I don’t know about you, but the last time I actually bothered to check a smoke alarm in my home, the battery had died long ago. Usually I just blow it off or go out and buy another battery, but what if a fire struck during the grace period between batteries? A lot of us tend to ignore fire safety and DuPont knows this, so they’ve created a smoke alarm that never needs batteries ever again – ever.
The device works by screwing a standard light bulb into it and then screwing the device into your light fixture. This way when you light up the room, the device gets charged and you stay protected. It’ll even operate up to 30 days without power. Sure, $39.99 is a bit expensive for a smoke alarm, but think of the batteries and lives you’ll save.
This is really cool. The smoke detectors in my house are already wired to the home’s electrical and have a battery but this is great for someone who doesn’t have a newer home. Does this detect Carbon Monoxide as well? Or just smoke?
These things are a nightmare. We bought two recently, one for the kitchen diner and one for the upstairs hall landing. They seemed like a good idea at the time.
The problem is, to test them or to stop them from sounding as a false alarm (for example, when you’re burning the toast) you have to cycle the light switch that they are connected to. This is fine, but when the alarm is shreiking in your ear, can you remember the sequence on the light switch? Is it on-off-on-off or off-on-off-on-off-on? When you have tripped the alarm, and you have finally figured out how to stop it from sounding, it emits a loud PEEP noise every minute for 12 minutes. Horrible.
Sadly, the time when we need the lights to be on most, naturally, is in the evenings or late at night, and we had easily twenty or so late at night terrifyingly loud false alarms in our house, waking up baby, neighbours and pets. After about a month I had enough and took them out of the light socket and bought conventional battery operated smoke alarms.
It doesn’t end there. After 30 days, the battery in the alarms start to fail, so again, once a minute it sounds a loud PEEP noise. I put each of them in a ziploc bag in a cupboard in the garage and left them to run down. Hopefully any passing thieves thought we had a sophisticated burgler alarm in the garage.
Neglected to mention, the false alarms were triggered merely by walking into a room, turning on the light, realising you meant to be somewhere else, or what you wanted was not in the room, and turning the light off, TOO SOON.
Please, for your own sanity, avoid.