The other night right after dinner, our smoke detectors started roaring! My first thought… Did I leave the oven on?! After going through the entire house and making sure we had no smoke or fire anywhere I started over another troubleshooting checklist in my head. Are the smoke detectors on a fuse? When did I change the batteries last? Since I had just changed them when daylight savings ended, I knew this could not be the issue. So WHAT was going on???
My kids and my dog were in agony over the piercing loud beeping and it definitely didn’t help me concentrate!
So when in doubt, where do we go first… of course, YouTube!
Right away I found a video talking about this exact problem we were having, “No smoke and fresh batteries but smoke detectors still continuing to kill your ear drums!”
What did I learn?
DUST! That’s right, dust can “confuse” your smoke detectors! I could not visibly see any dust on any of my smoke detectors, so I was extremely leery at first that this was our answer, but desperate and willing to start trying anything, I ordered my kids to grab the vacuum while I ran for the ladder! While my kids played “Innie Minnie Miney Moe” to determine which detector to start with, I prepared for the job ahead of me and found some earplugs (man are those things ever loud when you are right up in their space!). Surrounded by my desperately hopeful army I headed up the ladder to vacuum the first “lucky” smoke detector that was chosen!
After only 3 seconds of having the cleaning brush attachment of my vacuum on the face of the smoke detector it (they) STOPPED!!! I couldn’t believe that this actually worked! As my kids were running around the kitchen cheering and celebrating, all I could think was “I have to share this with the world!” Who knew that unseen dust could cause your smoke detectors to go bizURCK! Don’t you just love YouTube! Seriously, how did our parents survive???!!!!!!
Needless to say I got a bonus workout in that evening giving all my smoke detectors a quick little pick me up by vacuuming around each one and the face (bottom) of the smoke detector.
I hope this great lil’ tip stays in the archives of even just one person’s brain and saves them some frustration (and their ears) in the future! 😉
Many Blessings,
~Lisa
blogger and multi-media/internet marketing for 24Restore