HeyBub wrote:
Michael Black wrote:
If you want to gamble that there never will be a fire, then don't buy
smoke detectors and don't buy batteries for them. But so long as
you don't want to take that risk, you install the detectors and
change the batteries regularly.



I think those that advocate changing twice a year are taking into account
some people buy batteries made in China and sold at the dollar store twelve
years after they were manufactured with sub-standard ingredients.

I further suspect that brand-name batteries bought at a high volume retailer
(Walmart, Home Depot, etc.) have a shelf-life of five years and in minimal
use in a smoke detector of almost that long.


I think the MAIN idea is to get people to LOOK AT and THINK ABOUT the
damn things twice a year, and battery refresh was the only excuse they
could think of. Note that some early detectors used weird batteries
(those multi-dollar ones), and also didn't have low-power alarms that
lasted more than an hour or two- so if you were out for the day, you may
never know.

Hopefully, they also blow out the dust bunnies while they have it open.

But having ranted all that- no, I don't change mine till they start
beeping. But if you do, you should definitely move the old ones into
some location where they can spend out the rest of their life usefully,
not the trash. My alarm clock seems to want a backup battery every 3
months. It still keeps time during outages, it just won't tell me what
that time is.

aem sends...