My smoke alarm goes off semi-regularly when I cook, but I never remove the batteries when that happens. I just open up some windows, turn on the range fan, and start blowing air across the detector with a broom. The very principle of taking the batteries out bothers me, I wouldn't do it unless I had replacement batteries in my other hand.

How many people actually disable smoke detectors when they insult their cooking, and how many people just think that this is what other people commonly do? I suspect this is one of those "problems that everyone thinks that everyone else has, but few people actually do."

> How many people actually disable smoke detectors when they insult their cooking, and how many people just think that this is what other people commonly do? I suspect this is one of those "problems that everyone thinks that everyone else has, but few people actually do."

Every single person with sleeping babies? The people that need a working smoke alarm the most and are most likely to have sleep deprivation and most likely to forget to replace the batteries.

Guilty. I won't win the lottery, die in a plane crash, or burn up in a house fire.

Or people with dogs that wont stop barking when it goes off. Handy for house fires; annoying when cooking.

Well, the NFPA seems to think it's a problem.

http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/fire-protec...

I also know most of the people I'm related to have pulled the batteries at one point or another. Unless you think it's some genetic defect to have struck both my mother's and father's lineages, that probably points to a wider problem, too.

At my mom's house growing up, we just did the wave the towel at it trick when it went off, which worked remarkable well. No windows open, nothing fancy. Just some vigorous towel waving for about 15 seconds. It would go off if you did so much as overboiled water.

Poor placement of the smoke detector, I believe.

I'm not sure if that disabled it for a few minutes or what.

I would have loved to have a range fan or a kitchen fume hood. However in my case opening a window meant opening the sliding glass door.

You are standing in the middle of my apartment, to your left is the sliding glass door, right above you are two smoke alarms, and to your right is the stove top/kitchen.

No matter how much I would have loved to open a window and turn on a range fan to solve the problem the damn smoke has to travel underneath/past the smoke alarms to go outside. No, my kitchen did not have a window in it.

I know a LOT of people that were living in that apartment complex that while they lived there removed the smoke detectors from the living/kitchen area and replaced them for the once a year that maintenance would come by to replace the batteries...

The maintenance guy even recommended to me to just take them down.

It wasn't really a danger either, there was a smoke alarm/CO detector in every bed room (which was 3 ft from the other smoke detector, but you can close bed room doors while cooking), along with a full building alarm system.

> However in my case opening a window meant opening the sliding glass door.

I mean, that's what my window is too.. Bigger than actual windows.

All the time, man. All the time.

I just press the test button, that's worked on every smoke alarm I've used.