Stopping a sealed but nearly dead CO alarm from beeping.

[cozietoesie]

It's my own fault and I've learned my lesson.

I have a sealed unit CO detector/alarm downstairs that the heating engineer who did my annual fire and boiler check a couple of months back reminded me was due for renewal. Sadly, I forgot to get a new one and the darned thing has now nearly died and although it's not detecting CO anymore, it won't stop beeping to tell me about it!

A new one has been ordered and should be arriving tomorrow but in the interim, does anyone have any ideas how I can save my sanity? Is it a chisel and hammer job? I've put it down in the basement but I can still hear it beeping up here on the top floor. (And it doesn't have a facility, as some do, to give it a 3 day 'suspension of beeping' at end of life.)

I may be demented by the end of the day. Beep.....Beep......Beep..........

Have you wrapped it in loads of blankets etc?

Chisel and hammer. You are going to need to get rid when the new one arrives anyway. Why wait?

Not yet - although I may be driven to that.

I have to say that it's a great advert for alarms - just a pity that I need to listen to it.

Chisel and hammer waiting ready.

Take it to your local recycling centre and let it beep there instead!

Bin it - if it's not working anyway, why put up with the noise?

I keep seeing big 'Recycling' warnings associated with them - injunctions not to put in household waste. (Besides which, if I put this thing in the bin, which is very close to the street, I'd likely have crowds of people outside within 10 minutes.)

I put mine in the freezer until the beeping finally stopped. But it was a good week or two at least.

Dh took our last one on a walk with the dog and put it in a litter bin on the trail well away from our house and other peoples'.It was still beeping three days later, no idea if it continued as the bin was emptied on the fourth day.

Put it in a bucket of water and hope it short circuits?

Well it's now a seriously compromised alarm!

(It was actually surprisingly robust - just as well I have a decent toolbox because a pair of scissors and a little screwdriver would have got nowhere with it.)

They beep for ever it seems

They are infernal aren't they. We wrapped it and went down the hammer route. And then took the remains to the recycling centre.
Just in case it came back to life.

My cheap Argos ones are doing way better than the expensive ones.
It doesn't even mind being poked by the nearly 2 yr old. (Did some reading recently about how co is about same weight as air so doesn't rise like smoke, so should ideally be floor height or level with appliance it is there to monitor - ours is now on a fairly low shelf)

There should be a switch. Most of them have a mounting plate and switch off automatically when removed from the plate. See yellow arrows on the attached picture.
After deactivated, dispose at a recycling centre.

Great tip, thanks. We had same issue, 7 year old Firehawk COB7 battery dead (it lasts 7 years) and beeping every couple of minutes. We slid the metal switch down and it turned off the beeping.

If you look at the back of the alarm, on the right hand side at the very bottom is a diagonal slot with a little tag in it. If you bend the tab upwards out of the slot ( eg with a small screwdriver, I used the handle of a teaspoon...,) then the backplate can be slid downwards and removed. The beeping will the stop forever.

Copycat

I know this is an old thread but I had to take a hammer to my last one

Latest one is replaceable battery and you get two goes at silencing the battery warning as they realised they go off at inconvenient times

This is a really old thread, just wanted to say thank your for the teaspoon and metal tab trick, never knew this, thought I'd have to sneak out in the dead of night to dispose of it but instead I just switched the tab! Jobs a goodun