Pluggers by Rick McKee for January 14, 2023

Years ago, a lot of pluggers used to smoke in bed.

It’s okay. You probably need to go to the bathroom anyway.

It makes you want to assault and commit battery.

Usually when you are trying to get some sleep for an early morning vacation trip. Of course the flight gets cancelled when to get to the airport.

Not hard to change the batteries on a regular basis then test the alarm with the button ;-) Thank – You for the reminder to do the small but important chore !

It gets cold at night and the battery voltage goes down enough to trigger the replace battery check.

Ya know… they really do. Tape a spare 9v to the ceiling beside it. (I’m sure that’ll go over well.)

My elderly dad spent two days trying to find a cricket that he kept hearing and thought it was somewhere in the in closet.

They don’t, but during the day the house is too noisy to hear the beep. I wish the manufacturers would make the light blink every five seconds or so. It would make tracking the failure down easier.

My dogs totally freak out at the beeping.

Usually at 3AM too.

The smoke detector has been warning of a low battery for some time. A Plugger has to wander through the house trying to figure out which detector the beep is coming from. It’s the quiet of the middle of the night that the detector is located.

I’d laugh if I hadn’t changed so many of these at 2 a.m. At least the CO detector started beeping in the early evening.

Many of us Pluggers will remember Paul Harvey on the radio reminding us every time the time changed, Spring and Fall, to change the battery in the smoke detector to AVOID the chirp! ((RIP Mr. Harvey))

In the still of the night… you can hear all the creaks and groans of a house.. and, that mysterious beep.

It never seems to fail. The smoke detector batteries do go out in the middle of the night…even though I change them every January 1st.

I’ve got one of those Smart Smoke alarms, as it sometimes doubles as a cooking timer……

And it is always the alarm that needs a step-ladder to reach and the ladder is out in the garage and temp is below zero

I wonder the same thing.

About a week after I bought my condo all the hard wired smoke detectors aged out and started screaming at 2AM. I didn’t even know how many there were or where they were. So I’m getting a ladder and going around in my underwear removing the detectors, and I did not yet have window coverings. A neighbor lady was walking her dog, after 8 years she still doesn’t talk to me.

LOL… I think that is true. There should be a study performed.

We change our batteries when we change our clocks in the fall.

My, what a heavy sleeper the Mrs. is there to sleep through the beeping smoke detector.

It took me almost a week to find the carbon monoxide detector beeping in the church boiler room. It was plugged into a low mounted outlet, while I was looking at the walls and the ceiling.

Pull it out when go to bed and put back a couple days later

We have trouble with our kitchen smoke detector as it goes off when I cook. I finally found out why – it has to be more than 20 ft from the stove. Our house is on the small side – this would involve placing the smoke detector at the entrance to the living room on the other side of the house! It was located next to the doorway to the dining room – about 7 feet from the stove. In dealing with the alarm going off I have managed to break a decorative plate which was hanging on the wall while waving at the detector to get the smoke cleared from it (and now husband is determined to find a duplicate plate – it was from a museum collection).

Our current setup is the alarm sits on the top edge of the refrigerator (which is next to the doorway where it used to hang) and when I cook certain meals that I know will set it off I take it the living room for the duration and then bring it back.

On the other hand – we have a Class B RV aka a Chevy van commercially converted to an RV. The entire space is just about 20 ft long inside and the alarm sits near the front of the RV and just across the aisle from the stove. I don’t cook when we travel (just bought it so do not have to stay in hotels as we had bed bugs – oyyyy). But after Hurricane Sandy (aka 19th hurricane of 2012 – per another a post of mine on another strip) we cooked dinner in it a few times as could not cook in the house due to no electricity. When I cooked on the gas stove in it – I cooked a can of soup – the smoke detector went off (this is when we found it needs to be over 20 ft away). When we had electricity again and he went online he found that when cooking in our RV we need to put a shower cap over the smoke detector to be able to cook without it going off every time.