unit is sealed. Can’t replace the battery without busting it apart.
Right - but I’m questioning whether this is a good design. Napier makes the point that the radiation source may also have a limited life, which means that a 10-year total lifetime may make sense.
Good timing with the thread, as a smoke detector had a bad battery in my house last night. Of course, it was the smoke detector in the furnished half of the basement that is a fifth bedroom, but that roommate was at her boyfriend’s place last night. And then two of us have bedroom on the ground floor, but that other roommate was at his girlfriend’s, so I was the only one bothered by it, since the last two roommates have rooms on the second floor and were far enough away to not hear it.
And, being that it was in someone’s room, the door was locked and I didn’t have a key. After a few frustrating minutes with a butterknife wedged in there, I finally got it open…oh, but the only 9V battery we had was a random one in the junk drawer and yup, it’s dead, too.
The annoying part was that they are all hardwired smoke detectors. I know that they have a battery as a backup if the power fails, but there should be a “silence” button on hardwired detectors that you can press as a way of saying,
“Yes, I know the battery is dead, I don’t have a spare right now, so don’t make any noise for 12 hours and I’ll get you a new battery.”
Works too, doesn’t it.
Ours went out one night and after fiddling with it for a bit and not being able to stop the chirping I took it out to the garage and left it, but back inside I could still hear it… chirp… chirp. So I went back out and wrapped it in a thick towel, but still chirp… chirp.
It was only after I smashed it to smithereens with a crowbar that I realized the little transistor battery was available through a hidden (very well) sliding drawer.
If anyone ever needs some Americium there’s a little bit somewhere in my garage.
This seems as good a place as any to ask my Smoke Detector related question: Can they get worn out from actually detecting smoke? My wife and I had a small oven related fire which caused the smoke alarm to do it’s thing until we got the fire out. Now, since it’s positioned on the ceiling about 10 feet away but directly in line with the oven every time we cook and open the oven door it goes off. Ideally I’d like to move it out of the line of the heat from the oven but since it’s hard wired I’m waiting until we redo the lights in the kitchen first. So did we wear this one out and that’s why it beeps all the time and makes me want to smash it with a hammer into little tiny bits?
I don’t think they can. They can be filled up with sooty, dusty spider webs, though. Try a vacuum cleaner and a paintbrush to clean its beepy insides.
Seems obvious, but worth asking.
Do short alarms (burnt toast) shorten battery life? If you burn toast or bacon every week, will the battery need changing much sooner?