So at 3.30am this morning my wife wakes me up, stating that the smoke alarm in the upstairs hallway is making a noise about every 30 seconds, and that she wont be able to sleep until it stops. Despite looking, she cannot find any way to make it do so.

Sure enough - "CHIRP!". Not the, 'Get out of your house now', adrenalin-pumping alarm but the, 'This is going to annoy the hell out of you', intermittent chirp. After bemoaning the fact that it was interrupting a bizarrely interesting dream(*), I dragged my butt out of bed and went to look at it.

"CHIRP!". The sound reverberates around the small upstairs hallway, and rattles through my semi-conscious brain. There's definitely no smoke here, and it must be a fault code. Probably a dying battery. I examine and pry at the device but it doesn't easily open. Maybe it'd be easier if I could see what I was doing. I retreat to the bedroom to get my glasses.

Ah. Twist anticlockwise. With a simple pronation of my wrist, the body of the device separates from it's backing plate. Then I notice the wires extending into the wirebox behind and foggily remember that this is an AC smoke alarm, and connected to its brother in the basement. Still can't see the back up battery, or any hatch that might lead me to one. Puzzled, I wonder if maybe only one unit has a battery backup in it, and decide to check out the basement detector.

So I get dressed and visit the unfinished basement. Find the smoke alarm. Sure enough - there's a battery. I remove it and do the tongue test. Seems fine. Put it back in and hit the test button. I quickly release it due to the painful screaming in my ears. Oddly, this one appears to work fine.

Hang on...now I am awake, I notice that something is wrong. This smoke detector is attached directly to the underside of a 150 year old wooden beam and I can't see any wires protruding from it. Not only that. but it is quite obviously made by a different manufacturer.

Ok. So apparently we have two smoke detectors in the basement. I hunt around and locate another. I sanity check that it is mounted on a wirebox. Yep...and it's identical to the one upstairs. No obviously accessible battery either. No chirping, and the test button deafens me.

At this point, I decide that discretion is the better point of valor, and that the desire for sleep is beating back every geek tendancy in my body. I admit defeat and surrender to the RTFM urge. The only problem is that I don't know if we have it - the smoke detectors have lived here longer than me.

I memorise the model number and retreat to the office. Praying to Google, I soon locate the manufacturers web site and click on their tech support link. Then I find out that they only keep manuals online for their latest models, and the only information relevant to these ~8 year old detectors is their generic FAQ. This is about as useful to me as a chocolate teapot(**). It's trying to tell me why I should install a smoke detector and how the radiation source contained within is 1000 times less dangerous than background cosmic radiation from the sun. Hello! Earth to Major Tom. It's 4am in the morning and I'm not getting any sleep. Someone tell me how to shut this tucking fhing up.

I go back upstairs to take another look at the offending device. "CHIRP!". I wonder if maybe a bugs got into it and whether a blast of compressed air would help. As I study it closely, I notice that the body will separate further - there are some tabs hidden under the manufacturer labels. Hmm...Screwdriver job. Maybe it does have a battery after all. I unplug the damn thing from it's wires so that I can work on it in comfort downstairs. "CHIRP!". Aha! Battery!

I rush downstairs to my desk. I pull a small screwdriver out of a drawer, poised to attack, victory will soon be mine.

"chirp!". Whoa. Where did that come from? The basement?

My head spins. Has the basement detector decided to complain about my unplugging to the upstairs unit? Why? WTF could that mean? I want to find the engineers responsible for designing this thing and subject them to my pain. A month of 24x7 "Enter Sandman" at 90dB ought to do it. "chirp!". Again, the unit in my hand remains quiet.

I put down my screwdriver and wander towards the basement door, deciding upon the way that I'm just going to leave both detectors unplugged until the morning.

As I get close, "Chirp!", I realise that the sound is still coming from upstairs. WTF!?

At that moment I have an epiphany.

I walk upstairs and reconnect the smoke alarm. Then I turn around and pick up the carbon monoxide detector that hangs barely 4 feet away on the opposite wall. Low battery.



(*) It was strange. It was like at the end of a paintball match where everyone excitedly discusses their fortunes duing the match, who they shot, how they died etc. Only we were all in some kind of afterlife and the bullets had been real. The discussion was totally matter-of-fact, no negative emotions. It was simply ok - everyone there was friendly. Weird.

