[dfox]

Smoke(/fire in general) alarms are not a good example of a thing with high specificity. You perceive it that way, but what you see is the result of somebody getting paged about it and then checking (preferably physically, but also through eg. CCTV) whether there really is an emergency situation and canceling the alarm before its escalation timeout. Apparently, for typical commercial building false fire alarms are more or less an weekly occurrence.

Edit: in large scale fire alarm systems there also are rules about combinations of triggered sensors that cause immediate escalation (if there is smoke and elevated temperature in two adjacent zones, it probably is not a false alarm and such things, often it even takes into account the failure modes of the physical alarm loop wiring). This is an interesting idea for IT monitoring: page someone only when multiple metrics indicate an issue.

[tobyjsullivan]

It was an interesting example and maybe deserved a few more caveats to actually serve the point. After all, we've all heard a fire alarm of some sort in the past year (if not the past month) but how many were actual fires? (Technically the author said smoke which helps but not really.)

Where I was expecting the author to go:

- Clearly was talking about residential smoke detectors, not commercial. That could have been explicit.

- Smoke detectors do have a high false-positive rate but almost always at the right time. A home smoke alarm going off while I'm cooking is quite different to a smoke alarm going off when I'm sleeping. To the author's point, there are very few false positives while I'm sleeping so when they happen, I'm getting up.

Speaking of the commercial context, I wonder what sort of businesses would get a lot of false alarms and how that varies across industries.

[mjevans]

I have been _plagued_ by smoke alarms that treat a low battery as a sign of a fire. To the point that I am trained by their crying wolf that it is _always_ a false alarm. Particularly when I'm asleep and they've gone off.

I would actually prefer if rules mandated they could only have large capacitors and just NOT CARE if the power goes out.

Next would be to require a sensor pick up an area that's IR hot AND smoke to go off. I'm sick of bathroom steam sometimes setting them off too.

Finally, ONLY FOR EMERGENCY would the loud and annoying cry be allowed. Tests, low battery, anything not indicating a clear and immediate threat to life should be a low noise, low light, indication. Maybe a 2 second low-quality sound clip that says 'bat' at a soft voice volume with a strobe at the end of the voice (when a human would be looking for the noise). Fog/Steam/etc, E.G. possible fire without detected heat but at a weak detection level, could also use the 'info' level of alert, not the DANGER level.

[lostlogin]

I’m at the point where a low battery in a smoke detector triggering a fire would be an actual upgrade. Have tried cheap, expensive, and multiple models. Currently have zero active and about 8 on a shelf. They randomly go off even with new batteries. My house isn’t on fire.

[blep_]

I have literally never had this problem.

I don't mean that in a "so you must be wrong" way, but "there may be something up with your situation besides the smoke alarms themselves".

[lostlogin]

> there may be something up with your situation besides the smoke alarms themselves

Completely agree and it’s very frustrating. My guess is humidity, as hot nights seem to be when they go off.

[mjevans]

My guess is the landlord's invariably choose the cheapest models that check the box; or that everything out there just sucks for some reason.

[tobyjsullivan]

One of those can lead to the other