Some alternative places for beeping (that happened to me):
the backup battery for my basement sump pump
a box on our wall from Verizon, that is a backup battery for…OK, I have no idea, but cables from outside come through this juncture box
more than once, random items in never unpacked boxes, or a dresser drawer, or even further ago in my son’s toybox. The random items were just some gadgets from ages ago, admired and put away…an old digital alarm clock, a handheld electronic game, etc.
I wish you lots of luck - I know how maddening this can be.
Things that I learned with my smoke detectors:
–Mine have a red LED that blinks once every 30 to 45 seconds if the battery is OK. If the battery is not OK, the red LED blinks three times really quickly every 30 to 45 seconds.
–Mine take 9V batteries which have an expiration date on them that is fairly accurate as far as I can tell. I have a house Excel file with lots of info, including the expiration dates of all of my smoke detector batteries. I check that and proactively change the batteries when the expiration date comes up.
I literally smashed a smoke detector to pieces once. True story. Motherfucker keeping me up at 3 AM and still chirping with a new unused battery.
I ended up replacing all of my detectors and (so far) things have been good for the last couple of years. They still need batteries replaced of course but they at least behave as they should.
I concur! I have one that is doing the BIP! thing very intermittently, maybe once or twice every couple of days. It’s hardwired and has no battery, but is way past its replacement date, as are its two other companions, all three wired together. I imagine needing replacement is what it’s complaining about. Incidentally, a “feature” of having three detectors wired together is that if one goes off, they all go off – which is nice for making sure you hear the damn thing, but not very useful for quickly finding the source of the problem.
I have three replacement smoke+CO detectors, but although they’re supposed to be electrically compatible with the old ones, they cleverly use a completely different wiring harness because … reasons. So now I have to get up on a ladder three times and do some re-wiring.
Congratulations for getting me to spew a vodka martini out my nose! I have one of those detectors, too, cleverly placed in a hallway close to the kitchen.
Oh hell yeah. At my mom’s old house, there was one right outside the hall bathroom. We would stay with her when we visited, and every time my wife took a hot steamy shower in that bathroom, it would set that smoke detector off.
All of our smoke detectors are wired, so I don’t have to worry about dead battery chirps, thank goodness.
I swear I once had one not only do that but then keep chirping when I removed the battery entirely. It must have had some bit of backup power source. I put it out in a barn nobody was spending much time in, buried under a batch of sound deadening stuff. When I came across it again considerably later, it was quiet.
And nobody around here takes the things for recycling. I’ve got a collection by now.
The reason you can’t tell where the beeping is coming from is because those sound chips emit square waves instead of sine waves.
The sound hits your left ear and right ear at slightly different times. With a sine wave (like most normal sounds), there is a phase shift between what your left ear hears and what your right ear hears. Your brain interprets this to give you a sense of what direction the sound is coming from.
This doesn’t work when the sound is a square wave, however. The solution should be for these devices to have better sound emitters that produce sine waves instead of square waves.
This was a known problem with some animal training projects too. “Target training” is a popular technique, where you train an animal to address its attention to a target, then use that target to direct the animal’s attention to various other things. The “target” could be a beep sound. But it doesn’t work when the beeper emits a square wave, because the animal can’t tell where it’s coming from.
I can relate—I had to do this last month. Fortunately I was able to get an adapter from Amazon that let me avoid actual re-wiring. It still wasn’t any fun, though.
Phew! At least you found it and it was inside your house! I had to wait for my neighbor to get home!
But here’s an odd one: One Wednesdays I work for a food pantry and we go into senior living facilities, projects, and a couple of private homes. One week I get there, and I hear a smoke alarm chirping. As I leave, I mention “hey, it sounds like you have a smoke detector with a low battery – you might want to check that out.” This was at a house where there was a younger caretaker there. The next week, we return to the same house, and the smoke alarm is still chirping! So for an entire week, that damned thing was beeping (unless it just happened to be a coincidence that I came at another time where another smoke alarm was about to bite the dust.)
Thank you. I’ve known for a long time that the 520 Hz square wave smoke alarm sound was hard to locate, but I never knew the mechanism why. It’s the phase shift.
We used to do a two-day charity bike ride. Rent a beach house to sleep 20± of us overnight. Ever try & find one that only emits one beep per minute, at 2am, in a place you never stayed at, where you don’t even know where the light switches are on the wall & it might be coming from the bedroom of members of the opposite sex?
I don’t remember all of the details but it was eventually found…on a wall & not the ceiling, IOW, not where one would expect to look for it.
I had a similar issue a few weeks ago. Something was chirping, probably a smoke detector, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out which one.
Well, it turned out to be the alarm to warn of a hot water heater leak. I had a fancy water heater put in a few years ago which had this alarm; I didn’t realize it used batteries which need to be changed every few years.
Yesterday afternoon while I was watching TV the smoke detector in the hallway starting beeping for real. Scared the hell out of me. By the time I grabbed a step-stool so I could shut it off, it stopped. It maybe beeped a dozen times. I walked through the house but nothing was amiss. I pulled down the attic stairs and things were ok up there. I don’t know what set if off. I’ve been keeping an eye on it and the red “ok” button is blinking. What could cause it to go off for no reason?
IME they occasionally do that. Be glad it wasn’t the full blare. I’ve had three different smoke detectors (over probably 30 years) start insisting there was a fire when there wasn’t one. And I’m not counting going off because somebody burned something while cooking.
Smoke detectors can go off if they get dust or cobwebs inside. Or if a spider gets in one and crawls around. Or if they’re getting old and they are in a place where steam builds up.
Ask me how I know this. And how I found out you are supposed to vacuum the damn things every once in a while (ours are hard-wired).
