This is a thread where you can post anything about your most memorable smoke alarm moments. From rare smoke alarms to crazy things that triggered a smoke alarm, you can post it here. I decided to post this thread because the smoke alarms in my house triggered due to shower steam. They are 20 years old so it surprises me that they still detect smoke and similar gases.
P.s: Before you say “You need to replace them right away.”, my family has been very busy so we haven’t been able to look at new alarms.
Funny you should make this topic: just the other day the smoke alarms in our house went off for an unknown reason (I have a suspicion it may have been due to lack of cleaning, but my mom thinks it might have something to do with a power outage that occurred in nearby areas that night). As a precaution yesterday I took each of them down one by one, blew the ever-living crap out of them with an air compressor, & then put them back up. Funnily enough when I tried doing this with a compressed air duster can to the unit that initially alarmed it went off again!
I’d recommend dual-sensor alarms as the replacements, such as BRK/First Alert’s 3120B: they offer you the best possible protection from any kind of fire.
2 Likes
Maybe certain types of compressed “air” duster can are filled with some non- or low-toxic, easier-to-compress liquified gases which might be nitrous, halon, or anything alike, which generate sort of fog or fume or something that’d probably have tripped the detector.
Had a faulty First Alert 10-year battery Photo smoke detector. Went off 5 times in one week with no smoke or dust. I know this is smoke, but I will tell another story with my First Alert CO detector.
Back about 4 years ago, I was nine at the time. We had a fire in the fireplace earlier that evening. My mom was half asleep when she locked the exterior doors and changed the thermostat. She went to the fireplace and closed the chimney, not realizing the fire was slightly burning. About 1 AM I woke up to the CO detector emitting its emergency signal. According to the LCD screen, it was about 60-70 PPM. Keep in mind the CO detector was across the house, so the house would have had to fill with CO before it reached the detector. I had mild CO poisoning. I am grateful for that detector; I may not be here if we didn’t have that early notification.
1 Like
Had 2 Kidde hard wired smoke dectectors and 1 hard wired Kidde smoke/co combo that went bad one by one and every time one went bad they would alarm early in the morning and wake everyone up. There was also a severe thunderstorm that caused them to alarm.
I found these smoke alarms out in the field. They were old Smoke Sentals. They were located in the elevator lobby’s on a 4 floor building, probably put in when the elevator was.
Pretty cool! How old are they?
1 Like
My school just had two fire alarms today. My first thought was that there was dust in the smoke alarm as there is construction going on at the time of writing this. It turns out, there was a strange smell in the 7th grade hall that set it off.
I have no idea. I’d predict in the 60’s or 70’s.
That’s awesome! I’d love to have one of those.
I remember back in 2016, around 5 am on an October morning the power shut off, and all of the smoke alarms started flipping out for about a minute before dying. It was pretty weird.
1 Like
Going by that did none of them either have fresh batteries or even battery backup to begin with?
1 Like
It was an old house so some of them didn’t have batteries, it was mainly the living room smoke detector that did this, it was really high up and at the time we didn’t have a ladder high enough to get up there
There from around the mid 70s to late 80s
1 Like
