Smoke alarms chirping

[propellerhead]

WTF is wrong with my smoke alarms? They are chirping every few hours. Not the low-batt single chirp but like 3-4 chirps. The same kind of sound you get when you press and hold the test button. One will go off and the rest in the house go off too. I was thinking it had something to do with the heater so I ran all my ceiling fans. That doesn't seem to help.

Anyone experience this before?

[paul_376]

change batteries

[propellerhead]

I did that to every smoke alarm in the house less than six months ago. Like I said, it's not the single chirp once a minute when the batteries are low.

I gooogled and found some stuff about vacuuming the smoke alarms. I just did that. Let's see how that goes.

[mstng86]

Are they connected to an alarm system?

[scootro]

get yourself a cigar and blow smoke in 'em

[propellerhead]

Are they connected to an alarm system?

Luckily they're not. My previous house had additional smoke alarms that were part of the alarm system. One went off from some serious cooking in the kitchen and the firetrucks showed up.

[franks]

mine did this and now none of them have batteries

[propellerhead]

Without batteries, they do the LOW BATT chirp (one chip a minute).

[soap]

i pulled all my batteries AND unpluged em = zzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZ

[propellerhead]

Cleaning them seems to be working.

[ceyko]

Cleaning them seems to be working.

Yeah, mine did that awhile ago and the slightest bit of smoke set them off. (i.e. minor stuff you can't really see when frying foods and such...) I changed all the batteries (even though the ones chirping had fresh batteries) and blew them out. No idea which fixed them but man...like twice a day they would actually go off.

[unkoricky]

I changed all the batteries when we first moved in and it would still chrip for some reason. All of them stop except one... Anyone know why?

[Lone Sailor]

I had a smoke detectors a few years ago that I took the batteries out when it started chirping in the middle of the night, but that didn't work, so I unplugged it, but that didn't work either. I came to the conclusion that it was possessed and it was going to continue chirping for who knows how long and thus threw the damn thing outside so I could get some sleep. It stayed out there for 3-4 days still chirping before it finally gave up the ghost. I wound up putting a brand new detector in and pitched that possessed unit in the trash.

[CJ-95GT]

I had a similar problem that started because of the rolling black outs a couple of days ago. Mine are interconnected which was jacked up from the power outages. I called the city and alarm company. Both told me to flip the smoke detector breaker and wait 10 minutes before flipping it back on. I did and they stopped randomely going off ever since.