Hi guys. Kind of a weird question. But my dad just called me. His house has interconnected Kidde Firex smoke alarms, and they all started going off for no reason when he got home. Two questions:
He took all of them off the bases, but apparently there’s one buried in the wall that he can’t get to.
One of them is dual smoke/CO. If it had a CO condition, would it trip the other ones to do code 3?
EDIT He found it; wasn’t in the wall.
The only thing I can think of that could make them all go off randomly is that maybe a power surge ran in on them, or one of the detectors had a local malfunction and it affected the communication relay.
As for the CO=T4 on one, T3 on the rest…I honestly don’t know.
I’m pretty sure that they were all T3, but I’m just trying to be thorough.
With 9-volts, they could function as normal smokes, right? So he doesn’t have to get new ones.
I have a question about those CO/Smoke interconnected combos cause we have FireX interconnected regular smokes in my house with one Kidde interconnected smoke/CO combo and when the one goes off for CO, I thought they would all go off for CO as well because that’s what others of the same type on YouTube do. But they just do nothing, which is really weird. Any idea why? I’d want to get that fixed somehow sometime because that could be a safety hazard but I think you’d have to replace them all with CO/Smoke combos to do that and if there’s nothing quick and easy to fix it I’d just leave it. We already have standalone plug in CO alarms in my house in the other areas that aren’t covered by the one on the main floor so it’s not like we aren’t protected; just wondering why they wouldn’t interconnect for CO if they’re supposed to. Builder of house probably did something wrong (it was already built and lived in for 2 years when we moved there, not to mention the builder botched a bunch of stuff structurally that initially prevented us from buying the house I now live in, so just curious). But like I said, not a concern just a quick question I’ve been wondering about.
We have Kidde Firex PI2010s installed, and as previously mentioned by cerbpyro, these units tend to be sensitive to abnormalities in the power feed. Momentary power surges or brownouts will set ours off probably 1 out of 5 times, they’ll usually do one round of Code-3 and that’ll be it, just as if someone hit the test button once. As such, we’ve never had a prolonged alarm condition as a result of this.
Answering firefreak57,
Never assume carbon monoxide detectors will trigger smoke detectors. Due to NFPA codes, for CO, temporal 4 or code-4 is required to sound. If the smoke detectors do not have the capability, they cannot sound. THE ONLY way for one device to sound both code-3 and code 4 is if it is a combo device (co/smoke) OR the smoke detector is part of the same series released with the CO detector. If they are of different series (FireX and something else) they won’t work, but if they are if the same, they should.
FIR THIS I recommend first alert Alarms because they almost always will sync together no matter the tylpe of alarm (if interconnected)
Yeah, that’s interesting considering that my state requires a interconnected CO alarm be put on the interconnected smoke alarm system in all new construction. My house was built in 2011, so it was a while ago but I’ve been curious as to why they all do not sound in T4 if the CO alarm is triggered even though it’s a COSM-120VAC interconnected version; it sounds all the others for the ‘Fire’ signal but never the CO temporal-4 signal, which I just found odd. Of course it might not do that because of the test button tests both functions on the combo alarm and fire is first.
The combo smoke and CO is Kidde; the others are Kidde (branded FireX) ion smoke alarms which are also all interconnected on the same system.