And now a few words about home (mandated) smoke detectors.

The suspect

As I’m sure everyone is aware there is an unwritten law that all smoke detector batteries will fail in the middle of the night, never in the afternoon or the morning, sometimes in early evening but only if you are watching a video. Or otherwise entertaining yourself.

One non directional beep, (loud but non directional). We have a new house (seven years old) and in the house the mandated number of smoke detectors are six. I can see the logic of the placement of most of them though I did argue about the location of unit in the upstairs landing, located on the high ceiling directly above the balcony railing, I asked if it could be placed back 3 feet so if I need to get it down to change the battery I am not balanced on the edge of the 14 foot precipice above the living room floor. Sternly told that the mandated location was intended to detect smoke coming up from the kitchen and that moving it to the middle of the landing where I had requested it might in the case of a fire result in a three or 4 second delay before the smoke activated the detector.   The twice yearly risk of tottering on a step ladder to change the battery was not a consideration (after all household accidents are not their department).

So six smoke detectors and in new construction all six are wired together. Here the reason is so that when one of detectors is activated, all the houses smoke detectors, no matter how far apart, will sound simultaneously. Each smoke detector is powered jointly by house current and a 9 V battery, or so I’m told. But if the smoke detector is running on house current 99.9% of the time then why do the batteries need to be replaced once or twice a year? Frankly as an engineer these devices don’t impress me.

My first complaint is that when one of the units battery needs to be replaced, supposedly, there is the famous single, loud, beep. Now what would it take, technically, to make these units so that the single LED (which is always lit) wink or blink or flash to indicate when that unit is the unit with the low battery? I have a stopwatch function on my wristwatch and I have tried to time the interval between beeps but I never get the same value for the delay between beeps. The loud beeps are for me difficult to identify with the correct culprit if the units are anywhere close together. I have tried to go around the house closing all the bedroom doors isolating the individual units and then standing, stupidly, waiting for the next intermittent beep. I found it’s much faster to go around with the voltage checker remove each battery and test it.

In a related complaint, I’d like to know why it’s not allowed to have on a smoke detector; a bypass or mute. The unit closest to the kitchen (naturally it’s the dangerous one on the upstairs landing) is eager to sound off to announce that somebody is cooking something (anything) in the kitchen. There is never a whiff of smoke. To me there is no visual or olfactory sign of any reason to raise hell but it does. Apparently this is a common problem with ionization type detectors. Due to the interconnected nature of the system in my house, I would need to replace the unit near the kitchen with a compatible photoelectric unit. That probably would be prohibited (if I’m stupid enough to tell anyone about it) by the local fire inspector since the open construction of the kitchen, dining room and living room depend upon that unit. I actually do realize the reason I can’t find a detector with anything like a mute or bypass is that the companies that manufacture them are afraid of being sued and of course they would be correct (more on that below).

Successfully sued by any survivors or their relatives because we are not allowed to make our own choices about our own lives anymore, everything that happens has to have happened because somebody made an actionable act. The trial lawyers of America have more influence than all the rest of the nation combined.

So. The reason I’m writing a post about smoke detectors. Last night, at about 2:30 AM, (see above regarding the nature of the timing of these little events) every smoke detector in the house began signaling a full alert, then stopped, then started again. I jumped out of my bed, put on my glasses, turned on the lights and began to race around the house looking for smoke or fire or alien invasion. It would have been quite a sight you had happened to be walking by at that time of night. As you looked at the inside of the house through the windows in rapid succession every light in the house would come on blazing at full intensity as a half naked  man (the bottom half) ran frantically to and fro. There was no fire, or smoke, or ditto…

Eventually the full alarm turned itself off. And after a few minutes came the sound of a solitary low battery beep. Nice failure mode, nice, very nice. I pulled the batteries on all the units and disconnected them and went back to sleep. The next day testing all the batteries showed none of them to be seriously discharged.

As I said, as an engineer I am seriously dissatisfied with the design of these devices. Since their popular introduction in 1965 they have not seriously changed or improved. A few years ago I read an article about popular aviation, as an example the article wrote about a popular small aircraft made by Piper. This plane, seating about fouror five people, still had several anachronistic anomalies such as a carburetor instead of a fuel injector, and used older style connectors and fasteners. The plane’s manufacturer was asked why they had not upgraded to more modern and efficient technology wherever possible replied that if it’s being used on the aircraft today and it works and if they replace it and it fails or is thought to have failed or might possibly have been the cause of the failure then they would be sued. So nothing changes.

Shakespeare was right. First, we kill all the lawyers. Then all the Democrats and Pre..   Drop them out of an aircraft at 10,000 feet with a bag of smoke detectors for a parachute.