Author Topic: Smoke Detectors... learned something new  (Read 458 times)

K Frame

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Smoke Detectors... learned something new
« on: June 23, 2019, 02:26:33 PM »
Learned something very interesting last night...

Around 12:30 I wake up to the smoke alarm upstairs going off. Quick do a house check. Nothing out of place, downstairs alarms aren't going off.

I reset it and went back to bed.

Around 2:30, same thing. This time I do a full house sweep checking for anything that might be out of the ordinary. Still nothing.

As I'm heading back upstairs, it goes off again, but this time I notice that the upstairs hall smells a lot like bleach, which I had used on the grout in my bathroom right off the hall where the smoke detector is.

So, I hopped onto the internet and found out that the new photovoltaic smoke detectors can be set off by strong smells, including bathroom products.

So, I hosed the shower down to get rid of the bleach, turn on the fan in my office window to do an air change, and waited.

No more alarms.

Not something you want to wake up to in the middle of the night, that's for sure.
Carbon Monoxide, sucking the life out of idiots, 'tards, and fools since man tamed fire.

Kingcreek

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Re: Smoke Detectors... learned something new
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2019, 02:56:34 PM »
I set off a smoke detector once when I blew a little dust off of it while holding it in my hand.
When my mother was still living in her home a carbon monoxide detector went off in the middle of the night. Her monitored alarm system alerted and somebody somewhere decided to dispatch fire rescue. They couldn’t find anything wrong and reset the detector. It went off again 1.5 hours later and this time fire rescue shut the gas off and tagged the meter (middle of winter). It continued to alarm at different times during the night. Next day the utility company sent a gas crew in. They found the 12v battery backup for the sump pump in the crawl space had gone bad. I replaced the battery and no problems or alarms.
It wasn’t a high CO problem but apparently it’s not an uncommon thing according to the gas crew.
What we have here is failure to communicate.