I know that smoke alarms are installed in nearly every home, but I’ve never truly taken notice of them, until now. All it took was a recent 2 am wake-up call. What started as a series of annoying beeps, ended in full-on chaos in the middle of my peaceful slumber…. ok, maybe that is a little bit of a dramatization, but it was an annoying night none-the-less.
It all started at around 2 am when we began to hear a loud beep. Of course my wife knew exactly what was wrong, the battery warning was going off from the smoke alarm in the hallway outside of our girls rooms. “Ugh, go fix it” she says to me. I pull myself out of bed and go to the hallway with a stool to get high enough to reach the hush button on the fire alarm, but what do I do? Hit the “Test” button. Now instead of an annoying beep to let us know the battery needs to be replaced, alarms are sounding.
I’m tired and pretty grumpy at this point. So, what do I do next? Pull the wires off of the alarm… no power, no alarm, right? Wrong! I disconnected the wires the wrong way (guess you’re not supposed to just rip them out) and now all of the alarms in the house are sounding. One even talks and says, “Fire, Fire!” I quickly re-wire the alarm and we are back to the annoying beep letting us know that the battery is dead. However, the hush button is not hushing and there is not a 9v battery to be found… I was out of options. We just shut all the doors and forced ourselves to sleep through it.
The next day, all of the fire alarms start going off. Turns out I mis-wired the alarm and it eventually caused a short or some sort of an alert to the rest of the alarms. In the end, I had to replace one of our smoke alarms entirely and put new batteries in all of the smoke alarms to get everything operational again.
Because of this comedy of errors, I thought I better find out just how often I should be testing and maintaining the smoke alarms in our house. Something I never payed attention to suddenly became a higher priority. After a little research, I discovered that the US Product Safety Commission recommends that you test your smoke alarms (detectors) monthly and that you replace batteries a minimum of once a year. They also recommend that your family develop and rehearse an escape plan.
In a way, I have to sit back and laugh at the situation. However, because of this experience, maintaining and testing the smoke alarms in our house is a higher priority for my family. Not only to ensure a better nights rest, but also to ensure our families safety in the case of an actual fire. I hope that we will soon develop and rehearse an escape plan as well.
