Chirp

Tonight my house was full of chirping noises. No, it wasn't full of birds, and thank God because due to Alfred Hitchcock's movie, The Birds, that is my ultimate nightmare. My entire family spent 20 minutes trying to follow the chirps all throughout the house to locate every last smoke detector with a dying battery. Our landlord is very safety conscious so we have what seemed like 50.

After we located them all, changed all the batteries and reinstalled all of them the chirping began again. One by one all of the "fixed" smoke detectors started singing to us one more time. Instead of messing with it tonight, we pulled them all out and ripped out all the new batteries so we could actually get some sleep because it wasn't just the batteries, the entire unit failed on all of the smoke detectors in the house...at the same time.

So after some online research (courtesy of the Seattle Fire Department) here is my public service announcement: don't forget to change the batteries in your smoke detector every year and replace the entire thing every 10 years or sooner.

I guess I know what I will be buying tomorrow!