My wife hates me. (smoke detectors)

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aftershock

aftershock

Senior Member
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Memphis, TN
I wired smoke detectors in our home about 3 yrs ago. We have this one problem. Our hallway is only maybe 6' long and the kitchen is at the end of this hallway. The SD in the hallway IMO is too close to the bathroom door, but there is no other place to put it. This same SD is only about 6 maybe 8' from the stove.
I laugh about this, but my wife wants them removed. Anytime she is cooking, she sometimes sets off the SD's. We have 3 active in our house with one wired in my computer room and will be installed once I remodel.

What options do I have to keep my wife from setting off the SD? We have a vent hood.
 
Install a photoelectric type detector instead of the ionizing type. The photoelectric do not go off as easy from kitchen smoke as the ionizing do.

Chris
 
aftershock said:
I wired smoke detectors in our home about 3 yrs ago. We have this one problem. Our hallway is only maybe 6' long and the kitchen is at the end of this hallway. The SD in the hallway IMO is too close to the bathroom door, but there is no other place to put it. This same SD is only about 6 maybe 8' from the stove.
I laugh about this, but my wife wants them removed. Anytime she is cooking, she sometimes sets off the SD's. We have 3 active in our house with one wired in my computer room and will be installed once I remodel.

What options do I have to keep my wife from setting off the SD? We have a vent hood.
Click to expand...

What is the problem??? This is how we all knew the pork chops were done....no one had to holler "Supper!!"
 
aftershock said:
I wired smoke detectors in our home about 3 yrs ago. We have this one problem. Our hallway is only maybe 6' long and the kitchen is at the end of this hallway. The SD in the hallway IMO is too close to the bathroom door, but there is no other place to put it. This same SD is only about 6 maybe 8' from the stove.
I laugh about this, but my wife wants them removed. Anytime she is cooking, she sometimes sets off the SD's. We have 3 active in our house with one wired in my computer room and will be installed once I remodel.

What options do I have to keep my wife from setting off the SD? We have a vent hood.
Click to expand...

Sign her up for a cooking class!
 
You could install & remove the shower cap-dust cover-bonnett when your wife cooks. Would a heat detector suffice in one

location since you have regular smoke detectors in the other locations ?
 
Some questions besides the idea of the SD come to mind: What is the cfm of the vent hood? Does it need cleaned? What size of duct do you have, is it the correct size for the rating of the hood? Coupled with the change of the SD to the different type, it may give the desired result. FWIW I am not allowed to cook bacon at home...
 
marti smith said:
Some questions besides the idea of the SD come to mind: What is the cfm of the vent hood? Does it need cleaned? What size of duct do you have, is it the correct size for the rating of the hood? Coupled with the change of the SD to the different type, it may give the desired result. FWIW I am not allowed to cook bacon at home...
Click to expand...

I dont know the cfm off hand, it is about 2 yrs old, we got it from lowes. It's a Broan I think. The duct is 6" dia the same dia as the connection to the hood. I think I will go with raider1's idea
 
The way our hallway is, we are limited. At the far end is the air return (grill is off , we are painting.) The SD is actually too close to the bathroom door (should be 3' away IIRC from the mfg spec) Then as you can see from the pic,, that's all there is of the hallway. I'm standing next to the venthood.
 

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mjf said:
FWIW Looks like the SD is located to far from the ceiling. Used to be 12". A couple of years ago the fire inspector (who had been at a seminar the previous day) told me the sensor part of the unit had to be between 4" and 9" from the ceiling.
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It's 12" to the bottom of the switch box that the SD is connected to.
 
aftershock said:
There are 2. One on the left at the end of the hall and one to the right (brown door)
Click to expand...

I see a couple places you could move the SD to.

How about getting a cheap battery powered SD to use as a tester. First, put it near the one in the pic to make sure it will activate at same level as the one setting off.

Then, move the test detector around in the hall to find a place where it won't false. Then move the wired SD to that point.

If the installed detector alerts and the test detector doesn't, you may just be able to replace the installed SD with a new one.

