My house is pretty new, 5 years old. It has interconnected smoke alarms in every room (11), as required. I believe they are all First Alert brand.
We have been getting false alarms from them about every 3 months. Most of them are in the middle of the night which isn’t fun for me, and really terrifies my kids (6 & 8).
There is no apparent cause, no cooking is going on, no dust. They go off for a while and stop on their own. Some of these are CO detectors, but we had the Fire Department come out when it happened one time and they tested and everything was fine.
When they are going off, I can’t find the one that is causing it because they are all going off. However, on these the “ready” light blinks red if it has been triggered in the past, and every one of the units has triggered based on that. I actually permanently removed one because it triggered 3 times in one night. I thought it was a bad unit, but it just happened again at 5 this morning with a different one.
Nobody has died in this house, so I’m pretty confident it’s not ghosts (/s)
Anyone have suggestions?
So for troubleshooting purposes, I would suggest disconnecting the interconnect wire, but leaving them powered. You’ll want to reference the user guide for how to hook them up as a single station and do that. Then you can see which one is actually giving the fault.
If none of them trigger, then the problem’s probably in the wiring. Reconnect half of them and see if it happens again. Switch halves if it doesn’t, reduce by half if it does. Keep going until you find the connection causing it.
Keep in mind that you’ll still want the interconnect wire intact, so make sure to connect the ends together in the bays of the alarms you’re disconnecting from the interconnect network.