Smoke Detector Battery Replacement

 

We awoke at 5:30 AM this morning to our Kidde 21006377-N KN-COSM-IBA Smoke and CO combination alarm going off.   Since all eight of our detectors are wired together, the message "FIRE,  FIRE, FIRE" was blasted through the house.

That was enough to rouse me out of bed.  I checked the entire house - no fire.   There were two rounds of that message.  Each round lasted about a minute and they were spaced a few minutes apart.   Then all went quiet for the rest of the day.

We installed those detectors in the summer of 2019 as our previous Kidde detectors were past their expiration date.   Those prior Kidde detectors would say "Battery Low" when the batteries needed replacing, so there was some debate in our household on whether the batteries today were low (and the low battery message is not a part of these new detectors) or whether these new Kidde detectors actually though there was a fire.  My wife let it be known that it didn't matter -we would be replacing the batteries immediately.  Reading the manual,  these detectors would have said "low battery" if it was indeed a battery problem, so they actually were detecting smoke in some manner.

The Kidde AA batteries that were in those detectors were about 2 years old as of now.   My son tested one of them and it wasn't really all that low.  I went to the store and bought Energizer Lithium AA batteries as replacement, and that is what we installed today.  These new batteries have an expiration date of 12-2039, but I think we'll be replacing them in January 2023 just to be safe...we don't want that alarm blaring at us again!

The reason for this post is not because I think you all are super interested in our detectors.  It is here as a reminder to my forgetful self as to when we last changed the batteries, and what batteries we used.

Also note to self:  these new detectors take AA batteries, not 9-volt like the prior detectors!