Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
Smoke detectors
Last night, on the coldest night of the year, literally 10-15 minutes after the boys happily drifted off to sleep, the smoke detectors all started blaring. Oy. Now, there was no obvious sign of a problem, no odor or visible smoke — but, it was the first night we had used the fireplace this year, and the x-mas light’s were being weird because of the ice and moisture outside, so who knows, right?
Katie called the fire department, and headed next door with the boys. Asher was pretty upset by the disorienting noise. Keegan — well, he was ready to sleep right though the whole event if we hadn’t waken him up.
In the end, the problem was likely dust buildup in one of the smoke detectors. I knew in my head that they were traditional smoke detectors, and not carbon monoxide detectors or anything of that sort, so barring visible smoke, nothing should have set them off…but, better safe than sorry. The fire department assisted in tracking down the bum detector and I cleaned them all out with compressed air, and we seem to be fine now.
Fire department was very nice and helpful, but they do tend to track a lot of soot into your house. Moral of the story: You might want to blow out your smoke detectors with some compressed air if you haven’t in the last year or two.
