To be freaked out?

[avocadodi]

Whole household fast asleep and the smoke alarm starts sounding at 5am?
No smoke. No fire. Can't sleep now.
Oh and the kids slept through it, which can't be ideal if it was a real fire.

Smoke alarms beep when the battery runs out.

It wasn't just the intermittent beeps. It was properly going off.

Check for flies. As daft as it sounds we had one that kept being triggered and eventually found it was caused by a big fly inside it moving about.

As for the DC sleeping through it I thought I had seen an article a while back saying that young children aren't necessarily woken by normal fire alarms and tended to wake up with a human voice as an alarm.

Thanks. I'll open it up later and look.

I've had so many false alarms,burglar and smoke that they don't scare me any more. Can be set off by insects. Spiders seem to be common culprits. Can also be set off by dust. It's recommended you vacuum them regularly to ensure dust does not build up. Can also go off if battery is failing or if there has been a power cut/surge. I know they are supposed to just beep if the battery is low but I've had them just go off fully.

Is it also a carbon monoxide alarm? That could explain it going off if there's no smoke.

My parents one would go off at night too - it was a spider.

No, just a smoke alarm. Literally got the fright of my life.

We had ants in ours

As a previous poster mentions, it's a good idea to vacuum smoke alarms. Test them weekly and vacuum once a month.

We did fire safety training at work and the fire officer said that young children often sleep through alarms, their brains filter out noises, especially higher pitched ones. Like a pp said, young children are much more likely to wake up when a familiar voice shouts out for them.
God forbid we ever have to try this out.

I'll add vacuuming the alarms to my weekly cleaning list.
I never want to be woken up by a smoke alarm ever again!

It's happened at ours a couple of times (just gone off for a short time) and DS never wakes

I was going to take part in this survey but didnt get time

Derbbyshire Fire Service

Mine go off if my opposite but one neighbours go off which is worrying!!!!

No - your children probably won’t be woken by the smoke detector. Fairly old report on the research which came about after the awful Philpott case

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38918056.amp