My house is pretty new, 5 years old. It has interconnected smoke alarms in every room (11), as required. I believe they are all First Alert brand.
We have been getting false alarms from them about every 3 months. Most of them are in the middle of the night which isn’t fun for me, and really terrifies my kids (6 & 8).
There is no apparent cause, no cooking is going on, no dust. They go off for a while and stop on their own. Some of these are CO detectors, but we had the Fire Department come out when it happened one time and they tested and everything was fine.
When they are going off, I can’t find the one that is causing it because they are all going off. However, on these the “ready” light blinks red if it has been triggered in the past, and every one of the units has triggered based on that. I actually permanently removed one because it triggered 3 times in one night. I thought it was a bad unit, but it just happened again at 5 this morning with a different one.
Nobody has died in this house, so I’m pretty confident it’s not ghosts (/s)
Anyone have suggestions?
This happened in my house, too, although my house isnt new.
The fix was to use photoelectric smoke alarms. Most people have ionizing ones. I replaced my alarms, and it went away. Ionizing ones can detect things that are similar to smoke but definitely aren’t, and some of those things aren’t visible.
https://youtu.be/DuAeaIcAXtg
This video from Technology Connections gave me the idea, and I’m very grateful to them as a result.
These are combination ionizing/photoelectric. Some of them are also CO detectors. Maybe going to just PE would help?
Yeah exactly. Combos have to trigger if either goes off, because otherwise they’d be objectively worse than an individual unit, so they don’t help with false alarms.
Just photoelectric did it for me, no more false alarms.
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