Last night at 3 a.m. my smoke detectors went off. There really is nothing like being awakened from a dead sleep to that extremely high pitched chirp and a female voice saying “fire, fire.” I, of course, immediately got out of bed and went in search of this supposed fire. There was none to be found. However my smoke detectors assured me there was. I then had to go through the house and pull all five of them from their wiring and in some cases pull out the batteries because pushing the button would not hush them. At 3 a.m., that was so much fun.
When I bought this house it did not have any smoke detectors. It had two wall mounted holders for smoke detectors, one in each the downstairs and upstairs hall. There were none in the bedrooms, and there was no wiring for interconnected ones. I decided early on that as I renovated the house, I would install interconnected wired smoke detectors and bring the house up to current code, even though it was not required. I’m an engineer that way. During Phase 2 of renovations, because the ceiling downstairs had to be opened to install a structural beam, the house lost grandfather status, and interconnected wired smoke detectors now became required by the County. No problem. I was already planning to do it. When it came time to install them, I decided to get combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. I had to buy all new ones anyway, so I might as well go for full protection.
This leads me to last night and my need to rant. My detectors are Kiddie brand. I mention the brand because there is an oligopoly of sorts on household fire alert and response equipment. All of them seem to work the same and have the same flaws. Modern houses generally will have interconnected smoke detectors so that if one detects smoke, all the detectors will go into alarm. There should also be one detector in each bedroom and in each hall. Interconnected fire detectors and their location are not universally adopted building code requirements for new construction but are a good idea. If you have a large house, it is possible for one to go in alarm and not awaken a sleeping person in another part of the house. Research has also shown that children do not necessarily wake to a smoke detector at all, in particular the tone. This is partially the reason why voice alarms have been added, but with children, personalized voice alarms with the parent’s voice may be needed to insure children are awakened.
If my detectors detect fire, they set off one set of chirps and say “fire, fire.” If they detect carbon monoxide, they set off another set of chirps and say “carbon monoxide.” If the battery is low, another chirp and “low battery.” Then there is some complicated series of chirp sequences to denote if it was previously in alarm, has malfunctioned, needs replacement, etc. that NO ONE COULD POSSIBLY DISTINGUISH THE MEANING OF AT 3 A.M. Mine were definitely yelling fire last night. As I ran around with a stool trying to figure out what the problem was, the hush button was not working at all. At one point, one of them said carbon monoxide, but I have no idea which one because they are all blaring at me at 3 a.m. The units also have some complicated series of LED blinks to denote in which mode (or possibly mood) it is. This is great, but they are IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND AT 3 A.M. Also, as far as I could tell or at least understand, there was no way to figure out which specific detector set off the alarm and thus which one was malfunctioning. Maybe the LED is supposed to tell me this, but I couldn’t figure it out when all I wanted to do is stop the awful noise being blared at me.
Thus if any person who happens to work in smoke detector design happens to read this, these things are too complicated to understand when there is some malfunction or inaccurate alarm. I appreciate the voice that says fire, carbon monoxide, or low battery tells you what the supposed problem is. That makes it much easier to understand than which series of chirps are being blared. However, if you are trying to track down a malfunction, it is impossible. Stopping the blare seems to be impossible short of removing all sources of power. For interconnected detectors, I want and need to known which one started the alarm. I can’t figure out the problem if I don’t know that, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT IS 3 A.M. WHICH IS EVIDENTLY THE ONLY TIME DETECTORS HAVE A FLASE ALARM OR LOW BATTERY.
That ends my rant. While I’m on the subject of fire detectors though, please remember to change the battery every six months. Also, please remember when the detector itself needs to be replaced, never throw it in the trash. Smoke detectors contain a small amount of a radioactive substance. They are perfectly fine to have in your house, but they should not be disposed of in a landfill. Find an appropriate place to dispose of them. [Update: Please see my post Household Hazardous Waste Disposal on how I eventually disposed of my malfunctioning smoke detector.]
My smoke detectors do not speak, but man oh man, do they beep. I have had the same experience as you did-also in the middle of the night. I replaced the batteries in all…and two nights later same thing. My smoke detectors are two years old, and apparently, need to be replaced. Right now, all are disconnected. It has been a frustrating experience; that beeping really puts a person on edge.
What’s the appropriate place to dispose of them?
Good question, but unfortunately there is no good answer. Some states and municipalities have rules about their disposal. It really depends on where you live. The larger the municipality, the more likely they offer a place where they collect them. You are supposed to be able to return them to the manufacturer, but the Kiddie, First Alert, and others don’t always make it easy. I will need to return my malfunctioning one and hopefully get a free replacement as mine is less than a year old. I will have to see if Kiddie will take the bad one.
Dispose of them at a hazardous waste facility. They know what to do with them.
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Mine did this. I am trying to find the trick to getting the darn hush function to actually work. Does out keep going for a certain amount of second a minutes before the hush starts? None of mine flashed in a way to indicate which of the 5 was the culprit. So had to yank them down and pull out the battery so that the ringing in my ears will stop and I can sleep. Not exactly safe. I hate theses things. In MA old ones just get thrown away. I checked with the state. Hazard waste does not take them.
