Sitting here having coffee and I hear that sound that ruins your morning.
BIP!
Yup. Smoke detector battery. The sensors make a very loud chirp, very high frequency, and very long intervals. Forever. Until
BIP!
you find the detector that’s upset. And you can’t tell by the sound which direction it’s coming from like at all. Just generally. Maybe. Upstairs or downstairs? I think down? Maybe? The chirp is too high pitched, and the interval is too great so you spend like an hour wandering around, unable to find that fucker that’s ruining your day.
BIP!
So I start pulling all the detectors off the walls. Pile them all outside in the garage. Because I can’t tell which one it is. And because one is doing it, it’s like dominos: all the detectors will eventually start chirping. One after the other. So you have to replace the batteries in all of them now or this will happen again soon. Middle of the night maybe, 4am BIPs. Arrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhh!!!
BIP!
So now I’ve got six detectors in the garage and something is still chirping! WTH, there’s no other place for a detector to be! I even pulled down the alarm company detectors, and they don’t like that and the fire alarm goes off and you need to deactivate the panel and call the alarm company otherwise it’s fire trucks and mayhem shortly.
BIP!
So I guess I’ve got an invisible smoke detector. Somewhere downstairs. There’s no place for it to be. I’m at my desk and BIP! over and over forever.
BIP!
Would it be to much to fucking ask for an LED MOTHERFUCKERS that turns red when the battery is low? Seriously?
If you have any carbon monoxide detectors, they’ll be lower, close to the floor. Also we had a contractor-installed smoke detector that was very high on a wall over a doorway, rather than on the ceiling.
When we were renting a basement apartment years ago we heard a beeping in the middle of the night, over in an unfinished part of the basement. It turned out to be a CO detector that was in a box, clearly not meant to be in use. But it was going off, so we went outside (fortunately it was a nice night) and called the landlord upstairs because it was his alarm, and it’s not like CO stays in one part of the house.
He groggily came out, and we collectively determined that we didn’t think it was a legit alarm, but better safe than sorry. We called the fire department who came out and went through the house with their fancy equipment and declared it CO free.
Apparently it was just a low battery, but we for sure couldn’t tell. I join your pitting.
There’s one of those upstairs (which is stupid for that kind of sensor, furnace is downstairs) and I’m 99% sure that’s not it, but I can’t figure out how to pop it off the wall. But I think it’s something else.
Mine actually does blink red on the one running out of batteries, so that helps. Otherwise, yes, it drives me nuts: how they manage to make the sound come from everywhere yet nowhere at the same time is beyond me. I once spent part of the day on-and-off trying to figure out where the goddamned chirping was coming from – was going nuts thinking maybe I had a smoke detector stored somewhere in a closet or something that I had forgotten about. And then I figured it out – it was coming from a neighbor’s house, who was out for the whole day (if not the weekend – I can’t remember.) Ugh.
I had the smoke detector beep once exactly on the day in the autumn that the Daylight Saving Time switchover is scheduled, and I was confused, because I wondered how it knew that. (Probably just a coincidence, though.)
OK, it’s not the CO detector, I figured out how to pop that off the wall and gelded it/removed the batteries. It made a sad little chirp as it died. Something else is still chirping. ARRRRGGGHHH!
I wish for a phone app that could have a directional arrow that points at the BIP. And no, not bluetooth nonsense. That’d just stop pairing mysteriously after a few days or whatever. A fucking extreeme audio DSP analysis backend melded to a phone front end.
And now I have 3 hours of zoom meetings to attend so I have to listen to the fucking goddamn motherfucking goat felching ass munching BIPping all morning.
I think I’ve told this story here before. My in-laws went through the same exact steps as you, and still couldn’t find the beeping. I finally located it to a CO detector that was plugged into the wall, and hidden behind some furniture.
I’ve heard stories of people with hardwired smoke detectors that were beeping despite having fresh batteries, and the owners got so frustrated that they ripped the detectors off the ceiling—whereupon the severed wires hanging out of the hole in the ceiling continued to beep. If you Google “beeping wires,” you’ll find some of these amusing tales. (Yes, in all cases, the beeping was coming from some long-forgotten detector somewhere else, usually a CO detector behind a sofa or something.)
Last time that happened to me it was a carbon dioxide monitor. Plugged in just above floor level.
At the edge of the back of the foot opening of a rolltop desk; entirely invisible until I got down on the floor, which I did to check whether I’d knocked anything off the desk while looking for the damn beep.
The time before that it was a UV light in the water system, in the basement.
Yeah. There’s something about that noise that makes it very hard to locate. Also much more than usually annoying.
