This thread is inspired by a YouTube video I watched by @PhotoElev. I want to see the residential smoke alarm fails YOU discovered either by 3D tours on realtor sites or maybe you have a fail in your own house.
I got one right off the bat: in at least two of the houses I’ve replaced the detectors of, the existing FireX G-6’s horns didn’t work, meaning that even if they weren’t way over 10 years old & did alarm during an actual fire, they would be unable to audibly alert the homeowner! (& thus would be useless)
I know of a house in my area from the 90’: that has no smoke alarms whatsoever. All of the electrical boxes that used to have them are just open with nothing on them. Apparently, they went off after a power outage and didn’t stop, so they took them all down and never did anything about it. I’ve tried to convince them to get new ones, but they refuse.
Also, I’ve found quite a few Kiddle i12040 detectors that were manufactured in the past few years with non functioning interconnec, although they were working at the time of installation and it was not a wiring issue. If you have any of those, I highly recommend checking them, or better yet just replacing them with more reliable photoelectric units.
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I know that around 2012 we were checking my grandparents’ house (built in 1994) while they were on vacation. They still had those smoke alarms. When we walked in, we heard just the one in the bedroom going off, even though they were all interconnected. It turns out that all of them except that one had dead horns. It wasn’t even that one that was sending the alarm. When they got home, they immediately replaced them all.
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Huh, well how about that (glad you replaced them though, especially since the detectors were probably way over the 10-year replacement date too). Were they all FireX units? Not only do they seem to be a common brand in houses built in the 90s (from what I’ve seen at least), but horn failures are arguably just as common with their detectors from that period as well.
I actually took apart a broken firex smoke alarm and found out that the horn on these models consists of three metal contacts on the circuit board and a round disc just sits on top. The cover is then placed on this assembly. After many years of complementing one’s cooking, the disc moves out of place causing the horn failure.
Yeah, that’s what I once discovered too: definitely not a good or robust horn design for sure (& while BRK/First Alert detectors use a similar horn design, theirs is at least sealed in a plastic cover so it’s harder for it to become dislodged).
Yes they were all FireX units (looked lik G6s but may have been a similar looking model) I know they were hardwired and did not do temporal coding. The alarms they were replaced with were FireX i4618AC units, which were also replaced when they got to be 10 years old.