I am going through this crap right now!! I bought my old house ( 800sq feet) just about 2 years ago. There was no smoke detectors in it, the previous owners had to do some electrical up dating before the sale of the house could go through.. So smoke detectors was on the list. Now it would have been nice if the electrical guy left the smoke alarms manuals behind!! I have one alarm down stairs and one in each bedroom ( seems silly cause the rooms are literally 3 feet apart) . It was within 6 months after moving in that the chirping began,
intermidantly and it eventually stopped. At first I had no idea what it was.. as it did it in the middle of the night( i am not really with it then, then again who would be !!?? ) I got up at that time and walked around the whole house trying to figure out what the noise was. It wasn’t until a few months ago that it did it again, this time I knew what it was, and this time it seemed to be coming from the one in my bedroom. Again the noise stopped on it’s own. However a few days later it did it again. Then just last night it started at midnight and continued on until the afternoon. I had gone out this morning arming myself with new batteries, can of compressed air ( I read some where that dust can set these things off ) and a battery tester. When I came home I got up on the ladder only o be frustrated with being unable to open the stupid thing!! I did however ..after getting a flash light..was able to read it has a hush button and a test button ( they look the same to me??) i pressed it, it shut up…but.. the red light is still on ?? As well as the green ??Now I was told smoke detectors now a days MUST BE hard wired into the house. I have looked on line and it would seem that anything on such a model also says they have back up batteries. I googled pictures of smoke detectors by ” KIDDE” trying to figure out which I have ?/ I am betting the model number is inside.. of which i can’t seem to get at!!! 😛 When I googled KIDDE.. I found they have a hardwire model with and without battery back up ” ARRRR!!” I am so frustrated ! I hate these dam things! Seems I might have to either ignore it, or pay big bucks to get an electrician in to figure out the thing! 😛
Probably too late to be useful to you, but maybe useful to the next person google brings to this page. Many alarms will have the offending unit remain lit red, while the unaffected units are lit green. That makes diagnosing the problem a little easier (I have about ten of these stupid things screaming at me), if not fixing the problem.
I just had the same problem at around ~3am. The beep easily woke me up, and then I heard some lady saying “fire, fire”.. So my first reaction was to run downstairs to my 3d printer which was running, but only to see that there was no fire; no where in the house. The detector was the Kiddie brand as well, and I was fortunate that the one in my bedroom had a red blinking led so I’m assuming that one had the issue.
Earlier in the year I had one of the detectors give me low battery problems when exposed to a little bit of humidity (windows were open). This was probably just a problem because the humidity affected the voltage drop in the battery, but either way my suspicion is that their circuit it not overly tolerant of any deviation. The smoke detector is suppose to be a “life-saving” device, so maybe it should not be tolerant of problems but false alarms are should not be acceptable.
In my house I believe that I actually have multiple brands of alarms, so hopefully they don’t conflict with each other in any way. I’m assuming that there is some standard protocol they all have to follow, or else I imagine the alarms would let me know some loud malfunction noises 🙂
I was also awakened by being yelled, Fire, Fire! No fire! But it sounded for 5 minutes. I ran my ceiling fan and it stopped. It was flashing a red and a green light for hours. But it’s back to a green light. Not sure what happened either. My home is 3 years young and it only sounded in my bedroom.
I’m suffering these damned things malfunctioning almost once every couple months. Mine don’t go off on a false alarm. They tell me the battery is low. I test the batteries with a multimeter and find their voltage is fine!! I let them stay unplugged a while and then put them back together and all is fine. Until it does it again the next day, next week, or next month.
My house was rehabbed in 2010 and with that came all new electric and these shitty interconnected smoke/CO detectors. With added complexity comes reduced reliability. With pathological capitalism comes cheap shit that doesn’t last and demands re-purchase of more product from the same company that you already bought product from already (as well as one to three choices -or none at all- in companies to buy this garbage from).
I replaced one Kidde alarm and now I have another one sitting in my lap right now doing the same shit. This one doesn’t have a replace-by date on it but it says to replace it by that date… The last one was only five out of the supposed ten-year lifespan.
These things are getting more complicated and less reliable. The cheapass ones made by the oligopolies are shit for cheapness. The insanely complex ones that Nest produced, that supposedly were “smart” and user-friendly like their thermostat, were actually pulled from the market due to potential failure to alert on legit emergency situations. Yay for the software industry sticking too much computer into what should be 100% reliable electronic safety devices. Did anyone think that putting more complexity and more software into these things was a good idea? Certainly not any of we computer tech people who are honest about how wretched software is. I can’t wait for self-driving cars to reveal themselves to be the pathological technology they are.
What was I taking about again? Oh yeah, the incessant beeping defective piece of shit alarm in my lap. Yay.
Hi. I have 2 hard wired Kidde smoke/carbon alarms that went off last night yelling that it/they detected carbon monoxide. The hush button would not work.
My separate carbon monoxide detector (also Kidde) displayed zero so I assumed it was a false alarm.
Pressing the Hush button did nothing. After what felt like forever, maybe 5 minutes, the alarm stopped. After another 5 to 10 minutes the alarm started again and then stopped after a while.
I am just writing to ask whether you or anyone else have found new information about why the hush button does not work and what causes false CO alarms.
Thank you.
It seems I am in good company. Mine went off – briefly, three separate times – at roughly 2:30am. Nothing like “Fire, Fire!” to get you moving. After confirming that there was no smoke, and after reading the posts above, I went to the manufacturers website (Kidde). Here are some tips for others who stumble across this page at 3am:
* To find the initiating unit, look for one that is flashing RED at least once every second while in alarm mode, then follow the reset procedure below on that unit.
* If the alarm stopped on its own before you could find that flashing light, please see the owner’s manual to see if the alarm model has an alarm memory to tell you which unit was initiating.
* If there are no obvious signs of a fire, the alarm should be cleaned before being reinstalled. False alarms are most commonly caused by something interfering with the sensor.
* To clean, after disconnecting the alarm and removing any removable battery: hold the unit on its edge and thoroughly vacuum out the gap between the front cover and the back plate all the way around the perimeter with the crevice tool attachment of a vacuum cleaner, or blow through the same gap with compressed air.