The (hopeful) End of an Era
Of course I know I could be jinxing myself by writing this, but I’m really, really hoping we’ve finally put an end to the false fire alarms in our house! They’ve been going off randomly pretty much since we moved in. Sometimes a humidifier will set them off, sometimes we don’t know why. Almost always in the middle of the night though. And while E used to sleep through them, he’s reached an age where he’ll wake up screaming.
I’m pretty sure they’ve given him a bit of PTSD too. Every night before bed he points at them and goes “Beep!” and waves bye-bye. Every morning he wakes up and points at them. And a few nights ago he woke up screaming and pointing at the one in his room. UGH.
We’ve replaced the batteries. We’ve cleaned them out. We’ve lowered the humidity in our house. We’ve done everything the internet tells us to do. So finally I sent Tom to the source - the Wilmington Fire Department. He gave them a call and basically pleaded for help.
But first, two questions for you:
How long are smoke detectors good for, before they need to be replaced?
How often should you replace the batteries in your smoke detectors?
If you’re like me, and thought you knew the answers to these, you might have said 10 years and every 6 months, right? And since we’d recently replaced the batteries, and our house is about 4 years old, we thought we were good.
Nope.
The fire fighter that Tom talked to said that smoke detectors should actually be replaced every 3-5 years, and the batteries are good for 10 years.
I feel like this should be advertised more? Did you know this? And WHY do they tell us to replace the batteries at daylight savings every year???
So anyway, it turned out that maybe the problem all along, was that we needed new smoke detectors. And so we called up our favorite electrician who came out the next day (on a Saturday!) and replaced them ALL! GOODBYE AWFULNESS.
One funny thing, while he was taking out the old ones, one of them was beeping. It was no longer hard wired, and the battery was gone, but IT WAS STILL BEEPING. This is why these things drive people crazy. We literally had to just throw it outside.
So anyway. Moral to the story is, replace your smoke detectors.
Goodbye beeps!