Friday, August 29, 2008

Good Morning!

If anyone has any advice on this subject, please feel free to comment to let me know. I am now at my wits end.

As it turns out, I apparently have electric smoke alarms. How do I know this you ask? Well, to start with I’ve never had a battery run out in the past 5.5 years I’ve lived in my house. Secondly I had quite an experience this morning.

Picture this. It’s between 3 and 4 in the morning. Bailey (my beautiful and rabid Cocker Spaniel) are sleeping peacefully, when suddenly a horrific noise wakes us both from our slumber. Now, horrific noise doesn’t begin to describe this sound. It is the most ear piercing, shrill noise I believe I have heard to date. As we both jump from the bed in a complete panic, I discover this could possibly be my smoke alarm. More panic ensues, since typically an alarm of this nature would lead one to believe that a massive fire was burning our house down around us. After taking a quick breath and discovering no smoke, I move towards the one smoke detector I have noticed before and begin climbing a chair to try and take it down. This is definitely the culprit since the closer I get the louder this sound becomes and I begin trying to get it to turn off or off the wall. This is where I discover that my smoke detectors are hard wired to the electricity in the house. So, I rip this device off the wall and still there is sound. You can only imagine my surprise at an unplugged detector that still seems to be screaming at me. Keep in mind, it’s at least 4am and it takes me a minute to discover that the one in my hand isn’t screaming, but I have a 2nd detector. So, off I go in search of the other heinous noise. I find this one at the top of the stairs and start looking for another step stool. At this point, poor Bailey is crying because the noise is killing his ears and mine and all I can think, is MAKE IT STOP. So, I rip this one off the ceiling and suddenly collapse to the floor.

Then my imagination takes hold as I climb in bed. I figure I’ll clean up my mess today sometime, but I need sleep. Of course, now I can’t sleep because so many other things are running through my head. Have aliens landed on my house, is this the 2nd coming, have burglars somehow triggered this reaction remotely to see if someone is home and lights might come on. I know, I’m a freak!!

Anyways. At this point the only thing I have discovered is that one or both of my detectors must be malfunctioning (duh!) and when they are hard wired they are also connected to each other for a more powerful alarm. So, if you have any ideas or solutions for me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Happy Friday!

1 comments:

Kate Hollis said...

I hate dealing with stuff like this. And I can't offer any advice, just my sympathy. I had to try to replace batteries in one of our smoke detectors not too long ago... no big deal except that it's on the vaulted part of the ceiling which I couldn't reach too well. The only ladder we have is one of those "little giant" monstrosities which I was NOT going to drag upstairs. So I had to perch on top of a barstool and then streeeeetch my way up. Once I got the cover off, I couldn't figure out how to open the battery hatch. Ugh. I was mad, sweating, cussing, crying by the time I finally got the battery changed and that dadgum beeping to stop.

Good luck with your problem! I doubt aliens are to blame!