Beep Beep.... you get no sleep!

Last night, sometime after midnight, MFO and I were peacefully slumbering (or at least what passes for “sleep” these days), when there was a cricket like “cheep cheep” which half wakened me/us.  Blurred by dreaming (or dealing with the demons) I half wondered “what’s that?”   A few minutes later there was no doubt about the origin, as the cheep cheep turned into a chorus of ear splitting BEEP BEEP BEEP’s in about five second intervals.  Crap!  (euphamism)..  It's the *&%$#@! smoke alarm!  Damn thing’s battery must be low/dead.  Now, the ceiling of the master bed room is a half cathedral affair, rising up to about 20 feet on the high end.  The alarm is positioned about half way, so it’s about ten to twelve feet off the floor.  MFO said maybe it needs to be reset (all shouting over the BEEP BEEP BEEP’s).   We retrieved a broom handle and pushed the little button in the middle which silenced the damn thing.   For about ten minutes….

Okay, phase two: we’ll have to replace the battery. So I donned my “fuzzies”, some foot ware, and went into the garage, opened the outside garage door to the 20 degree temperatures, and lugged the step ladder through the front door into the house, and up the stairs to the bedroom.  Well, turns out that to reach the alarm body you have to be on the second step from the top, and two hands for the alarm doesn’t leave much for safety.  I did, however, manage to remove the battery one handed thinking maybe that would shut it up.  Wrong, it’s too smart for that!!  BEEP BEEP BEEP…

Phase three:  Go down into the kitchen, rummage in the catch-all box for the 9 volt batteries.  No joy – how can this be??.  But wait!  There’s one in the garage in the control box for the sprinkler system.. back into the frigid garage, extract the battery, back upstairs, insert battery, a few minutes pause and then the BBB! began again.  Most likely spent battery number two.

Desperation starts to set in at this point. 

Phase four:  Actually get in car, drive to nearby WaWa (open 24 hours), shuck out $5.50(!) for one new nine volt battery.  Drive home.  Drag bigger step ladder up stairs, insert new battery (squinting to make sure plus and minus terminals align).  Silence, then BBB!  I'm running out of options and ideas here, MFO cautiously suggesting maybe we should pack a bag to go spend what remained of the night in the motel up the street.

Phase five:  another thought.. back into garage, wait for the chorus to start again (you get about 10 minutes of silence with each reset) and then threw the circuit breaker to the room.  Lights out, alarm dutifully telling us there is a fire. (MFO found the instructions, while chirps tell you about the battery; three loud beeps tell you about the fire).

Last shot:  before activating my last ditch plan to call 911, I climbed the ladder again and removed the unit from the ceiling.  Two long wires came from the bird’s nest in the circuit box to the alarm body.  And just before I went for the wire cutters it looked to me like maybe there was a connector on the back of the thing.  Pulling and tugging revealed nothing, but looking at the installation instructions made it really look like it was a connector.  So emboldened by that knowledge, I got a screw driver and by prying and pushing with enough force I thought could break something (which didn’t faze me at this point) FINALLY it pulled loose from the back of the unit, and it at last lapsed into blessed silence.

An anxious few minutes of waiting (who knew if it talked to other units, for instance) there were no more Beeps, and we retired to bed for what remained of the night.  (about one and a half hours expended to this point)

So now we are “unprotected” with wires dangling, but at least there is silence, and oh yes, what to do now?  Am suspecting a bad unit.. it’s always something..

Excuse me, I have to go take a nap before we get
DFD