Smoke alarms keep going off for no reason

[ericboo]

For the past two days, at random times, my downstairs smoke alarms start going off for about 10-15 minutes and then just stop. They are hard-wired and there is no smoke, and I have a separate CO detector that is not showing anything.

They were installed about 3 years ago and are wired together.

Any ideas?

 

[dman]

Low batteries?

 

[Shame]

Originally posted by: dman
Low batteries?

 

[Toasthead]

yeah its the batteries...even the hard wired ones are required to hjave battery backup and these need to be replaced every once in a while. This just happened to me in my new home after about 16 months.

 

[ericboo]

I will check the batteries out now. Thanks.

 

[jmgonzalez]

Long time ago, I heard this low beeping noise all over the house. I also heard the same from other houses since the windows were open. This is a fairly new community, so a lot of houses were wired for alarms at the same time.

I finally replaced my 9v batteries, and the sound went away.

 

[GeekDrew]

I can't remember which builder it was... but one of my brothers just bought a new house... I think that they completed construction on his house (and many near it) some time in September - October. They all have smoke detectors wired into their alarm systems... and the batteries are all starting to die... in all of the houses... it's a nightmare. I guess that for some reason, this particular type of detector is prone to false alarms during a low battery condition. The fire department loves that builder for using low quality batteries.

 

[Looney]

Any chance the smoke alarm is also a CO2 detector?

 

[TitanDiddly]

Originally posted by: Hardcore
Any chance the smoke alarm is also a CO2 detector?

Yeah, I was going to say... :Q

He said it's not in his post though.

 

[Looney]

ah sorry, i'm a little drunk atm. Anyways, i have a hardwired smoke alarm throughout my entire house, and they do have battery backups, but when they're low on batteries, they just do the normal beep like any other smoke detectors.

Do you have CO2 detectors in all rooms that you have the smoke detectors in?

 

[ericboo]

No batteries for backup. Turns out it was a faulty detector.

 

[FoBoT]

i had one go bad, it is still sitting on the entertainment center, haven't bought a replacement for it yet

 

[dman]

For scientific reasons, if one goes bad and they are all daisy chained, and you disconnect it, do all the other go off / or stop working? I assume they still work, as fire could disconnect one, etc.

 

[ebaycj]

Originally posted by: dman
For scientific reasons, if one goes bad and they are all daisy chained, and you disconnect it, do all the other go off / or stop working? I assume they still work, as fire could disconnect one, etc.

First, they're not daisy chained, they're in a star-topology. if one detector gives a false-positive, all the others will go off. if you figure out which one it is, and pull that one off the wall *AND disconnect the plug going into it*, the rest will stop going off.