Smoke Alarm recommendations

[roccles]

In January 2019 I bought a twin pack of Fireangel TST-622Q Smoke Alarms which claimed to have a 10 year battery life. The first one died about 3 months ago and the 2nd one has just died. Pretty sure my old ones with replaceable batteries lasted longer than these.

After looking on Amazon it seems that a lot people are experiencing the same issue not just with the Fire Angel brand but on other brands that claim to have a ten year battery.

Should I just buy one with a replaceable 9v battery again or are there any decent ones out there with long life batteries? Not looking for anything smart or connected.

Cheers

 

[Werewolf]

I had a similar issue with a pair of Fireangel wireless linked alarms (and their CS was useless*).
I ended up taking a punt on them again and so far they've lasted ~4 years, but I've only got the two with 10 year batteries (the kitchen heat alarm which is linked to the upstairs hall smoke detector), the rest of the house is standard smoke alarms with PP3's.

The trick I've found with the replaceable battery alarms is to simply keep a pack of spare batteries and as soon as one of the alarms starts to beep swap the batteries in all of them if fitted at around the same time, otherwise the chances are good you'll keep getting woken up over the next month as the others start to run low. I don't know why, but smoke alarms always seem to start giving their low battery warning at about 3 am, and it's very annoying trying to find which one out of 5 or 6 it is when you're half asleep.



*The beep/light pattern was not one listed in the instructions, or on their site (IIRC it was something like "a connected alarm's battery is low" when the other alarm was not giving a low battery warning).