(**) Actually, less useful. I could eat a chocolate teapot.

Hahahahahahaha!!!

Joy! My house seems to have smoke alarms that have both backup batteries and an A/C power source. The builder, no doubt following some awful building code, placed about five thousand things on my ceiling throughout the house. And, indeed, they'll chirp at me when the backup batteries go bad. Despite having a two-color (red/green) LED built into them, there's no visual status code indicating that the battery has gone bad. You just have to wander around and wait for the damn chirp again. This can be quite frustrating, even when you're fully awake.

Amusingly, my builder uses the cheapest alkaline 9-volt batteries available. I've been replacing them with fancy name-brand batteries. I even did a few with much more expensive lithium batteries because I happened to have a small box of them at the time. Guess what the last one I replaced had in it? One of said expensive lithium batteries. I have no idea why or how often these A/C-fed smoke detectors feel a need to check in on how their battery is doing, or how often my house goes without power when I'm not around; it seems that several times a month I'll come home to blinking clocks.

And, just to make matters more like genixia's story: there's a strong correlation between battery failure and room temperature. A warm battery seems to be a happy battery. This means that the beeping always happens at night, after the air conditioning has cooled the house down, when I'd rather be sleeping.

I feel your pain, brother.

They just need to design a nuclear powered one, guaranteed for several millennia. It's already got a bit of radioactive material (Americum I think) in there anyway so some more won't hurt...

awesome.

Heh!

Nice story!

Almost the exact same thing happened to us at home. We live in a new house where AC powered smoke alarms are required to be put in by the builders.

One night (small-am) the smoke alarm upstairs goes off, full volume. Unsurprisingly we wakt up, and after checking the house, decide there is no fire, but the smoke alarm will not shut up.

So I open it up with a screwdriver, and unplug it from the mains. It stops making loud noises, and goes back to chirping, as per your ones.

Ok, so no AC power, it must be chirping due to the battery, right. Wrong. Even after removing the battery it still chrips every 30 seconds. Must be a capacitor in there? Not that I could see on the circuit board. So here's the alarm chirping with no obvious power source.... A tad frustrating.

I had to take it outside and hammer it to death before it stopped. Weird.

Paul.

I was awoken by the "chirp" in the early hours of this morning. We have 2 mains- powered smoke alarms and the chirp seemed to be coming from the downstairs one, so I disconnected it from the mains and set it on the coffee table and went back to bed

chirp

aaaarrgghhh

Back downstairs to remove the backup battery from the bloody thing. Then back to bed

chirp

aaarrgghhhhh

I stood under the upstairs one for 10 minutes daring it to chirp. It didn't, but the downstairs one did. Despite having no power or battery in it.

Odd. I can only assume that either it had enough power in a capacitor to chirp, or I have a poltergeist.

It's now silent, but I missed out on a couple of hours sleep, so am grouchy today.

I didn't notice there were two *'s, and when I looked up the reference to "bizarrely interesting dream", I incorrectly found "Actually, less useful. I could eat a chocolate teapot.", which DOES in fact sound like a bizarrely interesting dream

Classic story though ...

ms

I was awakened one morning around 3AM by a phone call. It was someone from ADT alarms letting me know the battery was low on my alarm according to their system. Funny thing is I quit using their monitoring system several months prior due to the alarm getting disconnected for home repairs... That was annoying...

Yup, ADT can be a pain. I actually MOVED and they called me at my NEW NUMBER in a different city to tell me that my alarm was having some problem (don't remember exatly what was going on). The lady simply wouldn't let it go when I told her I didn't own the house anymore. She kept insisting that my alarm was having problems and I needed to do something about it.

Well, I guess it's good to know that ADT watches out for us... I remembered the phone call a couple weeks later actually. Since then I had to rip out the battery and AC connection to get it to stop beeping. And ADT actually called after that for a customer service survey. I told them I am no longer a paying customer and that their service was fine, except for a 3AM call to tell me about something as minor as a battery being low on a system they are no longer supposed monitor was a bit outrageous. I wonder if they do anything right, like make a call to 911 when an alarm goes off.