hard wired smoke detectors

You buy a house, hardwired smoke detectors are gong to be a good thing, right?  They’re hooked into the house wiring, so they should provide a relatively safe, constant source of protection, especially if they have the battery backups that seem to come standard with such a system.

Do you know that current smoke detectors, when they go off, come pretty close to making your ears bleed when they go off?  It’s evidently more of a problem when you are dealing with a hardwired system that says if one detector goes off, they all should go off.

Running through a house with the piercing noise of ALL detectors going off isn’t pleasant, the only thing that makes it any better is knowing where the main breaker is to shut those little b*stards down.  Now, I get to go through isolation of each individual detector to find out which one is tripping all of them.

If I had to choose, I’d go with independent battery powered alarms, if one is a problem, you pop the $5.00 or so to replace it.  Instead of that, I get to spend a week or so, isolating the issue and replacing the problem.  It could be done quicker, but I’ve got other things to do.