3 ms·
Smoke/Carbon Monoxide detectors have been an enormous issue for me. Many of the detectors that use a 9V battery backup have a poorly designed chamber holding t
by nate 13y ago
Smoke/Carbon Monoxide detectors have been an enormous issue for me.
Many of the detectors that use a 9V battery backup have a poorly designed chamber holding the battery. Often the battery doesn't make good contact with the metal contacts inside the detector. This results in constant false positives that the battery is low. When it actually does run low, I'm forced to start this cycle over and over again of: find "new" battery, alarm still chirping, is the "new" battery really low or is it the battery chamber misaligned again, etc.
The dog loses another 3 months of her life from stress whenever this happens. I've never seen an animal so scared of a constant chirp.
So when these things start chirping at 2am, and I can't tell if the batteries in the drawer are brand new, instead of dealing with a scared dog, and possibly buying yet more new batteries, the detector comes off the ceiling and ends up in a drawer of blankets to dampen the noise as the chirping takes awhile to die after the detector is removed from power and battery removed.
Additionally, I help with many things around our condo association. I'm constantly changing batteries in these detectors. But first I need to find them. You hear a chirp that the battery is low, and now you have to find it somewhere. Maybe it's in the common hallways of 3 floors of units, or maybe it's a unit owner's. This involves me walking around the building trying to catch one in action of chirping.
I've been a loud detractor of Nest in the past because of their use of Facebook ads spamming my friend list, but I welcome an intelligently designed detector and am going to gladly spend the money to buy at least two of these and will hopefully get the condo association on these. The dog is going to be very happy. :)
- foobarian 13y agoI bet there are CYA reasons that current smoke detectors are as annoying as they are. Smoke detector or not, it is inevitable that there is going to be a fire, and people will get hurt, and nobody wants to be the maker of a smoke detector that wasn't as annoying as possible about signaling for battery replacement. With the nest and the text message, I would worry about the text number/account credentials getting stale/lost over time, and then when someone gets hurt in a fire there will be liability shenanigans.
- WillyF 13y agoI wonder if they could use the motion sensor to alert people of a low battery. I'd much rather hear a chirp every time that I walk by than while I'm half way through a good night's sleep.
- kbutler 13y ago> the detector comes off the ceiling and ends up in a drawer of blankets to dampen the noise as the chirping takes awhile to die after the detector is removed from power and battery removed. You can generally hold down the test button to quickly drain the internal capacitance (sometimes with interesting audio effects).
- jtbigwoo 13y ago>> Often the battery doesn't make good contact with the metal contacts inside the detector. This results in constant false positives that the battery is low. This is probably not bad design. The smoke detector is trying to tell you something.
- tene 13y agoWhy do you keep dead batteries, especially somewhere you could confuse them with good batteries?