In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 31 Dec 2016 06:25:16 -0500, Bob
wrote:

Hi,
Happy Holidays.

Would like your opinions on this.

Got my son and daughter-in-law a First Alert Smoke/CO alarm for their house.

They are both as non-technical as you can imagine.

Thought a bit about what to tell them to do if the Alarm goes off,
falsely. Apparently, this is a fairly "common" occurrence.

Alarm has a 10 year, non-replaceable, sealed battery.

Did a Google search, and these batteries are apparently Li-Ion.

The alarm also has a small slider switch, with a break-away tab in the
back, to permanently disable the
battery, and any ringing.

My guess is that at 3:00 AM, it's not a very good option for them to
start playing with.

Why do you think it will malfunction. I think that is pretty darn rare.

If the alarm goes off at 3AM, they should assume tthere is a fire or CO.

I had a neighbor whose smoke alarm kept going off for days or weeks, and
he finally took it somewhere to be repaired (so I was told. maybe he
just removed it). Not too long after something burst into flames and
1/4 or 1/2 of the inside of house was destroyed. Fortunately no one was
injured, or at least no one was killed. There had been smoke that
entire time that the detector detected, but that the people couldn't
smell. Of course they should have gotten another detector when they
removed that one, but I would not assume it's defective.

So, I told them to just dump it in a bucket of water.

But, having found out that it is a Li-Ion battery, this doesn't sound
like a good idea anymore.
Explosion hazard in water, etc. ?

I doubt it, because Li batteries explode when they get too hot, from
either sending power out or taking it in too fast. . There's no reason
water woudl make either of these happen** and more importantly it would
cool anything that got hotter than the water.

**Unless maybe it was salt water and made a decent conductor.

However you may ruin the detector and it might not have been bad.

Put the thing in the refrigerator and you will barely hear it even when
you're in the kitchen. It will probably stop too, because it's shielded
from what ever smoke or CO was causing it to go off. . Then take it
out in the morning, take it outside and see if it starts up again. If it
doesn't it's probably good (because the batteries will sound much longer
than one night) Then take it to the same location it was in and see if
it goes off then. If it does you have a real problem.


Any thoughts on this bucket of water approach, etc. ?
Other ?

Thanks,
Bob