Total Recall

Do-good legislators all too often get ahead of the applied science ... possibly for personal financial gain? The bureaucratic bozos here in Massachusetts have recently decreed that any new home or re-construction requires a house-full of hard-wired interconnected smoke/carbon monoxide alarms. This means that if one goes off ... for whatever reason ... they all go off. Now I don't know if many of you have been woken up in the middle of the night with an ear-splitting FIRE! FIRE!, but our household has experienced it twice in the last three months ... and once during the day about five months ago. Of course the fire department is called and they find nothing irregular ... and you ... feeling like a real put-upon doofus ... have to remove all the suspected smoke detectors until you can figure out what really went wrong.

In our case the manufacturer, Kidde, first sent us two replacement detectors free of charge ... one of which then was the culprit in our most recent bout of sleeplessness. We now are awaiting the second round of free fixes. This replacement cycle also means that you are substantially without full fire-alarm coverage for some period of time ... unnerving to say the least.

Searching for solutions on the Internet, it appears our situation is not uncommon and is equally frustrating for quite a few new-construction homeowners. Talking to Kidde's customer service today, I was asked a number of questions by a skeptical agent and was then required to insert the battery so that she could hear the alarm go off. I was also told that small spiders or dust could upset the delicate mechanisms inside the detectors (made in China) and that they should be vacuumed or blown-out at least once a month. This is quite an inconvenience for a house with over ten smoke alarms. And what happens to those poor schlubs that have some detectors twenty feet up on vaulted ceilings? I think that a justified remedy would be for our Massachusetts state legislators to be assigned the task of doing this for us ... because they passed this silly law without any idea of the true consequences.

One last point, I have talked to our local fire department and they are, at the moment, unwilling to take the lead in fixing this issue ... either through technology, education, or pressure on the legislators and/or manufacturers. To me, this is feeling more and more like that famous General Motors ignition-switch recall that never happened ... until much serious damage and gnashing of teeth had already occurred. I think Kidde ... and possibly other makers ... need to step up and fix this problem before their liabilities soar out of sight.