"Harry K" wrote in message
oups.com...


John A. Weeks III wrote:
I am living in smoke detector hell this morning. In
the middle of the night, one of the detectors started
chirping. Apparently one of the units has a low battery.

Since I have this hardwired system, if one chirps, they
all chirp. That makes it next to impossible to tell
which one is doing it, and it makes it hard to find a
place in the house where I can go and get back to sleep
(it was 3AM).

Well, when morning rolls around, the house warms up a
bit, so the battery suddenly has a little more life left
in it, so it stop chirping. So, now I don't have a failure
mode to track down.

It wouldn't be so bad if I had only one or two. Here in
Minnesota, you need one on each floor, one inside and
outside of each bedroom, and one at the peak of the
cathedral ceiling. For me, that is 7 units, plus 3
carbon monoxide units. And the tallest one is 18 feet,
which is a non-trival task for someone like me who has
limited mobility.

So, why don't these units have a light on them that tells
when they have generated a chirp? It would have been so
easy to just look for the one that started this mess, and
yank it out until I could deal with it in the morning. But
as it was, I lost half a night's sleep. I also ended up
going to every detector, trying the easier ones first,
replacing batteries.

And guess what--it turns out it was the one at the peak
of the cathedral ceiling. I don't have a clue how I am
going to get up to that sucker. I might just pull that
puppy out and leave it out since there are 4 other
detectors within 10 feet of this one (the peak of the
ceiling drops down 8 feet, and then there is the entry
to two bedrooms, and there are 4 units by the bedrooms).

-john-

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John A. Weeks III 952-432-2708
Newave Communications http://www.johnweeks.com
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No help on locating one but a couple comments.

You can cut the number of units by 3. They have combined smoke/co
detectors.

I have never understood the reason for hardwiring. You still have to
maintain/change batteries so just what benefit does hardwiring add??

I have 4 hardwired together, none take batteries, so I never have to replace
them or have them wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me the
battery is low.