Instead of waiting for a smoke detector to jolt you out of bed in the middle of the night with the loud chirping or beeping sound it makes when the batteries begin to die, it makes sense to beat it to the punch by replacing the battery twice a year on a regularly-scheduled basis, during the time change. This is a good time to replace all of your smoke detectors’ batteries, because it serves as a twice-yearly reminder, is on the weekends when we set our clocks forward for daylight savings time and back to standard time. This year, the time change is on November 7, 2021.
Smoke detectors may be either battery powered or wired directly into a home’s electrical system. But nearly all smoke detectors, including those that run on household current, do contain a battery. Detectors that are hard-wired to the home’s electrical system use this battery to provide backup power in case a fire knocks out the house’s electrical power.
Both battery-operated and household-current smoke detectors sound the previously-mentioned beeping or chirping low-battery alarm.
This alarm is different than the deafening, blaring fire alarm that occurs during a fire: it is a sporadic beep, not a constant blast.
If you hear the beeping or chirping low-battery alarm, do not ignore it; change the battery immediately. Do not ever remove the battery without replacing it with a new one–smoke detectors with fully-functional batteries are critical to the safety of your family and home. Sadly, news reports of tragic fires often point out that the home had smoke detectors but those detectors had been disabled.
The Darke County Solid Waste District and our local Fire Departments have teamed up to offer a battery exchange for 9-volt batteries. There is a limit of 5 batteries per household.
Batteries can be exchanged at the above locations.