Dead Battery

This morning I had a very important doctor's appointment that involved being put to sleep for the procedure. I have never had any serious surgery and being put to sleep was a first for me. Needless to say, I was a little nervous but am happy to report that everything worked out fine. Last night I didn't know how it would turn out and found it tough to fall asleep.

I awoke at 3am but didn't know what time it was. I heard my dog get up and walk down the stairs. Normally that means she wants me to let her out. It didn't take long for me to figure out why she left the comfort of her dog bed: she was hiding. A battery in one of our smoke detectors had died and now the detector was chirping. Since I was awake, there was no way I could get back to sleep until I fixed that high-pitched beep.

I went down to where we keep the spare 9-volt batteries and grabbed a handful. Then I headed to the central part of my house where most of my smoke detectors seem to be located. I replaced one battery but the chirp continued. I replaced the next one with the same result. Then I started going through the bedrooms. I could still hear the chirp in the first bedroom, but it wasn't from that smoke detector. I finally heard it in the second bedroom and could confirm I found the bad battery. I put in a new one but the alarm chirped again. My replacement battery was also dead. I was out of batteries at this point and so I returned to where we kept extras. I pulled one out of the packaging and put it in the offending detector. Once again, it chirped.

At this point I was getting ready to pull the smoke detector from the ceiling but decided to hold out for a minute or two more. It must have taken a bit for the smoke detector to figure out the battery had been replaced because the noise it was making stopped. I could finally go back to bed. I tried to coax the dog to come back upstairs but she was comfortably asleep under the desk in my office and didn't trust that the painful noise was silenced.

Sometimes it is easy to fix technology problems. If the designers of smoke alarms had put in a simple red light to indicate which alarm had a dead battery, my searching would have been much more simple. In my case, I had to pull an "Edison" and test a number of devices before the problem was solved.