Where I was expecting the author to go:
- Clearly was talking about residential smoke detectors, not commercial. That could have been explicit.
- Smoke detectors do have a high false-positive rate but almost always at the right time. A home smoke alarm going off while I'm cooking is quite different to a smoke alarm going off when I'm sleeping. To the author's point, there are very few false positives while I'm sleeping so when they happen, I'm getting up.
Speaking of the commercial context, I wonder what sort of businesses would get a lot of false alarms and how that varies across industries.
I would actually prefer if rules mandated they could only have large capacitors and just NOT CARE if the power goes out.
Next would be to require a sensor pick up an area that's IR hot AND smoke to go off. I'm sick of bathroom steam sometimes setting them off too.
Finally, ONLY FOR EMERGENCY would the loud and annoying cry be allowed. Tests, low battery, anything not indicating a clear and immediate threat to life should be a low noise, low light, indication. Maybe a 2 second low-quality sound clip that says 'bat' at a soft voice volume with a strobe at the end of the voice (when a human would be looking for the noise). Fog/Steam/etc, E.G. possible fire without detected heat but at a weak detection level, could also use the 'info' level of alert, not the DANGER level.
I don't mean that in a "so you must be wrong" way, but "there may be something up with your situation besides the smoke alarms themselves".
Completely agree and it’s very frustrating. My guess is humidity, as hot nights seem to be when they go off.
Edit: in large scale fire alarm systems there also are rules about combinations of triggered sensors that cause immediate escalation (if there is smoke and elevated temperature in two adjacent zones, it probably is not a false alarm and such things, often it even takes into account the failure modes of the physical alarm loop wiring). This is an interesting idea for IT monitoring: page someone only when multiple metrics indicate an issue.