Thursday, March 22, 2007

The Pizza Alarms

The smoke detectors in our house are kind of getting to be the bane of our existence.

There is one right around the corner from the stove and any little thing makes it go off. Browning chops, a big spill on the stove top. Even cleaning the oven.

And they are hard to get off. Once the first one detects smoke, all of them start in. That's 10 detectors going.

We used to be able to get them to shut off by waving a towel under the kitchen one and maybe opening a couple of windows. But now that doesn't seem to have much effect most of the time. I've had them going for up to 40 minutes.

And I cook to relax.

Now this morning at 5:45 a.m. the one in the office here is chirping. We change the batteries (they are hard-wired but have battery backups) twice a year, but we still end up with detectors chirping for low battery power. The sound echoes in the house so a lot of times you really have to work hard to figure out which one it is. One night we chased around in the middle of the night for some time looking for the chirper, only to discover it was a CO detector.

I can see why people disconnect them. It's a dumb thing to do but you are tortured less that way.

1 comment:

Burkinator said...

We have the same problem, and it terrorizes the cat. When the battery in my room goes, I have to figure out how to reach the vaulted ceiling. Those high ceilings used to look so cool ...