It would be nice not to die horribly in a fire. I’d also be nice not to be woken up at god knows what hour by an alarm thats going off for no reason, ignores any button pushes. Then stops for no apparent reason. Then goes off again. Then Stops. Then gets ripped out of the ceiling, goes off because its lost its mains connection, has its battery taken out and still keeps bleeping plaintively and eventually gets buried under a pile of cushions in the living room.

This one has never been triggered by over enthusiastic cooking or whatever, its only ever given false alarms in the middle of the night.

We’ve got the wiring for a mains powered one but would just as happily fit battery only – main concerns is it stopping when you tell it to stop and being broadly reliable

Our local brigade fitted a couple of these for us 2 years ago, never had an issue with them either.

You checked the fuse hasnt tripped right ?

Mice gnawin wires ? Id be looking at why it dropped its mains conection

+1 for the fireangel,p.s just reminded me to test them 🙄

We use a bunch of the Atom ones – do the trick, and dinky too:

http://www.fireangel.co.uk/Smoke-Alarms/Optical-Smoke-Alarms/SL-602R.aspx

I bought a BRK Dicon 670MBX to replace the original mains smoke alarm that kept randomly sounding off. You can try changing batteries & hoovering dust from the internals but eventually they do go. The only reason I stayed with BRK was that the new alarm was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for the original however it does the job and has a handy false-alarm cancel button for when you burn the toast.

As far as I’m aware the mains supply to the detector is fine, but I’ll check it. If it was faulty it doesn’t really explain why it only goes off between 1am and 3am.

The alarms don’t sound when we get power cuts (in previous houses they’d either sound or blip during outages) so a loss of power on its own shouldn’t be enough to set them off

Get your hoover on the bugger.

apparently, spiders who live in your smoke alarm take great delight in waking you up in the middle of the night with their spliff smoking antics.

*may not be science-based, but the hoover does do the trick.

I’ve never had this, and had a variety of cheap alarms. I’d suggest any replacement would be fine.

Had EI Series 140 radio linked fitted for 5 years or so – never had a false alarm

Building regs required one in every room and hallway when we had a loft conversion done so there were loads of them. Noise when testing (when they all went off) was incredible.

Heat detector in the kitchen, mix of optical and ionisation elsewhere. I think it’s the ionisation ones you need to keep away from the kitchen – they’re meant to detect slow smouldering fires but are incredibly good at detecting toast. Also the cheapest which is why they get fitted most often.

dust them regular and new battery every year “got fire brigade on too ” with a 10 yr battery ..

all of them are hassle free ..

worth having a carbon monoxide one too as more as lethal than fire, if you have gas appliances etc