Ugh, today was annoying. I don’t usually say that. I’m not really a big complainer, but this really sucked.
So this morning I was making toast in a crappy Hamilton Beach toaster oven. Now, this thing hasn’t worked properly since I got it, and I probably should have just sent it back.
When the timer finishes, the quartz elements stay on for a while after it dings. It almost always burns anything inside unless you’re closely watching it. I’m pretty sure this stupid thing is a fire hazard.
Anyway, I made myself some toast, and it dinged, and a friend was talking to me so I left it for like 5 minutes. Soon I noticed smoke coming from it. My toast was black.
I put the toast outside, opened both doors and not a peep from my fire alarm… and then it started. And it didn’t stop, either. My alarm kept going off long after my apartment had been completely aired out. I had both doors open, every window. A fan blowing in and out of the place and still every alarm in the house, including those not in my apartment were going off.
I actually left my house and came back hours later to the alarms STILL going off.
I don’t have the manual, but I did find one online. I mean I don’t own these things, my landlord does. The manual says it has a hush mode, but that it won’t work if there’s too much smoke. Well my apartment had none in it at this point, and the hush button simply didn’t work.
The only thing that finally shut the damn things up was to cut power to every fire alarm in the house simultaneously. This thankfully was easily done since they were all on the same breaker.
Now, these things are all battery backed-up. So when there’s no house power they should still be running on batteries. My only thought is that they somehow communicate through the ground wire with each other. Either that or they were all in some kind of panic mode and wouldn’t reset until electricity was cut.
The units themselves couldn’t have reset since they all have batteries, and I’m pretty sure they all have good batteries since they work without power and don’t chirp.
What the hell was wrong with these things? Ugh… I want to smack a Kidde engineer upside the head. Why do they behave this way?