Daylight savings ends for most of the US tonight. When you change your clocks, don’t forget to change the batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Nearly every home fire fatality happens in a house with no/not working detectors. A little prevention does save lives.
Increasingly hardwired smoke detectors over here, since they mandated installation of them, along with RCD’s, any time a property is sold.
That said, I still have 3 battery powered ones to cover areas of the house that may be a little isolated from the nearest hardwired detector.
Thanks for the PSA!
I buy lithium primary batteries-which last 10 years. 10 years is also when you should replace your smoke detectors.
Don’t smoke detectors have annoying chirping noises they make when the backup battery is low on power? That noise drives my dogs insane, so I have to swap batteries out as soon as the chirping starts.
Since the daylight savings time / standard time split is now roughly 8 months / 4 months, I’ve gone to changing the batteries on New Years and July 4th, which is nearly 6 months and easy enough to remember.
They do chirp but the source of the tone is very hard to locate.
It is pretty also pretty easy to get used to and not notice them after a while.
The previous tennents had stashed one in a cupboard. I can tell you right now that they’re impossible to locate and you definitely do not get used to it. Worse of all it didn’t seem to be consistent, so I thought I was going insane, rather than there being a low-battery on the smoke detector I could see (and was hardwired…)
Lol yeah. The sound is so non-directional its fucking crazy. And yeah, you absolutely can never get used to it. And it always happens at like 4am whereupon I rage pull, after dragging the ladder out of the garage, all of mine out of the fucking ceiling and replace the batteries at some point during the next week.
Before we were married, my spouse was living in a basement apartment and had a chirping detector that we could not locate at all. It turned out that when the homeowners finished the basement, the contractors thoughtfully drywalled over the detector when doing the ceiling. /facepalm
I’m currently in a three-level townhouse with all detectors wired together. Twice now we have had a false alarm in the middle of the night, which rings ALL detectors on all levels like an air raid klaxon. It would blare for about 15-20 seconds then stop for 20 minutes or so, then go again. It was fun figuring out which detector was the culprit–especially the first time it happened (took us several cycles to fully wake up, figure out what was going on, make sure there was no actual emergency, and pinpoint the faulty device)–and then restraining myself from violently ripping the faulty detector from the ceiling. Good luck getting back to sleep after that. I was a bit calmer the second time it happened.
I had an issue with monoxide detectors going off constantly. The heater people would come and I replaced the detector many many times.
After a few years somehow I find our ancient boiler has been recalled 20 years ago because the exhaust pipes were prone to cracking and leaking. I think I was googling because the boiler would shut off and we’d have no heat in the winter.
We fixed that up and no more issues with co detectors. Any residual brain damage is unfortunately permanent.
It was the previous owner’s boiler. Guess they never filled out the registration.
We had to call the fire dept a couple of weeks ago. It’s just getting cool here and we turned the heat on for the first time. 6 AM all the alarms go off. I shut them off at the alarm panel. My assumption was that if I could turn them off it wasn’t a fire. But, why take chances? So 911 was called. Long story short the fire chief said it was probably accumulated dust hitting the heating element. He said that they get lots of calls like this at the beginning of Fall. I apologized for the trouble and he said no problem it was part of their job.
Rich, did they take down your name and such? The one time I’ve called the fire department for something like that, they took down my info. I feel like it was so they could charge me an idiot tax if I called them again immediately.
“The first one is free, kid”
Yes they did. Good point.
The name and other info is for filling out a fire report, which eventually gets used for various statistics and reports. It’s not personal, we do it for everything.
That’s good to hear. Thanks for the info.