A Little Birdie Told Me

Lately our house has been chirping. No we aren't experiencing a bird infestation - it seems like all at once, the batteries in our three smoke alarms were dying.

I admit that we don't follow the rule to change the batteries when we change our clocks. That seems excessive, especially since winter time is only about 4 months now. Usually we try to remember to test the alarms once or twice a year and wait until the chirps. Which, this time around, came all at once.

We realized that our alarms were really old. We have owned the house for over 5 years now and they didn't look particularly new when we moved in. Smoke alarms are only supposed to be good for about 10 years, and, in fact, one even said that it was made in 2002. Time for an upgrade.

Our first upgrade was at a random trip to Home Depot. There weren't many options for the kind that aren't hard-wired in (and ours are not). This was pretty much the only choice that didn't include bells and whistled like talking and CO detection (more on that later). So it came home with us. The battery doesn't need replacing - it has a 10-year battery that starts chirping after a decade in use and then the whole alarm gets replaced.

It went up relatively quickly but not too quickly, because the walls on the first floor are plaster and everything is a pain when drilling/screwing into plaster. The holes, of course, didn't line up with the holes from the previous alarm.

Next we decided to put some effort into researching our options, since Amazon had a much better selection. It turns out there are several ways to detect smoke - photoelectric or ionization. They detect smoke differently and respond with different speeds to different types of fires/smoke. In case you don't want to read the link: Photoelectric smoke alarms are generally more responsive to fires that begin with a long period of smoldering. Ionization smoke alarms are generally more responsive to flaming fires.

It turned out the one we had just installed was photoelectric, so we decided that we should get the other kind, so that the greater variety might make us safer by giving us more warning. And in fact, we were able to find one that uses both kinds of sensors. The radioactivity warning (because of the ionization sensor) is a little scary...

This one uses AA batteries, which is one complaint we saw in the reviews. It might need replacing too often, so we will see. It's in the basement, so at least if it starts chirping, it won't wake us up (obviously we want to noticed the chirp quickly, but the next morning is sufficient).

The old alarm was looking pretty grungy:

That leaves one more to replace near our bedrooms, maybe yet a third kind (the talking kind maybe?).

After reading one of the manuals about where the alarms should be, we think they may not be located in the best places. But rather than move them, we may just add an extra one to the kitchen area. Currently our main-level alarm is inside our stairwell, which has an overhang that would probably stop it from sensing the smoke quickly. But it didn't seem worth having to spackle over the holes, so for now we just replaced what we had.

Finally, a word about our CO detectors. The ones in the house when we moved in were definitely decrepit, so we bought a new one for each floor. But after doing some more digging while researching smoke alarms (and talking to a former volunteer firefighter), I learned that they need replacing every 3 years. And we bought the house 5 years ago....oops. Time to work on getting those replaced. It made me wonder, though: if smoke detectors last 10 years but carbon monoxide detractor only 3, how can they be combined in one unit. Better to keep them separate and working effectively.