Who wears ear protection when setting off fire alarms?

I don’t because I don’t have any ear protection/don’t care for it, and I also live in an apartment and setting off alarms is scarce/problematic. I usually put a small piece of tape on the alarms, some alarms I don’t, such as electromechanical horns.

I do like setting off alarms in my collection if they can be run on household batteries or if they were wired to plug into a wall socket. I use a pair of wired computer headphones to protect my hearing during tests, but I would purchase dedicated noise-cancelling headphones for added safety.

Based on my current living situation, I usually ensure that the house is empty before setting anything off. If I was to live in an apartment, I may refrain from testing devices out of an abundance of courtesy and concern for any neighboring units attached to mine. I have not explored covering up my alarms with tape or something like plastic wrap, because I feel like it would deteriorate the sound quality by having it muffled.

Usually not. Most if not all of my alarms aren’t loud enough to warrant it, since the sound duration is measured in seconds or minutes. Hearing protection is still good if you don’t like listening to loud alarms at full volume.

Here’s a source I found on safe levels of noise exposure:

I seldom set off my alarms (even though my house has thick stone walls, not that it changes anything), but I do wear ear protection if I set off my louder alarms (such as my Amseco BZ-50BP which is deafing loud even at half voltage it’s still deafing loud), otherwise if the alarm I set off has a volume control (such as my AE&T/E2S T100) I tend to set it to the minimum possible.

For school fire drills I do. The alarms in an echoey hall makes the volume almost unbearable to stand under for any period of time.

For the most part fire alarms don’t really bother me so I don’t have to wear anything when the alarms go off and I like listening to the pitch changes. However there were only two cases that I would have wanted to have ear protection. The first was in middle school when we had a first period fire drill in science and for some reason the 4051s in that wing were the LOUDEST in the whole school. The second time was in high school and if you had to exit through a back corridor that lead down stairs outside of the teen center. Next to the doors in the teen center to get to that corridor there is a 9838 horn at EAR LEVEL right outside the doors. Whenever the alarms went off, the one in that hallway was unbearable even if you weren’t going out those double doors.