On 12/31/2016 11:41 PM, micky wrote:
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.
snipped good advice.

If you failed to teach your son basic home safety, you should take a
do-over!
You don't have to be technical to understand that your first priority
when the alarm goes off is to get the $^% out of the house.
Defeating the alarm is the last thing you should do.

I bet that if you asked nicely, the fire department would come over
and do some basic testing with calibrated equipment for free.

Avoiding false alarms is a high priority for detector vendors.
Yes, they can break, but it's very unlikely. If it goes off, get out!

I have an air quality particle counter. I've done some experiments
with smoke. The particle counter detects a lot of particles long
before the smoke detector alarms. I've found overheated components
in computers when I couldn't smell anything.
Did I mention, if it goes off, get the hell out?