I got a call this week from the tenant in my “spec house from hell” saying all the smoke alarms were going off, and he couldn’t figure out how to shut them off. So I buzzed over there to find him out doing yard work. When I went inside, I realized why he was outside. The din was terrible. Three smoke alarms shrieking was deafening.
When I built the house, I put in 3 inter-connected hard wired smoke alarms. Two of them were just 110V, and one had a 9V battery backup. I shut off the breaker that had the alarms on it and the 2 without batteries shut off. But the one with the battery kept going.
So I took it down and pulled the battery. Let it sit a couple of minutes – Even took it outside. But every time I put the battery back in, the thing went off. Even hours later after I was home, it went off if the battery was in it.
I ended up replacing that unit, and have had no more problems. But I’ve never heard of one of those things going bad like that. Just curious how common that is….
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I had one in my garage that was like that. It's open air, and really should be the least likely to do that. But it'd often pick 6 am for no good reason till I got rid of it. Just a bad apple.
I got one like that right now. its one of those from lowes
Very common. I have replaced over half a dozen over the last 15-20 years.
One time I had one on the main floor went off which I coudn't get to because the ceiling was 9'6" and I didn't have a ladder. So I disconnected it from the one in the basement. Thinking that the one on the main floor was the bad apple, I replaced it. The moment I reconnected it in the basement it started going off again. Everything was fine after I replaced the one in the basement as well. The funny thing was it was the one in the basement that was bad but it never went off. Instead it sent the signal to the good one. Go figure.