Question:
Every time we cook something in the broiler, every smoke detector in our house goes off. I'm talking detectors on the first floor in the foyer next to the kitchen, up the stairs in the second-floor hallway, and up the second flight of stairs in the attic. The smoke detectors also go off frequently when we do frying on the stove top, and even when we reheat partially eaten casseroles (because the area of the dish that no longer has casserole in it has little pieces of food that "burn" while the remaining casserole is reheating).

As a result of all this, we find ourselves removing the batteries from some of our detectors on a regular basis. This is Very, Very Bad, but it makes it somewhat easier to understand all those stories about people who die in fires because their smoke detectors were missing batteries.

If we leave the batteries in all the time and just press the little "shut up for ten minutes" button on all the detectors for each false alarm, there's another problem -- we're teaching our three young children that they should ignore the alarms. And, of course, pushing the shut-up button doesn't help much after the kids are in bed and the alarm has already woken them up.

Is there any decent solution to this problem? Is there a smoke / fire / heat detector on the market which is good enough to detect a real fire soon enough to give good warning without going off every time we cook dinner?

Answer: Are the detectors wired together with a/c power? In other words, when you test one, do all the detectors sound off? This is code in my state for new installations.

It only takes one bad or overly sensitive detector to trigger them all. It isn't uncommon when you have 6 or 8 detectors to have a bad one. I had to have one replaced in my newly built home when it started going off for no reason whatsoever. It is VERY irriitating to have ALL the detectors screaming repeatedly in the middle of the night!