It's 3am and My Smoke Alarms are Malfunctioning?

[summerrluvv]

Is this common? The darn things have went off twice. The first time I thought I was dreaming. Then it happened again. All of them at once. I don't smell smoke, don't see anything, what gives? Oh, and my kids have slept right through them, that's not good!

 

[drakethib]

Sounds like you need a new battery back up for them and louder alarms to wake up the household.

 

[summerrluvv]

I think they are hardwired (we rent so I'm not sure)..here we go again. Yup, hardwired in just checked them. Ugh, they just went off again, I don't even know what to do

 

[mrFDNY]

Hi,
You say alarms, Like more than one?? If more than one are going off, 2 do not malfuction at the same time, the odds of that happening are like a billion to one. Are they Co detectors as well??? Co is carbon monxide, it is taseless, odorless and invisble. If more than one of your fire/smoke alarms are going off at the same time, you need to call the fire dept. If it is just one, than it could be the battires. If you can still find the manual, read it. A weak battery signal is a different sequence of beeps than the detection of smoke or co in newer alarm units.

 

[summerrluvv]

Well, we have 4 in one area basically, one in each room and one in the hallway. It's hard to tell which one is going off since it's so loud! It just sounded like all of them, since it was sort of an echoing sound (if that makes sense). They aren't CO detectors, we have one of those downstairs. It's happened 3 times now. If it happens again, I'll call the FD. I don't see any batteries in them, just the wires that hardwire them to the electrical system.

 

[LuvN~Travel]

Could you be having an electrical problem? We had that recently where the power went crazy at the end of our cul-de-sac. The power had been fluctuating all night then early in the morning like yours the smoke alarm went off too! Very annoying! lol I was up running around to see if something was on fire. Luckily when I called a local company to come see about our power problems (thinking we had some sort of serious shortage to our circuit breaker panel) they told us they had already had a call from someone else on the same end of the street as us and the power company was out there fixing things.

Hope you find out soon what it was!
Kim

 

[fireman17]

The housing area we provide service to has what sounds like the same smoke detectors that you have. You need to do two things that may solve your problem. One, get a can of compressed air, the type you use to clean computors and spray all your detectors. You only need to give them a couple of short burst of air you don't want to use the whole can on them.
Second you'll want to find the circut that they're on and turn off the circut and turn it back on. What you are doing is resetting the detector and hopefully this should solve your problem.
Now, as for your children sleeping through the smoke detectors sounding this has been found to be a big problem lately. What you need to remember that children do sleep soundly and in the event of a fire yes, the detector will wake adults you still need to awake your children and remove them from the house.
We practice this in our house as we too found out our children do sleep through our detectors going off.

 

[dbogen]

Well, we have 4 in one area basically, one in each room and one in the hallway. It's hard to tell which one is going off since it's so loud! It just sounded like all of them, since it was sort of an echoing sound (if that makes sense). They aren't CO detectors, we have one of those downstairs. It's happened 3 times now. If it happens again, I'll call the FD. I don't see any batteries in them, just the wires that hardwire them to the electrical system.

Did they ever go off again? I hope they stopped and you are sleeping now. Let us know how it turned out.

 

[eeyoreiscool]

Ours do this everynow and then. Usually it is due to a spider or dust in the detector. We either blow it out or use a vacuum on it. Since they are hardwired, if one goes off all should go off. It can be hard to figure out which one is the troublesome one as well.

 

[marshallandcartersmo]

This happened to us 3 days after we moved into our house. Of course the first time they went off at 3am we grabbed DS and ran out of the house. Then realized a few minutes later.......no smoke, no fire and the smoke detector stopped. DH went back inside--everything fine. 30 minutes later after checking for smoke/fire tried to get back to sleep. Then the alarm goes off again. Round 2...........tore out of the house again, this time remembering the phone, and we called 911. I remember telling them---I don't think there's a fire but the darn things keep going off!
They came anyway to check, trucks, lights, sirens........the whole 9 yards. Decided it was a malfunction in the garage detector, and since they are all wired together it made the whole house's detectors go off. We just took the garage one down and went back to bed.

Crazy scary night.........

 

[The Mystery Machine]

Generally in an apartment all of them go off. Yea, we experienced that fun. Some kids pulled the fire alarm.

I can't believe it didn't wake up your kids. The alarms in our other apartment forced you outside because they were literally unbearable to listen to.

Now this apartment, I set the alarms off cooking the other day. They weren't so ear piercing as the other place.

 

[lovetoscrap]

We had the same thing happen a few months after DD8 was born. It absolutely scared the daylights out of me. I ran to her room and was ready to snatch her out of her crib and grab my older DD and get out. But DH quickly determined it was just a malfunction. Ended up there was a dead cricket in it And ours were hardwired so they all went off. He had to figure out which one was the problem at 3am!


The fact that kids don't wake up has been studied. I think there is a company that makes smoke detectors where the parents record their voice to wake the child up. Studies showed that kids would wake up to the loud sound of their parents voice telling them to wake up and leave the house more often than they would wake up to the ear piercing alarm. When my kids were little I really prefered they stayed asleep and in bed so that I KNEW where they were in case of emergency. At 2 and 3 years old if they had woken up they probably would have just started wandering around the house because they were disoriented and didn't really understand what to do.

 

[summerrluvv]

Thanks for all the replies..it didn't happen again, I think it must have been dust or a cobweb because once a couple of them were opened up and shut again, it didn't happen anymore. I have some canned air so I'm gonna spray them in a bit and turn off the breaker. Of course I couldn't sleep ALL night because I'm the most paranoid person there is!! Oh, and then the Principal called nice and early to ask me if I had received DS's test scores from his previous school, so needless to say I'm soooooo tired today

Oh and I rent a house, not an apartment.

 

[Minnesota!]

It will happen when its humid, too. DH's old house had that issue. Any time it got too humid they would go off. And they were hardwired, too. what a PITA!

 

[locodemickey]

I know what you mean! Ours did that too in the middle of the night and we have 6 detectors! Ours are hard wired and have a battery backup. It turned out that we just replaced all the batteries and that did the trick. It was so loud though!! BTW, it did wake the kids so that was good - they were so scared though.

 

[Geoff_M]

We've had this happen. A few years after we moved into our new house the alarms would go off spontaneously with no sign of fire. The first time we were home for this it was in the middle of the night. Later we talked to neighbors who'd heard them go off in the middle of the day when we weren't home.

It's a pain to diagnose because ours are powered by AC with battery back-up. They are also all linked together, so when one is set off, they all sound the alarm. Once they were set off, I'd have to go into the basement and turn off the breaker for the alarms, and then go from unit to unit and pull their batteries. The malfunctioning one would be the one that then turned the rest of them off when you pulled its battery. In the end we had to replace three detectors before we'd be assured of a good night's sleep.