Smoke alarm with Voice Alerts. FAQ

My 10-year alarm was silent for about 10.5 years, then it began to chirp.

In 41 years, I've never had a false alarm except the story I told about earlier this summer, when the hard-wired smoke detector failed after 45 years. Not for soke alarms or for CO detectors -- I'm on my third one of those now. The first one, that my brother gave me, might have saved my life when I misadjusted the oil furnace, so it almost clogged the flue with soot. But it's not just oil furnaces that can make CO.

When reading about these things for my long posts above, I read that humidity and other things can cause false alarms, like if someone takes a shower just before bed. I never do that, never take long hot showers at all. .

My house had one when built, so it shouldn't be hard for me to replace it in the same location.

AIUI, while the smoke detector should be at or near the ceiling, that's not true for the CO detector. It would be hard to read a numeric display on the ceiling anyhow, but many of the separate CO detectors that plug into the wall have numeric displays, including the one I used to use which I replaced with the same model (though now it has a non-replaceable battery)

All display the ppm concentration.

BTW, one can test CO detectors. They sell small bags of CO, half the size of tea-bags, that can be opened by the detector. I did that once, for fun. You might not want to it every month, but if something goes wrong and you want to know if the detector works, you can probably find these bags for sale.

Oh, wow, things have changed. This is just for sprays:

After picking an alarm, I played the Amazon video again and it seems like it's high pitched alarm, nothing like the clattering of the alarm that broke. I can probably hear it fine, but I don't know about waking me up. Have to go back to the drawing board .

I noticed recently that when I set the alarm on my car, if I'm at the rear of the car, I hear the beep. At the front I hear it about twice as loud, but in the middle of the car, probably depending on which direction my ear is facing, I don't always hear it. 2005 Toyota Solara/Camry.

I took the battery out of the smoke alarm about 35 years ago. It didn't work well with my cooking techniques.

I insist on a display in a CO alarm. It will show something long before an emergency condition. I have one next to the fireplace, and can look at the display. Anything other than 0 indicates a problem (usually forgetting to open the damper), and can fix it before it becomes an emergency.

I haven't had that happen. What I don't like is the low-battery chirp. It can take a long time to find the device that's chirping.

BTW, Earlier this year, I had a double-chirp from a CO alarm with a display. That one was easy to find because is was displaying "End" instead of a numeral.

We had a bad hailstorm in 2023 (some was actually baseball size). I had my roof replaced. Apparently, the roofer had moved the exhaust pipe from my furnace (just about 6 inches, but that was enough to separate it from the furnace outlet. It's a good thing I looked before turning on the heat.

I do sometimes, but haven't had that set off a smoke or CO alarm.

I have had a smoke alarm go off when I had just cooked some bacon. I had accidentally put it on high instead of off (on an electric stove, they are next to each other). It was too hot to reach the control to turn it off, and an apparent design flaw of that apartment required walking through the fire to get to the circuit breakers. In this case, the only damage was a black spot on the ceiling and a ruined pan.

Easy solution. If one has a weak battery, the others are not far behind. I got five years from mine and replaced them all.

Hard-wired 10-year lithium battery...

Excellent.

In the story where the CO detector went off, becuase I'd fouled up the oil furnace and it made enough soot that the flue only had a 1" opening in the middle of a bunch of soot, the CO alarm woke me up, I turned off the furnace and opened the window in my bedroom. But then I had no firm idea how long the window had to stay open, only my educated guess about air dispersal. And it was quite cold out and gettting cold in the room and it wouldn't get warmer because the furnace was going to be off the rest of the night.

So numeric display would have been a big help, to know when to shut the window and go back to sleep. Although I'm not sure they came that way when CO detectors first came out. And if they did I shouldn't quibble because without my brother, I wouldn't have had any one at all.

By total coincidence, my kitchen smoke detector started chirping the day before yesterday afternoon. I found it quickly.

But the microwave kitchen timer tweet was harder to find, yesterday. It's so soft I don't hear it when it goes off even if the tv is not on. And then it will tweet for hours and hours, maybe forever.

As the Democrats import more third-world country into the US, we'll probably see more "professional" furnace exhaust vent installs like this:

Pause at 4:29, note the exhaust duct vented into the return air duct.

"

Probably not a major cost for new construction (where codes likely require smoke and CO alarms).

From memory - if a hard wired alarm may have the power interrupted (like AFCI/GFCI circuits) UL requires backup (battery). Conveniently the NEC requires AFCI or GFCI (or both) almost everywhere in a residence.

For CO alarms - I have

What I remember from long ago is that UL listed alarms won't alarm until

There is (or was) a CO alarm that would alarm at under 30 - don't remember how low. It was not UL listed. The instructions probably made clear that at a low detection there wasn't likely a hazard.

I should hope they did. But I understand your desire for a lower alarm value, considering that my CO detector always says 0. So anything abouve that is unusual, and must have a reason.

I'm sure I can. The current alarm, until it broke, filled the whole house with its noise.

It turns out that current alarms make nowhere near the noise that the alarm I had until July did.

The one that finally broke is a Lifesaver Ffyrenetics 1200

It used a Kobishi CLB26 vibratory horn. Described as loud as hell, supper loud, definitely louder than their replacments. Enough to damage your hearing. A ton of noise, miniaturized car horn. Uses several hundred milliamps of current, but pieze-electric, the current method, use "almost nothing at all".

This kind of horn was used in the 70's and maybe until 1985, so I can't find anything nearly as loud now. Of course in 41 years, the alarm has never gone off when I was asleep or when I was not cooking.