Happy New Year! Smoke Alarms again…
I don’t appear to have written about it, but at some point early in 2025 we replaced our smoke alarms, so I didn’t replace the batteries during the 2025 New Year. Looking at previous years, even when I did write an entry for the new year, I don’t appear to have written about it since 2022… which is not great. I pinky promise I did actually replace the batteries (you’re actually supposed to do them during daylight savings time, but whatever).
The new ones are Red Smoke Alarms, recommended by our electrician who has installed heaps of them. I specifically wanted a few things out of them, which they fulfill: I wanted mains-wired, interconnected alarms, in all the locations that would be required if I rented the house out (not because we have any intention of being landlords, but I figure it would be the bare minimum that made sense, and also if we went to sell the house while they were still not-EOL I figured it would not lower the value of the house if it did not need retrofitting to be a rental), and I wanted an alarm suitable for the garage.
The last point was the sticking point, our sparky spent a night or two researching it and speaking with Red about it. It’s a finished garage, but not super well insulated, so it gets rather toasty in there, and of course the car starting and the dust probably aren’t great for them either. In fact, it killed the spare cheap-ass smoke alarm I put out there, which started chirping at about 11pm at night after only about a year, and it was not the battery that died.
So we ended up with three photoelectric smoke alarms - the back two bedrooms formerly shared one, but apparently it’s more effective for them to be within x mm of a bedroom door, and one between them would not suffice. Now I must stress, my compliance with these rules is possibly optional, as this house was built prior to 1997, but I think these rules are fairly good sense anyway, and a third smoke alarm isn’t that expensive. I think they’re all the R240RCs.
The garage has a RHA240SL heat alarm. This is less great than a smoke alarm, but between the dust and the heat, a smoke alarm just won’t really work in a garage for very long. It’s mains wired too, and interconnected with the others, so we’ll actually hear it instead of the faint chirp the other one did through the fire door that goes to the garage. It’ll take longer to raise the alarm than a smoke alarm would, because by the time a fire makes the room reach 55C it’ll already be quite a problem, but it’s better than no alarm at all.
So far we’re pretty happy with them - it remains to be seen whether we get the quoted ten years out of them, but our sparky has been pretty happy with them apparently.
