Smoke Alarm Replacement Christchurch

Smoke Alarms Have a Use-By Date. Almost Nobody Checks It.

Quick question: how old are your smoke alarms? Not "when did I last change the battery" — how old are the actual units on the ceiling? If you're like most people we ask, the honest answer is "they came with the house."

Every smoke alarm — battery, hardwired, cheap, expensive — is done at 10 years. The sensor inside degrades with dust, humidity and time until it responds late, or not at all. The cruel part is that a dying alarm looks and behaves exactly like a healthy one. It sits there. Its light blinks. It even passes the test-button check, because that button doesn't test the sensor. The only reliable signal is the date stamped on the back, and that date lives on the side nobody ever looks at.

We did a job in Avonhead last year — lovely 1980s family home, four alarms, every one original. Thirty-something years old. They'd been dutifully battery-swapped every daylight saving like clockwork. The owners were doing everything right except the one thing that mattered, because nobody had ever told them alarms expire. Twenty minutes and four new photoelectric units later, the house was genuinely protected for the first time in decades.