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Smoke alarms are literally life savers! Units that are powered by household power have backup batteries to allow the alarm to continue protection, even if the residence loses power. If the battery gets low, the unit informs you by “chirping.”
Although new ten-year battery-powered units are now becoming popular (due to developing lithium battery technology), the majority of homes still rely on AC household-powered units with battery backups.
These types of units are typically available in both photoelectric and ionization sensor types. You should have both in your home as photoelectric sensors typically respond faster to smoldering-type fires, and ionization sensors sense smoke from fast burning fires more efficiently. Because seconds count when a fire starts, the faster your alarms let you know of the danger, the better!
No matter the type, batteries provide reserve power should there be AC power failure. The batteries are typically 9V. The battery will typically have adequate power for 6 to 12 months. If not changed out timely, the alarm will emit a chirp about every 30 seconds. Our experience is that this seems to happen in the middle of the night!
Many put off the task of testing and replacing batteries because of a lack of how-to to easily do this task, or remembering to do it. Whether your units have front door or back of unit battery compartments, the change out is very easy with a little bit of know-how and no special tools (other than a cheap battery tester you can pick up online or at the hardware store).
Around the DirtFarmer household, we use the dates of time zone changes to remind us to either replace all the batteries, or test and replace the ones that are depleted. NO MORE MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT CHIRPS!
There’s no need to call an electrician or to put up with irritating, hard-to-locate chirps, or worse yet (and very unsafe) disabling smoke detectors that are there to protect you. You can take care of it on your own; JUST DO IT YOURSELF!
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Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
Have you ever had one of these little dudes
start chirping in the middle of the night?
You know, letting you know the battery's getting low?
Nobody wants to live through that.
And if you've been putting off installing new batteries,
it's a lot easier than you may think.
Stay tuned and I'll walk you through it.
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
Changing the batteries or testing them
in smoke alarms around your house
is a basic homeowner skill,
but many of us put it off
because we think it's a little complicated.
It's not, it's really easy.
There's two types of smoke detectors
we're gonna cover in this episode.
One is this type that's mounted
and you have to put the battery in from the back.
And the other is a front door type.
Now you should know,
this is one in an extended series of fire safety videos
that'll be hosted by Dirt Farmer Maggie
on all sorts of things.
Smoke detectors, the types, the different ways they work,
also ladders that can be used to escape a fire
from a second story or out of a basement,
radon testing, carbon monoxide detectors and safety
and all those sorts of things, watch for that.
And if you find this video to be helpful here
with what we'd give you in a few minutes,
make sure you subscribe to our channel,
ring the bell so you'll be notified
and check out our merch at DirtFarmerJay.com.
We've got a lot of great things there
and you can interact with us there as well.
Well, as I said, there's two types of detectors.
The first one we're going to look at
is the front door battery compartment.
Let's take a look at that.
This one right here is AC powered.
It's getting power from the rest of the house
or for a circuit to these,
but it has a backup nine volt battery
right up here behind this little front door.
And there are another type
where you actually have to pull this off
and put the battery in from the back and then reinstall.
And I'll show you that in a moment.
Now you may be wondering, why do you need to show me this?
There's lots of houses now or lots of smoke detectors
where there's a 10 year battery.
There is no AC house power.
You just put it in there, it's sealed.
And at the end of 10 years,
you go ahead and dispose of the whole thing,
put a new one up there.
Well, there's a lot of houses like ours
that still have these AC powered smoke detectors
with battery backups that need to be changed.
Now the batteries are designed to be changed
every six to 12 months.
As soon as you get outside of 12 months,
you're asking for trouble
like that persistent Milanite wake you up chirp,
which is always hard to find by the way,
because the frequency that chirp goes,
it's hard for your ears to sense where it came from.
Not that I've ever experienced that
or left the battery in too long,
but a friend of mine told me about this once.
But anyway, when you go to change these,
what we do around here is we use the time changes
in the United States as our dates to change them.
And so what I do is I go through
and either outright change the battery
or using a battery tester,
I simply look to see is the battery good or not,
and then make a determination,
leave the battery in or change it out.
Now to change it out,
this is the steps you're going to take.
To go ahead and install one of these front door types,
the first thing you're going to do,
you just simply reach up and open the door.
Once the door is open,
you'll plainly see the battery in place in there.
You can simply reach behind the open gap
behind the base of the battery and pull it gently down
and the battery will disengage and come out.
Now, when you pull it out,
make sure you look at the position of the terminals
because when you replace the battery,
you want to make sure you put the same place back in.
And so as we put a new battery in it,
oh, here we can see it's a little bit turned around.
I need to reorient it to get it
where the negative is on the side that's close to me
and the positive is away from me.
We reinsert the battery in
and firmly place it in until you feel it kind of pop in.
And then you go ahead and slide the door shut.
And when you do,
now you've successfully replaced the battery.
All right, now you've seen how to replace the battery
in this type.
Let's use a sample set, a brand new smoke detector
to show you how we'd use the other type
where the battery's in the backside
and you need to remove the whole thing.
Okay, to understand how to change the battery
on a back battery access,
we're going to use this brand new unit
that hasn't been installed yet.
And as you can see,
we have to envision a little bit right here.
This is the ceiling and we're looking up on the ceiling.
And we're using this table to give you some contrast
so you can see the parts here.
But here's the ceiling.
This is coming out.
This is what you would see standing and looking up.
No battery compartment.
It's only accessible in the back.
To access it, you have to lightly twist this off the unit.
There it goes.
I'm working upside down, so I went the wrong way,
but you can see this way.
And there's actually,
although you may not be able to see it,
there's some embossed type right here
that says what direction to turn it
to install it or uninstall it.
So when you lift it off and you pull out,
what you're going to get is the wires
coming out of the box in the ceiling.
And this is what you're going to be presented with.
You're going to need to unclip this.
And when you do that,
it's usually some pushing clips on the side.
You undo it.
Now this is completely handheld.
And at that point, I'm not going to pull it
because this is a brand new unit.
This door is just simply going to swing open after this tab.
And you're going to replace the battery
exactly like you did the other,
maintaining the right polarity, the right post inside.
Close the door back down.
This is coming back through.
It can only be installed one way.
You're going to install it just like that.
Notice that tab goes over the battery door
and this cannot be installed back again
unless it's correctly put in like this.
You're going to put that back up against the ceiling
and that says on to that direction.
So I push it a little bit
and there it's now attached to the ceiling.
Easy.
Well, if you found this video to be helpful,
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We'd love to talk to you either through our website
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Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay
going to check the rest of the batteries in the house.
