Home Improvement
This happened in my house, too, although my house isnt new.
The fix was to use photoelectric smoke alarms. Most people have ionizing ones. I replaced my alarms, and it went away. Ionizing ones can detect things that are similar to smoke but definitely aren't, and some of those things aren't visible.
This video from Technology Connections gave me the idea, and I'm very grateful to them as a result.
These are combination ionizing/photoelectric. Some of them are also CO detectors. Maybe going to just PE would help?
Yeah exactly. Combos have to trigger if either goes off, because otherwise they'd be objectively worse than an individual unit, so they don't help with false alarms.
Just photoelectric did it for me, no more false alarms.
I had this same issue. I had one alarm going off, and it had one of those 10 year batteries, and no off switch. I put it in a ziplock bag, and weighed it down in a pot of water. It continued to go off for hours. I sent the video to firstalert, they blamed dust, and told me I need to use compressed air about once a month to clean them out. F that, once a month???? I ditched them and got the google nests. They at least tell me which room is going to go off, and gives me a 10 second warning to silence them. You can silence them from any room, as long as you can reach them. Only had them go off randomly once and new batteries did fix it
So for troubleshooting purposes, I would suggest disconnecting the interconnect wire, but leaving them powered. You'll want to reference the user guide for how to hook them up as a single station and do that. Then you can see which one is actually giving the fault.
If none of them trigger, then the problem's probably in the wiring. Reconnect half of them and see if it happens again. Switch halves if it doesn't, reduce by half if it does. Keep going until you find the connection causing it.
Keep in mind that you'll still want the interconnect wire intact, so make sure to connect the ends together in the bays of the alarms you're disconnecting from the interconnect network.
When was the last time you changed the batteries? I've had this and swapping in new batteries was the fix. I tested the old batteries on a cheap-o tester and they all read as good when I took them out... But sure enough, new batteries was the fix for me.