and again
Guess what the GG is doing. He is on a ladder fiddling with something on the CEILING, right? Do you know what he is fiddling with? If you guessed “smoke alarm”, DING DING DING! You win the booby prize.
The last year has been a saga of chirping (and sometimes screeching) smoke alarms here at the Landfill. At my INSISTENCE, we installed Nest smoke alarms a year or so ago in the “hall” and the dungeon. They are fine. I tested them yesterday. But we have a complicated situation in which there are multiple other smoke alarms. THREE of them are within a couple FEET of the upstairs “hall” Nest alarm. You’ve heard me say this before. Multiple times. A neighbor’s tree fell on our house in 2008 or 2009 or so (not looking it up) and city building code required one smoke alarm per bedroom. Our three LITTLE bedrooms are clustered around the “hall” (a very small square space) so we have four FRICKIN’ smoke alarms within six feet of each other. You can’t even tell which one is chirping. Bureaucratic bungling run amok. Come out and look at the actual SPACE, you cretins.
So yesterday morning, I was enjoying a wee brek and some word puzzles when, CHIRP. 30 seconds or whatever, CHIRP. F*CK. I called the GG up at the moominbeach and kinda read him the riot act because I thought he had changed out the smoke alarms. Nope. New smoke alarms were available but not installed. The chirping stopped (because there was no blasted faaaar) and a beach urchin helped me change out the battery. I can do this kind of thing myself but standing on a chair or whatever and tilting my head *back* is not fun. These things didn’t used to be ON the ceiling. Anyway, my beach urchin fixed it and we had a wee ‘hattan in the back yard to “celebrate” and all of the alarms were silent all night.
The GG came home today and, as promised, got to work changing out THREE smoke alarms. They were OLD as hell and I think we should replace these things more frequently.
April 29th, 2025 at 8:34 am
It may not be the battery. Our new smoke/CO detector came sealed with the battery included. Its radioactive detector wears out too. It instructed that when it began chirping, throw it out and buy a new one.
April 29th, 2025 at 4:22 pm
They do expire and the wiring goes bad. That’s what happened to mine. Even new batteries wouldn’t help. However, John and I didn’t do enough research and put the sealed 10 year ones over the old wiring (what else could we do?) and they don’t like that either. They still periodically chirp. John is envisioning pulling them off and putting aluminum foil between the wiring and the smoke detector. I have LOTS of them though so it would be a pain. (literally in the neck)