this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Smoke detectors are so friggen annoying, they have horrible UX.
When the battery starts getting low they always chirp/beep starting in the middle of the night because that’s when it tends to be coldest which makes the battery slightly worse, so you get a horrible sleep and hit the snooze button because fuck finding the right battery at 3am.
Or you take the battery out and it fucking screams at you and continues chirping because it’s missing a battery and maybe you’ll forget and die on a fire while it’s powered down. But it’s 3 am, where the fuck do you find a store selling batteries that’s open?
The new ones are wired in, but they still drain the battery anyways, so they’re even more annoying to replace and still have all the same annoyances.
They say “test weekly” on the detector, so you go to do your test. It waits for you to press the button and then at full fucking volume beeps right at you. Sure, you know it’s loud enough for a fire, but it’s so fucking loud it physically hurts and scares the shit out of my pets.
Why haven’t these things gotten any better?
UL 217 and 268 standards. They have gotten better but there are certain things where the balance of safety, cost and convenience heavily favors the first followed by the second and then the third.
Interestingly (for a certain narrow definition of "interesting"), the standards have been updated in recent years to reflect the impact of convenience on safety. Cooking can produce smoke that reaches the threshold needed to trigger the alarm without being an indication that there's an imminent danger to the structure and residents. When cooking sets off alarms, people may be tempted to disable those alarms while cooking. Some get re-connected afterward, some don't. The result is that because the alarm is effective (annoying), a significant number of homes have fewer active warning devices than intended.
Some nerds conned a lab into letting them light stuff on fire for money without all the legal trouble a casual arsonist might have to worry about. A side benefit of this arrangement is they've collected a ton of data on smoke and fire development with a wide variety of fuels over time. In order to cut down on the likelihood of those annoyance disconnections, devices built to the newest standard should be less sensitive to the type of smoke that results from normal cooking.
Doesn't fix the midnight chirp you're talking about but the people writing the requirements have noticed that human nature is still a factor.
Thanks, that makes sense, I guess it's kind of the same situation as headlights where despite ideas in tech the last moves slower.
You don't take them off the wall and hold your hand over the speaker when you test them?
Not the ones that are wired in, no. I’ve also got one that has like a cone shape and you can’t cover it.
I just put on the headphones I use for woodworking or earplugs.
I have never seen a fire alarm with a backup battery. Buy a different one maybe?
Wired ones are the code where I live, and the wireless ones do seem to have a built in battery that chirps after you remove the main battery. You'd need to do surgery to stop it.
Interesting. I’ve never heard about any of these. In Germany the alarm chirps when its battery is about to run out and stops when it’s dead. They are not wired.