Kidde Combined Smoke / CO Alarm

[Matt]

Hey guys. I've been having some trouble with a Kidde smoke/Co alarm
I've recently bought for my room. I am in the unenviable position of
living with a hot water boiler in my wardrobe so I thought that whilst
i was going to buya smoke alarm anyway, I may as well get one that
does CO as well - so I bought the Kidde one.

However, the alarm has started going off around early-mid morning every
day. There's no audio warning; there is simply just a long beep,
followed by a shorter beep then a pause. It does this over and over
until I get fed up of it and takes the batteries out. Having read the
operating instructions, it mentions that the alarm cannot operate below
4.4°C. Since the time of day that this happens is probably when my
room is coldest and that since my room is on an outside wall and in the
North East of England, it seems that going below this temperature is
probably what is setting the alarm off.

Since I'm planning to take this alarm back (but still keen to have a
CO/smoke alarm) does anyone know of an alternative CO alarm that I
could get? Even better would be another combined smoke/CO detector so I
don't need to buy two.

Kind Regards,

Matt

 

[Todd H.]

Since I'm planning to take this alarm back (but still keen to have a
CO/smoke alarm) does anyone know of an alternative CO alarm that I
could get? Even better would be another combined smoke/CO detector so I
don't need to buy two.

Are you sure this might not be the time of day your heater or whatever
is running and it might not be a CO alarm?

The CO detector to have is the Nighthawk plug in model with the
digital readout. To confuse matters though, Kiddie bought Nighthawk
semi recently, or licensed their technology. It's a rectangular
little box with an LED display on it.

Battery powered CO detectors have a long history of being prone to
false alarms. Battery powered smoke alarms work fine though.

I might have the fire department out with their very expensive CO
detector around that time of day to make sure you don't have a problem
that your current detector is trying to tell you about. They do
that for free as a public service here in most locations in the US.
YMMV.

Best Regards,

 

[nick markowitz]

I would double check fo Co also had a customer give me a unit that was
always falsing brought it home and never got one false ends up he had a Co
problem.

 

[Matt]

I might have the fire department out with their very expensive CO
My landlord provided me with a CO detector which is about 3 years old
but it seems to work fine when I test it - that has never gone off yet.
I've also got one of those patches that changes colour put on the
inside door next to the boiler and that is still white. Basically I put
the CO detector up just before I started the central heating in the
house, so the boiler was not running fully at the time.

Therefore, I'm pretty sure it's temperature!

 

[[email protected]]

My landlord provided me with a CO detector which is about 3 years old
but it seems to work fine when I test it - that has never gone off yet.
I've also got one of those patches that changes colour put on the
inside door next to the boiler and that is still white. Basically I put
the CO detector up just before I started the central heating in the
house, so the boiler was not running fully at the time.

Therefore, I'm pretty sure it's temperature!

How close to the boiler is it? Every CO unit that I have seen
recommends keeping it a reasonable distance, like 15 ft away from
combustion sources to avoid false alarms. Also, it sounds like the
beeps are not the normal alarm sound, so if the manual doesn't say
anything more about it, I would contact the company and ask them what
that beep sequence means.