Yep. Our 2 dogs are still acting a little freaked out today.
NFPA recommends a 10-year maximum life for smoke detectors.
Yeah, but that’s just a recommendation to insure the electronic components are all in good working order. A smoke detector isn’t going to just stop working when it hits the 10 year mark as long as the battery is good*, unless it’s actually broken; a CO detector will literally not work anymore when it gets used up.
*I know, many smoke detectors nowadays come with a non-replaceable 10 year battery.
As required by fire codes in many states. Which was news to me the first time I encountered this annoyance.
Why no silencing reminders and no replaceable batteries? Because too large a fraction of the public will keep silencing the alerts until the batteries are dead for good, then never replace them.
“Stupid and lazy” is why we can’t have adult things; only things designed to be child-compatible for all the 30yo children amongst us.
The last few posts explain a lot. Thanks! I’ve ordered a replacement detector and will toss the one that kept bugging me no matter how often I changed the battery.
I have a friend who’s smoke detector had been beeping for over a year.
Evidently your friend owns neither a ladder nor a shotgun. One or the other of those tools can silence any smoke detector ever made. 
She’s a hoarder.
If she had a ladder, she probably couldn’t position it correctly to get to the smoke detector, and she’s too unfit to use a ladder anyway. She’s also too embarrassed by the mess to have someone come in the house to fix it. I’ve offered, but she lives across town (which is a long way in Phoenix).
Whenever we talk, I can hear it beeping in the background…
Ouch. That beeping is crazy-making and with a person who’s already on shaky mental ground that is double plus ungood.
Best wishes for a good outcome, but I’m not optimistic.
Step stool and a 9 iron to get at the one in the bedroom. Cathedral ceiling and all.
I had one in the top of a stairwell trunk once. No great place to put a ladder; neither the top end nor the bottom end. Plus the real impressive potential kinematics of any fall left me real cold about the project.
I semi-seriously considered the shotgun approach since it was pretty well out of the normal field of view up there.
Wasn’t there a bit thing years ago where the us car makers admitted that the top speeds posted in all but a select few were a crock of bull? i remember lawsuits and such being discussed because people actually thought their escorts could really achieve 120 mhp…
If it’s an ionization smoke-detector eventually the Americium-241 will decay to where it won’t work. But if my math is right, it takes about 65 years to get down to 90% of the original amount of radioactive material.
Yeah. When we remodelled our GC moved mine from waaaaay up on the cathedral ceiling down to where I could reach it on a safe stepladder (safe for me – with bad arthritis in my knees).
I thought fire codes require detectors within a short distance of the ceiling?
It passed inspection. But seriously. I don’t own a 20 ft ladder. Am I supposed to hire a handyman to change a battery?
IIRC for a while in the late 1970s - early 1980s the top speed on speedometers in the US could not exceed 85 mph. It probably coincided with the era of the 55 mph national speed limit. And that was probably a pretty reasonable top end for most cars of that era.
When they were filming Back to the Future the prop department had to make a fake speedometer for the DeLorean to show it hitting 88 mph, because the DeLorean’s actual speedometer only went up to 85. Although I have my doubts as to whether a DeLorean could even go that fast.
Or a rickety 12-foot stack of old newspapers and magazines…
Play it where it lies. Hope you got a good wack at it.
I also have cathedral ceilings. I had one that I had to drag an extension ladder out to get to. Lots of fun in the dead of winter. Note I ‘had’ one. No more.
My hearing is quite bad. It’s my wife that alerts me to them. We have… I donno 5 of them scattered around. I have a hell of a time figuring out which one needs a battery.
are those made by HP or Epson?
(that would explain a few things …