smoke detectors

ediep wrote: so the other night we are all sound asleep and at 2:30 am the smoke alarms start going off!! We jumped out of bed, Jason starts crying (waaaay to loud for his superman ears) . DH checks the house and there is no smoke. I start panicing and can't sleep all night!

The next morning I calle dthe fire prevention office in my town and the man says that smoke detectors have a 10 year life span and ours my be needing to be changed, or dust or bad batteries may make them go off like that

well, I didn't want to take any chances, I went out and bought all new smoke detectore and batteries and Dh changed them all last night

anyway, my point is....... did you know that smoke detectors only have a 10 year life span??

kimberley replied: i did not know that. glad everything was okay.

Crystalina replied: Mine never make 10 yrs so I have nothing to worry about. Mine usually get a good beating with the broom so...

TheOaf66 replied: good to know thanks

Kaitlin'smom replied: yep...We when bought our home in 99 we bought new ones and if we stay much longer I will get new ones again.

Glad all was okay.

PrairieMom replied: I had no idea. TFS! I will keep that in mind. We have been in our house for 5 years, so i have a while before I have to worry about it. My parents have lived in the same house for nearly 30 years and have never changed theirs!

C&K*s Mommie replied: That is good to know, thanks for sharing!

This is the house that I have grown up in, I am not sure if it has ever been changed or not, I doubt it, and it works well. So well that it is super sensitive to even the slighest smoke, like today when I turned the wrong eye on on the stove, and it detected something in the air (there was no smoke at least that I could see), scared the beejeebies out of Christian but it happens often even with the slightest of smoke.

coasterqueen replied: Batteries should be checked every year regardless. Dh wired our smoke detectors to run off electricity and then if the electricity goes out it runs off batteries. Ours beep at us if the batteries are dead until we change them.

We are about to put carbon monoxide detectors in our home as well, if we can find the combo smoke/CM detectors. It's becoming law here at the first of the year that any new residence sold/leased/rented, etc must have CM detectors in it so we felt our home should have them in it as well.

I wonder why the SD are only good for 10 years? If batteries are maintained properly in it I don't see the problem, unless the detecting mechanism goes "bad" after so long?

Ed??????? Is it just residential grade ones you buy in the store that go bad or do commercial grade ones as well? Dh bought ours special grade through an electrical firm he works with through work.

Will have to check on this. Thanks for the tip Edie!

redchief replied: There is really no difference between residential grade and commercial grade smoke detectors except that commercial detectors aren't required to have a battery backup. The two methods that are used to detect smoke have about the same usable life. Regardless of the type of smoke detector you have, they have an expected usable life of 7 - 10 years.

I'm posting our state's pdf flyer on smoke detector maintenance, because that's the one we give out to our residents.

NJ Division of Fire Safety Smoke Detector Maintenance Guide

coasterqueen replied: Thanks Ed for the clarification. Ours are 6 years old and since we are trying to find SD/CM combo detectors we'll just replace them this year and not worry about next year.

luvmykids replied: Thanks, good to know! I always thought as long as you changed the batteries they were good forever.

MyBrownEyedBoy replied: I replace the batteries in ours every Labor Day weekend. But we've only had the new ones up for about 2 years, my dad put them up right before Logan was born.

booey2 replied: We just had to replace ours, it kept going off everytime the bathroom door was opened after a shower so we knew something was up. We have the kind that you don't replace the batteries every year but change the whole dector once it goes. Once we put the new one up we have had no problems. I think it wast almost 8 years old.

Terri

Heather77 replied: Ours beep if the batteries die. We change the batteries every year though.

lisar replied: Well I did mainly cause I work for an electric company. We wire new homes. So we install those things. There are many diffrent things that can make them go off. I hear about smoke detectors all the time. Not to long back there were a bunch of them recalled for going off for no reason. That was alot of fun. I am glad you just replaced them.