Last night, as I was reading before bed at 1:20a (yes, we stay up late), we hear a chirp repeated about every 15 seconds. We quickly recognize it as the low battery alert for one of our smoke detectors.
The smoke detectors in our house are wired to electricity with a battery backup. When the battery runs low, they chirp. I swear they have a clock that knows to chirp during the night. They never seem to chirp at 8a, 2p, or even at 10p. No, it is always in the wee hours of the morning.
Of course, we have 9 smoke detectors in our house, 6 on the top floor alone. So now it is a matter of figuring out which one it is. It takes us 20 minutes to figure out that there are two chirping. A third started chirping, because in checking the battery it did not get put back in properly. Of course, one of the chirps is coming from our daughter's room. So we turn all the lights out, find a working flashlight, and quietly change her battery without waking her. Finally, at 1:50a, batteries have been replaced and chirping stopped. Time to settle back down for bed.
Needless to say, with the late night adventures, neither my husband nor I woke up early to go running.
In our previous houses without the hard wired alarms, we would change the batteries routinely. However with the primarily electric alarms, we have opted to conserve batteries by waiting for the low battery alert to change the batteries. I am now rethinking this approach.
