I awoke to the sound of the most obnoxious bird peeping in my bedroom. I turned on the light and couldn’t see it. Turned off the light and then heard it again. Turned on the light and waited.
No. No bird.
It was my smoke alarm batteries dying out.
In case you are not aware of the fact, in a house with multiple smoke alarms, when one battery goes out - well, there is no short-cut. You have to change every damned battery in every smoke alarm. Luckily, I had those wonderful square batteries in my drawer because, idiot that I am, I bought them for the smoke alarms and never got around to changing them.
SO…down to the garage, schlep the ladder around the house and change them all until I get to the living room. Really high ceiling. Have to stand on the ladder, in the middle of the room, and stand on the second to the top rung.
I don’t do well with heights, and at 3:30 AM, this is no fun…but I am alive today to let you know I was able to do it.
I believe the rule of thumb is to change the batteries in smoke alarms whenever you have to set your clocks up or back…twice a year.
I strongly suggest doing that unless you too want to stand on a ladder, second from the top rung, and change out batteries in the middle of the night.
Those fookin’ fire alarms with the wired-together crap are the bane of my existance. Taking them down and pulling out the batteries doesn’t work; the ones in my house have some kind of standby mode or internal battery or something that makes them continue to beep, even when I remove the battery. Plus, like the OP said, all the other ones in the house beep if one is removed or has a low battery.
They’re also programmed so that the batteries only die in the middle of the night, usually when a) you’ve been out late and want to sleep like the dead and/or 2) you have an early morning interview or presentation.
Amazingly enough, the fire alarm people acknowledge that the infernal beeping mostly starts at night. In trying to trouble shoot a nuisance alarm, I called them up. In the course of the conversation I was told that they believe the slight temperature drop in your house at night (in many areas of the country) has enough affect on the battery chemistry that it can often be just enough to drop an already weak battery into beeping mode.
You are a much better person than I. I would have stood on a chair, and a small box, and another if that wouldn’t reach. Honestly, I’m shocked I’ve made it my 19 years.
Heh. An elderly customer once called me to find and kill the cricket in her condo. You can guess what the cricket turned out to be.
Detectors will often beep after the battery has been removed owing to capacitor discharge. To really drive people nuts, detectors that have a ‘Hush’ feature may beep to announce their hushed mode, so if you accidentally push the hush button when reinstalling the detector, the beeping continues until the hush circuit times out, ~ 5 minutes, depending on the manufacturer.