Check your smoke detectors!

Remember a couple of weeks ago I did a post about answering the doorbell at three in the morning? Well, this morning at our house started with similar excitement, although in much more real - and a bit more scary - terms. Fortunately, it wasn't three in the morning, it was a little after six, but just as a doorbell will awaken you with a start, so will the smoke detectors going off at full tilt.

Now, don't panic. Everything is fine at our house. No fire. Not even smoke. What set the detectors off? Dust.

Testimony to what a terrible housekeeper I am, it appears that a significant amount of dust had accumulated within the innards of our smoke detectors. Now, at the old house, which was much smaller than this one, we had three smoke detectors - one in the hallway outside the bedrooms, one in the living room, and one in the kitchen (which would invariably go off if we operated the toaster) - and one carbon monoxide detector in the utility room. And, we knew how to shut them off.

This house, being much larger, has smoke detectors all over the place, and they're hard-wired ... meaning if one goes off, they all go off. All over the house - the living room, the hallway outside the girls' rooms, upstairs, downstairs, both garages. No way to shut them off except to disconnect them - and this is not an easy task, especially considering we have eight-foot ceilings around most of the house. Fortunately (again), I have six-foot children. ;)

Again, don't panic. I did not immediately ask the children to disconnect the smoke detectors. First, I shoved all three of them out the front door - into the 12-degree weather, in nothing but their night clothes - and went all over the house, checking doors and peering in closets and so forth, making sure there wasn't actually a fire, before I went back to the front door to join the kids outside. In retrospect, it was kind of funny to find them huddled together right outside the door.

I told Little Bit we needed to brush up on our safety plan.

By this time we're into the comic relief stage. I'm trying to figure out whether to make the kids get dressed and go back out while I call the fire department, and the kids are trying to figure out how to shut off the ear-splitting, loud enough to wake the neighborhood smoke alarms. I called the WGH at work, and he told me to check the furnace room, which I'd forgotten on my first run through the house. No smoke. Pilot light still lit on the water heater, so no gas leak. After I got back upstairs, The Tall One and The Boy both got up on a chair and a ladder, respectively, and yanked the smoke detectors out of the ceiling. Well, no, they didn't really - you know, no plaster showering down around Little Bit's head or anything. They were quite adept at disconnecting the things in just the right spots. The WGH then tells me about the dust. He said I needed to blow the dust out of the detectors before we hook them all back up again.

Hmph.

I need a maid.

Although I'm not sure checking the smoke detectors for dust is probably something the Good Housekeeping folks think to tell you to check when you clean.

Is it?

I don't know. I don't read Good Housekeeping. Which is probably why I'm not good at housekeeping.

Now, where is that can of compressed air?

Read a book. And check your smoke detectors for dust.

=) JB