Our house was built in 2000 and in six years time deeds have switched
hands four times. We believe people have left because our house is
haunted. The smoke detectors are el-cheapo units presumably put in place
by the builder at lowest possible cost, and they tend to set themselves
off when we leave the house open (which we do a lot in the spring and
fall). My suspicion is the detectors are not very good at discriminating
between smoke and humid air. When we leave the house open at night during
the time when the dew point drops, sometimes they go off…
This has caused us a few nights headache. My typical remedy is to take
them down until morning, then blow them out with compressed air and put
them back. I usually only do that if they go off more than once at night.
So one night last week, at almost midnight exactly, they go off. Beep.
BEEEP. BEEEEP! I just roll over and look up at the annoying beeping thing
on our ceiling. At this point my bolt-from-bed-in-fear-of-fire reactions
have dulled a bit, but I’m awake anyway.
Meanwhile, Laura is laying in bed, not fully awake yet, flapping the
covers while lying in the bed. Yep, madly flapping the covers. I ask her
what she’s doing, and she sasses that she’s fanning the detector. “From
there?” I ask incredulously, wondering how flapping the covers six feet
below a smoke detector, possibly not the one setting off the whole racket
(since they are all linked), will do any good. Agitated and frustrated at
the situation (and at me now), she tells me to shut up.
I roll over and go back to sleep, thankful it’s stopped.
In the morning we have a good laugh about the effectiveness of flapping
the bed covers at the smoke detector. We’ve come to hate those smoke
detectors, but at least we got a little laugh out of them recently!