Smoke Detector False Alarms?

My house is pretty new, 5 years old. It has interconnected smoke alarms in every room (11), as required. I believe they are all First Alert brand.

We have been getting false alarms from them about every 3 months. Most of them are in the middle of the night which isn’t fun for me, and really terrifies my kids (6 & 8).

There is no apparent cause, no cooking is going on, no dust. They go off for a while and stop on their own. Some of these are CO detectors, but we had the Fire Department come out when it happened one time and they tested and everything was fine.

When they are going off, I can’t find the one that is causing it because they are all going off. However, on these the “ready” light blinks red if it has been triggered in the past, and every one of the units has triggered based on that. I actually permanently removed one because it triggered 3 times in one night. I thought it was a bad unit, but it just happened again at 5 this morning with a different one.

Nobody has died in this house, so I’m pretty confident it’s not ghosts (/s)

Anyone have suggestions?

aflat ,

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

SuperJakish ,

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.

Khanzarate ,

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.

youtu.be/DuAeaIcAXtg

This video from Technology Connections gave me the idea, and I’m very grateful to them as a result.

argentcorvid OP ,
@argentcorvid@midwest.social avatar

These are combination ionizing/photoelectric. Some of them are also CO detectors. Maybe going to just PE would help?

Khanzarate ,

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.

Tayb ,

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.

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