I know I know, it’s been forever since I blogged anything. I’m going to make, yet another, attempt to get back to it.
Ah the 21st century… we get to enjoy things like brain dead smoke detectors…
Why oh why in this day and age can’t we make a smoke detector that, when its battery is low, lights up or does something to identify itself other than chirp at a random interval??My house is full of these damn things.Code requires them all over the place along with their evil cousin, the CO detectors.They aren’t any better about having a low battery.Then our alarm system requires it’s own detectors for both smoke and CO.I guess it would be far too easy to just use the existing ones eh?
So now when one gets a low battery I have to hunt for which one of the flock is really making the chirp.And it’s a LOUD chirp, enough to hear in the office when one on the 2nd floor is chirping.Enough to wake you up and keep you up all night until you finally just say “oh hell I’m not sleeping anyway” and go look for it.At which point it usually decides it’s done alerting you about it’s battery for now and quits.
Then when you find the damn thing, and get something to reach it and pull it down (and why do they always fail at night?) and pull it’s battery and exclaim victory at the 20 minute hunt, it defies your elated mood and chirps yet again!The cunning bastards that manufacture these devious littlebits of pure hell decided that it would be a real blast to put a capacitor in them that stores enough juice for it to keep chirping it’s low battery warning at you even after you have removed the battery.At least you can hold down the test button and run out the capacitor, which also is good for waking up anyone lucky enough to have been able to sleep through the previous chirping, searching and dismantling.
Why? Would it cost so much to put a small led or even a traditional light bulb in the thing and have it come on and stay on when the battery is low? it has some little Red light that flashes randomly that seems to mean “All is well here, I’m working as I should” becauseI guess the constant on Green light isn’t enough to convey that nugget of information.
They get worse…. A while back when I had the duct work cleaned, the enormous vacuum managed to create enough negative pressureto suck back some of the CO from the water heaters.This set off the CO detectors, which like the fire detectors, are loathsomely tied to each other so that if one goes off they all go off.
Now I ask you, what is the point of this? I know they have made this into a selling feature and some people, even some I know, have actively sought out this feature, but why?I have a larger than average house, 5600 sq ft of living space.And I can hear EASILY any of the detectors going off in any room.They wake me with their low battery complaints;I don’t think I will have a problem if they go off for real.But since they all go off all you know is there is a problem. You now have to wake everyone up and get them out of the house so you can think straight, then get some ear protection and a shotgun and go back in to shoot the little buggers.
Wouldn’t it be far more useful if only the unit doing the actual detecting was the one going off? Then you could have a chance to identify the problem and maybe deal with it with something other than blind panic and fleeing.Consider as a case in point, the day of the duct cleaning. I knew where the problem was, the unfin area where the vacuum was next to the water heaters. I didn’t need the CO detectors upstairs or on worse yet on the 2nd floor wailing away. And yet they were.If there was a fire in one of my rooms in the middle of the night, I’d rather at least have the chance to rush in there with a fire extinguisher and try to put it out, especially since my army of detectors is going to alert me the moment they “smell” smoke.But that option, that choice, is denied me.I must leave the house and watch the fire spread while waiting for the fire department to arrive.
Does that really make any sense to anyone??