Where is that beeping coming from?!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I missed most of the good bits of Lost tonight because I was chasing a beeping noise around my house.

Yesterday I was trying to install a new range hood with Dad’s help. The wiring was dead simple - white, black, ground. We turned off the breaker (which controlled the range hood, fridge, and the dining room - but nothing else in the kitchen), pulled out the old hood and installed the new one.

When we went to turn the breaker on, the thing kept blowing and turning off. So, no power, fridge plugged in via extension cord, electrician coming tomorrow.

Tonight I went to pop some dinner in the oven (same wall as range hood and fridge…different breaker!) right before Lost came on.

Within 5 minutes, a chirping sound was coming from one of the smoke alarms. So I assumed.

I found it odd that this would happen since I JUST cleaned my oven last week so it’s not like there’s a ton of burning gunk in there.

Went to undo the alarm but the chirping stopped. Went back to Lost. A few minutes later, more chirping. Took the battery out of the alarm, went back to Lost. A few mins later, new chirp.

Decided maybe the problem was the other alarm. Not wanting to totally disable all my smoke alarms, I opened the kitchen window. Chirps stopped.

More Lost, more chirps. Oven is still on at this point cuz I was hungry and there was NO SMOKE.

Urgh! Since I’d just had electrical problems, I started getting paranoid that the inside of my wall was on fire and the smoke alarm was sorta kinda sensing it in a really crappy way.

Pulled the fridge all the way out (dear lord I have a massive fridge) and felt the wall all over. No fire.

So, being that I didn’t want to miss more Lost (omg I am so horrible) and the dog was going mental, I took the battery out of alarm #2.

More Lost, more chirps. WTF?!?! I checked the UPS in the office (computer battery backup) but nothing was awry. The thing hasn’t beeped in years anyway (dead battery).

I finally got to eat my food, but at the last 2 minutes of Lost, MORE CHIRPS GODDAMMIT.

I had managed to take a quick peek at the CO detector while running between smoke alarms and feeling the kitchen wall. It was still plugged in, with it’s little red blinky light blinking as usual.

But, since it was the last thing left in the house that could make such a noise, I hit the CO detector’s test button to test it. This did not sit well with the dog, who finally made a beeline for the basement (note to self: explain fire exit plans to dog). The test did it’s testy things, and I didn’t know what the hell they meant, so I unplugged it and took it to the office so I could find the manual online.

The manual was of little help. I did notice that it said it would chirp if the battery was low but

  1. I didn’t use the battery - the thing is always plugged into the wall
  2. The chirps they described didn’t match my chirps.
  3. The “Lb” notification was not displaying, as the manual said it would.

Wait…#1…it was plugged in. But…in the dining room - WHERE THE POWER HAS BEEN OFF FOR 2 DAYS!!! :smack::smack::smack: The battery was well and truly dead.

So, I replaced the battery and WENT TO PLUG IT BACK IN TO THE DEAD DINING ROOM PLUG!!! :smack::smack:

I finally wisened up and plugged it in in the living room, where there is plenty of power. After, of course, thinking for a minute I could just leave it unplugged (which would of course resulted in more chirps, probably at 4 AM).

It was an amazing occurrence of events that I was already worried about an electrical fire, the chirping started exactly when I turned on the oven (my newly cleaned oven) and the beeping had nothing to do with fire.

Mundane and pointless, but I just had to share.

Oh, and my roommate Basement Dan slept through a whole hour of extremely loud beeping and me running around. I guess I should go over the fire exit plan with him, too (step 1: wake up).

2

You are certain no one brought you one of these?

3

Ha! As soon as I saw the title of your post, I suspected a CO detector, and was going to post that very possibility. Luckily, I read to the end of your OP, and didn’t need to.

I don’t know what it is about those things, but I know of four that have produced the same kind of puzzlement. I imagine their little CO detector brains find it very amusing to watch humans running around trying to stop the beeping.

4

Beat me to it, CairoCarol.

5

Reminds me of another ‘where is that &%$$am beeping’ story. At a friend’s cluttered studio apartment in the early 80’s, we hear someone’s beeper going off. It’s no one’s, so we start looking for the misplaced pager. We take the place apart, but no matter where we look, it seems to be behind us. After an hour of rummaging through 20 something bachelor detrius, we realize it’s the low battery alarm for the smoke detector on the ceiling! That’s why it was always ‘behind’ us.

6

Here it’s usually the cellphone, which beeps just frequently enough to be a royal PITA, but not often enough to easily locate it. Occasionally the battery is dead–more often someone has sent us a text. We’ve had two recently–one at 2am from my SIL (who was drunk at the time), and another shortly after midnight from an acquaintance letting us know that her father had died. I don’t have a problem with finding that out so much as I have to wonder why she’d send us a text about it in the middle of the night. As if I don’t have enough trouble sleeping as it is…

7

For us, it was the battery-powered smoke detector. We were convinced it was from the security-system panel as it was definitely coming from that direction. We thought it might be related to our having just switched from standard phone service to FIOS - perhaps the security system decided it couldn’t talk to headquarters? It definitely seemed to stop when I was on the phone, anyway

So, on the phone with the security company, they talked me through their putting it into test mode, then me arming it, then opening a door to make the alarm go off (ah, and isn’t that a lovely noise) - so they could confirm they were getting a signal. They asked if I was sure it was the security system, and I said I was. So we decided I’d wait and see if it chirped again.

10 minutes later, CHIRP.

I went and stood by the security system panel to listen. A few minutes later, chirp - but NOT from the panel. So I went into stalking mode - turned around, listen to the chirp, tried to triangulate… finally narrowed it down to the smoke detector. Just outside our bedroom. In a direct line from the bed, to the security panel, to the smoke detector, which is why we assumed it was the panel to begin with.

New battery, chirping stopped, and we felt pretty foolish.

And at least we know for sure that the security system does in fact call the company if there’s a problem!