Smoke Alarms

[athelind]

Coyote designed'em. He must have. He was whispering in the ear of the person who decided that, when the battery in one of the damned things ran low, it would make a single, brief "PEEP!" every few minutes -- and then sit silent, so you couldn't figure out which one needed attention unless you sat around starting at each one.

Of course, when you press the "check" button, all of them make exactly the same sound no matter what the condition their battery.

Comments

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Oy I hate that. And somehow the little peep defies all directional audio cues...you have to go stand under each and every smoke alarm in turn waiting for the next "PEEP!", which can take a couple minutes, and heaven forbid your roommate should be talking during that time. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And of course they never peter out simultaneously...if you've got half a dozen or so around the house, they'll carefully coordinate their efforts so as to always have one peeper a month.

I went and bought a bunch of 10 year lithium 9V cells and will be swapping those into the smoke alarms as each goes into peep mode. Yeah, the batteries are almost five bucks a pop, but it's WORTH IT!

[jdarkwulf.livejournal.com]

I have the loudest, most obnoxious smoke alarm in the known universe. I'm an apartment-dweller, so one central unit is sufficient.

The battery always, always dies in the middle of the night. This particular model doesn't peep. It emits a half-second burst of its ultra-loud claxon.

The battery died about a week ago, at one in the morning. On the first blast, I woke up, turned off my alarm clock, and lay there, confused. On the second blast, I somehow teleported myself to the smoke alarm, ripped its cover off, and yanked the battery, all within the span of about a quarter of a second.

Beeping smoke alarms

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

Rule of Thumb...change the godforsaken 9v PP3 batteries every year on a fixed date.....
I had a smoke alarm in my old motor caravan (required in 1989 apparently) and the battery was dying so it was going peep....peep.....peep......at 10 minute intervals. It was parked away from the house (where I could get it in) and I came back to find a note under the windscreen. Apparently the peeping was driving the folks in the adjacent house nuts. Lord knows how long it took 'em to work out where the noise was coming from....