Always in the middle of the night!!!!

The second, of three, Nest Protect smoke alarms reached end of life.

I swear, I think smoke detectors in general are more of a pain in the ass than they’re worth. (I say that as someone who had a house burn down!)

I also have come to believe that the damn things are somehow built to sense sundown, then wait 6 hours before starting their bitching about low battery or malfunctions.

That’s only when they’re not going off because someone took a hot shower, or a bit of toast got overdone.

There’s nothing quite like being naked on a stepladder in the middle of the night trying to get one of these nuisance devices off the damn ceiling to shut it the hell up!

The modern machines all seem to have CO detectors in them and it’s the damn CO detector that goes out first. But rather than being able to tell the stupid machine, “Yes I get it, the CO detector is malfunctioning. There is another unit that is still functioning so stop chirping every 60 seconds and let us get some sleep…”

Nope! It’s gotta be taken care of right then. Like you’re going to be able to run out to the local hardware store at 2am and buy a replacement.

The Protects were literally the best of these nuisance machines. I’ve had these for 10 years and they have legitimately reached end of life. I’m not too annoyed, other than now I have to replace them with whatever bullshit machines are on the market today.

That’s thanks to Google’s masterful decision to keep fucking over Nest, (who they purchased a while back and have systematically destroyed.) Trust me, however much you hate Google, (and there are numerous reasons beside what they did to Nest,) it’s not enough.

I’ve hated smoke alarms since at least 1982. I had one in an apartment that pissed me off so much, (again at 3 am), that I leapt off the floor, snatched the damn thing from the ceiling and disemboweled it on the spot.

The Protect units were purchased after, at random, any one, of the three units installed in my house by the builder, started going off at random intervals for absolutely no reason. Always sometime between 1 and 3 am. (Not good if you’ve actually been in a house fire and are perhaps a little twitchy about fire!)

Those stupid machines were so bad we couldn’t use the stove in the kitchen without having the sliding doors and all the windows in the house open. Even then, it was 50/50 that they’d start that horrific screeching, reporting a fire that didn’t exist. This was only slightly more annoying than the smoke detectors in the previous house that burned, never raising a peep, even as they were consumed by fire.

But take too hot a shower… Then once again there you were, naked, throwing doors and windows open to make the damn things shut the hell up!

The Protects, solved most of those problems. I’m not looking forward to going back to the shitty overly sensitive machines.

Last night, at least, I knew what was going on. Even half asleep, I got the malfunctioning Protect off the ceiling. Unplugged it from the AC connection, pulled the backup batteries, and left the mess on the kitchen counter.

I don’t remember pulling the batteries, I was on auto pilot. I don’t even remember going back to bed.

From this you might infer that I’m very grumpy when my sleep is disturbed. That is true to a point.

If the source of the disturbance is the dog wanting out at some ungodly hour because he’s not feeling well. I’m totally fine with it. If it’s a child or even an adult that’s waking me for a legitimate reason, I’m not grumpy at all.

But a machine? (Including alarm clocks,) oh hell no! I loose my damn mind. This is especially true of a machine that’s decided to tell me about a low battery every 60 seconds at 4am.

Now my challenge is to strike a balance between price and minimal false alarms in my replacement smoke detectors. Truthfully, if the originally installed units weren’t wired into the house power, (and therefore there weren’t open holes in the ceiling where they were installed,) I’d be removing the mounting rings, spackling the screw holes over, and calling it a day.

What ever POS devices I choose, I take comfort in the high probability that I will not be living with the decision for long.