Stuff can get inside SD's that will make them over sensitive to what they see as smoke. The worst culprits are dust, especially drywall or paint dust from sanding or spraying. Grease / oil smoke will can accumulate as a layer of goo on the sensors. Since the SD's are designed to fail safe, the idea is to make them fail to alert, not to non-detection.
 
Oh,

I should mention that I have an SD in an 8 ft. hallway about 5 feet from the bathroom door and it has only squawked once and that had nothing to do with the bathroom. It was reacting to a space heater starting up for the first time of the season and it detected the burning dust. I couldn't see or smell it, but the SD did and went into alert for about 10 seconds.
 
K8MHZ said:
I see a couple places you could move the SD to.

How about getting a cheap battery powered SD to use as a tester. First, put it near the one in the pic to make sure it will activate at same level as the one setting off.

Then, move the test detector around in the hall to find a place where it won't false. Then move the wired SD to that point.

If the installed detector alerts and the test detector doesn't, you may just be able to replace the installed SD with a new one.

Stuff can get inside SD's that will make them over sensitive to what they see as smoke. The worst culprits are dust, especially drywall or paint dust from sanding or spraying. Grease / oil smoke will can accumulate as a layer of goo on the sensors. Since the SD's are designed to fail safe, the idea is to make them fail to alert, not to non-detection.
Click to expand...
My biggest hurdle is the air return. I really cannot go any closer to the end of the hall without being too close to the return. The cap you see on the SD has pretty much been on since the first time it went off, which was shortly after it was bought/installed when I remodeled the kitchen/hall. I wonder if there is an exception to placing one in a hall where this is an issue? It's a 2 bedroom house, both bedrooms have an SD. I have a computer room at the back of the house (which needs to be remodeled but is not considered a bedroom although I have the wiring ready to install a smoke interconnected with the rest) and has an SD just outside of it.

So far I live with this issue but would like to stop the false alarms. My push for installing was when my daughter was just born, the thing to do was to sterilize baby bottles by boiling(?) them. Well my wife fell asleep while doing this and I just so happened to wake up and noticed that it was rather foggy in the house. I got up to discover a fire on the stove where the water had boiled out of the pan and the plastic caught fire. Was a real eye opener for the need of smokes. What if I had not woke up? Kinda scary and I will never forget it.
 
aftershock said:
My biggest hurdle is the air return. I really cannot go any closer to the end of the hall without being too close to the return. The cap you see on the SD has pretty much been on since the first time it went off, which was shortly after it was bought/installed when I remodeled the kitchen/hall. I wonder if there is an exception to placing one in a hall where this is an issue? It's a 2 bedroom house, both bedrooms have an SD. I have a computer room at the back of the house (which needs to be remodeled but is not considered a bedroom although I have the wiring ready to install a smoke interconnected with the rest) and has an SD just outside of it.

So far I live with this issue but would like to stop the false alarms. My push for installing was when my daughter was just born, the thing to do was to sterilize baby bottles by boiling(?) them. Well my wife fell asleep while doing this and I just so happened to wake up and noticed that it was rather foggy in the house. I got up to discover a fire on the stove where the water had boiled out of the pan and the plastic caught fire. Was a real eye opener for the need of smokes. What if I had not woke up? Kinda scary and I will never forget it.
Click to expand...

OK, how about a different approach.....

Just where does the kitchen stop and the hallway start?

Would you be willing to try a (I'm not a carpenter, so forgive the terminology) some sort of barrier on the ceiling to delineate the hall / kitchen boundary, keeping the SD on the hall side?
 
raider1 said:
Install a photoelectric type detector instead of the ionizing type. The photoelectric do not go off as easy from kitchen smoke as the ionizing do.

Chris
Click to expand...

I agree with this post, and I believe the smoke detector companies will even suggest a photoelectric type near cooking areas, but ionization type in bedrooms.

Ionization type will detect heavy particles from a fast burning fire and burning food on the stove fits in this category. You want these in a bedroom to quickly alert you of a fire in the bedroom if you were sleeping in there.

Photoelectric will detect smaller particles that are common from smoldering fires. They will sound alarm for smoldering fire long before an ionization unit will. Combination of both types of units in the home offers better protection than just one type or the other.
 
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