home fire alarms trip when power is out (learned something today)

[John@Outfront]

i live in an area that has lots of power outages,  mostly planned but when the power goes out --5 minuets later all of our smoke detectors go off,   like 15 of them.  is there a way to trick them to stay off, I'm sure they are all linked so it could be any or all of them that are tripping it.  for example there could be one that is a different brand and its triggering all the rest

any ideas would be helpful.  like tomorrow is a planned 12 hour Edison power shutdown and my wife just flat out has to leave cause there will be no way to shut them off

or is there....................................?

 

[RIDERED]

Is it part of your alarm system? If so most have a battery backup. 

 

[Sinverguenza]

X 2 on battery back up. Look for the panel if they r hooked up to the alarm system. Inside you will find a small battery like for a quad and that might have gone bad. 

 

[John@Outfront]

good call  ill check that out, as i dont remember it doing that before on previous outages

 

[RIDERED]

Like this in the bottom left corner. 

 

[nzulmer]

Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to trick them off. You would need to remove the backup batteries out of each FA to stop the alarming.

Sounds like you have a faulty FA going into alarm during loss of power causing the entire system to go into alarm. I would figure out which FA is bad and replace it. 

 

[AZ_Limo]

Lots of variables here like detector manufacturer mixing, co/smoke combo, etc. But replace all the backup 9V batteries at the same time, and that usually does the trick. If not, as previously posted,  you may have a faulty smoke detector which has various ways of figuring out depending on manufacturer. Look for one that will be solid red if there is a dim back-lit led present. FYI, not an expert, but I have changed hundreds of bad residential smoke detectors over the years. Good luck, sometimes these will make you pull your hair out, that's why I don't have much left.

 

[FIREMAN]

If you have the new style smoke detectors that have lithium ion batteries they are good for like 10 years.  If you have the older smoke Detectors After you change the batteries in the smoke detectors make sure to hold down the test button until the alarm goes off, once it sounds release the button.   Then it should chirp once like 30 seconds later to let you know it is armed and ready. 

 

[John@Outfront]

i fixed it  thanks guys.  i have 10 detectors in the house. when power was off i went to each detector and looked at the LED,  all of them were off except 1.  it was red.  i pulled the battery and was only 6.2 volts, changed battery and the LED stayed off with AC turned off.  Turned AC on and all LED glow green.  Woot Woot!

in the mean time i found the breaker on my main panel that supplies the smoke alarms and labeled it.  what that means is now on a more regular basis i (or you) can turn off AC power to smoke detectors and check to see if the alarms go on,  if the sirens go on then i have one detector with a bad battery and will go  find the one with a glowing red LED

i gather that when a smoke detector's battery goes below operational level it trips the common wire that links all smoke detectors to each other and turns on all the rest that have a good battery (AC power being off)

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