Does anyone have any recommendations for smoke detectors that actually work?
My First Alert photoelectric smoke detectors are garbage. At 3am one of mine decided to go into full alarm. 3 full beeps…then silence. Woke me up with adrenaline pumping. I went all around the house looking for anything which might be on fire. Finally, I pulled up multiple air quality sensors and saw they’re all flat-lined, no changes. Satisfied, I tried to go back to bed.
BEEP BEEP BEEP… again… then silence. I got up and made the rounds again and finally the offending detector started going off again. I hit the Silence button on it with a broomstick and 10 seconds later it started going off again. Argh… No matter how many times I pushed Silence, it started back up 10 seconds later.
So here I am at 3:30am, dragging a ladder up the stairs, half asleep, to get the smoke detector off the ceiling, hoping to shut it up. Smoke detectors are here for safety, right? So I get it off the ceiling and there’s no way to remove the battery. There’s a disable switch, but that requires breaking off plastic, and they made it so you can’t do this without tools. It’s 3:30am… I’m still half asleep. I wandered into the hallway closet and found a Vice Grip. I grabbed a thick book, put the smoke detector on it, and proceeded to “disable” the device until it finally stopped beeping.
I should point out that this smoke detector was a replacement sent from First Alert to replace another one of theirs which did the exact same thing at 2am instead of 3am! It’s bad enough when one of these starts chirping in the middle of the night, but having it go to full alarm because the sealed-in battery went bad is completely unacceptable.
It’s a fault detector. This First Alert smoke detector was a replacement First Alert sent me after the first one failed in the exact same manner after 2 years…for a “10 year battery” smoke detector. Plenty of reviews out there on these where people had similar problems with the detector going into full alarm in the middle of the night for no reason.
Must be a product fault as I have never personally experienced such a problem nor have I known anyone with such a problem nor have I read about such a problem.
Keep in mind they sell millions of these per year. If the problem was so pervasive, there would have been a recall as this is a life safety issue.
If you search the web for “photoelectric smoke detector false alarm” you will find tons and tons of reports that these devices can produce false positive alarms.
From my own experience:
We bought 3 cheap photoelectric smoke detectors with 10y battery a year ago. Within a few months 2 of them sounded alarms with NO smoke and for NO obvious reason.
We cleaned the detectors from dust etc. and one of them went off again a day later so we trashed it and replaced it with a much more expensive version tested and approved by several organizations and … a few months later that one went off for no reason, too.
So yeah, photoelectric smoke detectors cause false alarms for plenty of people.
One - less than ideal - solution is to switch to detectors that sense heat instead of smoke but these trigger much later, unfortunately.
I had the same smoke detector go off twice in three months. It was a new photo + ion first alert.
First time I sent it back and got a replacement unit. I was concerned bugs may get in behind unit so I carefully taped up the hole behind it to reduce chance of bugs.
Then the second time same location went off. I realized I had an air filter device about 3 feet away under it. It blows up. Also there was dust clinging in corner of wall/ceiling which I cleaned.the air filter might have moved some dust around causing false alarm. I relocated the air filter on opposite side of room.
I use the cheapies. All are working without a hitch. I think they are First Alert. I put them in more locations than needed for redundancy. 3 pack $17.54
