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The ones I have also talk - They do the tone, then announce something along the lines of EVACUATE! SMOKE DETECTED IN *LIVING ROOM*! EVACUATE and then do the tones again... I love the fact they announce location, makes it very easy to determine which detector needs to be hushed.
The reason the annunciator was emitting " a painful blood-curling screaming siren sound" is 'they're designed to produce that piercing, aggravating, irritating, unnerving, etc. sound to alert any/all occupants of the dwelling so as to get them to actually react by hopefully removing themselves from the area. Like someone may have stated earlier, trying to find a "quieter" detector defeats the purpose of the device. Try to eliminate the issues within your control that set the devices off. I've responded to numerous calls over the years where the occupants ignored the alarm, with and without active fire. I can only guess that there is a false sense of security if you can't "see" the danger. People just don't want to be bothered with being inconvenienced for even a short period of time. Your detector should only emit a small "beep" periodically when the battery (as your backup power source) is low.
I understand it can be unpleasant when they activate, but it's much better than the alternative.
And a detector that utilizes both ionization (better at detecting active flame fires) AND photoelectric (for smoldering fires) technology would be best because you don't know what type of fire you are likely to have. The fire doesn't react to the detector, the detector reacts to the fire
As a side note, when my kids were younger, I went into each of their rooms and activated a detector next to each of them as they slept. Not one awoke to the device less than a foot from them. Even with a detector in each bedroom and in the hall and living areas, I would possibly have had to wake all 4 kids if there were a fire.
Good luck.
I have many smoke detectors in my house, all on very high ceilings too. Mine used to go off after a blackout or when the power flickered, and they would all go off. The worst time was when they all went off at once at 3 am and we had to pull them all down, remove the batteries, wait a while, then put the batteries back in and plug them in again, because if you removed one, took the battery out, put it back in and plugged it in before turning off all the others, it would just start going off again. So I definitely understand how you feel about them.
But I still have all of mine plugged in (except the one hubby smashed that very irritating night) because I have kids and I want everyone to get out safely if the house ever burns up.
When we first moved in, we would hear other people's alarms going off all the time too. Someone told me the alarms have to "settle" for a while and then they calm down and only go off when they really need to. It seems to be true. My alarms have been behaving themselves for a year or two now, and I haven't heard anyone else's alarms going off either, but when I ride my bike on the streets where they've just finished building the houses, I hear alarms like I used to hear on my street.
I would not decrease the blood-curdling nature of the alarm. It's supposed to be absolutely intolerable for a reason. Also, retain the interconnection, so that the entire house gets a full alarm regardless of the location of the problem. Most modern systems will have an LED indicator to tell you which alarm set off the others.
But it's a defect if it alarms in response to a circuit outage--modern alarms are not supposed to do that. All that should happen then (if anything) is a periodic beep to let you know the circuit is out and you're running on the battery backup. If your alarms don't have a battery backup, replace them with a model that does.
In my former house, I ran a dedicated alarm circuit with nothing on it but the alarms and one emergency light. The dedicated circuit protected the alarms from being cut off by some unrelated fault, but if the circuit went out, the emergency light came on to let me know there was a problem.
If you're having a problem with the alarms coming on because you burned somethiing in the kitchen, be happy that they're doing their job. Don't put an alarm right in the kitchen, but in a room adjacent. Also make sure you've got effective kitchen ventilation--a range hood vented to the outside, for instance, and maybe even a supplementary exhaust vent in the kitchen ceiling similar to a bathroom vent.
In my former home, the alarm most vulnerable to kitchen smoke was in an adjacent hall right in front of the linen closet. So in that closet I kept a pair of sound muffs and a can of compressed air to handle "not really false alarms" from kitchen smoke.
There is some truth (that I have seen) that the alarms that talk do a better job of waking people up than just tones... I know that I myself have had tones integrate into my dreams as I keep sleeping, when a smoke alarm yells at you, you will get up and so will the kids.
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