Broken smoke alarm
This past week was a crazy one for us in Texas. In the ten years I have lived here, it has snowed several times. But this week, the temperature dropped to crazy lows (below 0!), and stayed cold for a loooooong time. We had rolling blackouts, broken pipes, broken toilet tanks and wet carpets. Our pool equipment seemed to have a new broken pipe everyday.
Starting Monday, we had power that would come on for 10-15 minutes, and then it would go off for about 45-60 minutes. Sporadically through the day, our smoke alarms would chirp. It didn't happen often, so I didn't pay much attention to it. As day turned into night, we started hearing the smoke alarms more frequently, but not enough to be really concerned.
Everyone bundled up and we all went to bed. Brian turned to me and said, "I sure hope those dumb alarms don't keep me up tonight." I laughed, absolutely sure that I could sleep through anything. I'm typically a very deep sleeper, and can sleep through a lot.
"They won't keep me up at all."
Wrong.
Almost on cue, our smoke alarms started chirping louder (it seemed) and more frequently. I began to count the time in between, like labor contractions. 15 minutes...8 minutes...5 minutes apart? They are getting closer! Somehow, I think I kind of fell asleep. But not quite. That insane chirping just kept us in a state of consciousness that prevented any real sleep from occurring.
After a time, I rolled over in frustration to see how much time had passed. 12:30! It's only 12:30?! I remembered seeing a post about this exact problem on our neighborhood Facebook page. I searched it up on my phone, starting reading about what to do...and fell asleep.
The entire day had been exhausting. Maybe it was because our house was cold, or not knowing if or when the power would come back on...I was tired. I think I was asleep, but it's more like "asleep".
Finally, at 4:30 in the morning, I threw off the covers and asked Brian if he was sleeping? Nope, he wasn't. He did say he put in his AirPods to see if that would mute the noise...nope. Determined, I grabbed the ladder, ripped the battery out of the hallway smoke detector, and unplugged it from the ceiling. Then Brian did the same to the one in our bedroom.
Complete silence.
We waited. Anticipating another dreadful chirp, we scarcely breathed. One minute turned into two, which turned into several. The quiet was beautiful. We got back into bed and closed our eyes, both of us muttering how stupid we had been for not doing something earlier.
Why did we let those stupid things chirp nearly the entire night?! Why did I take so long to try and fix it? Honestly, I don’t know.
The moral of this story? Don’t go to bed with chirping smoke alarms, thinking that you can sleep through the noise. You can’t.