I am considering a bulk purchase with some co-workers to try to reduce costs on several Kidde Silhouette smoke detector/alarm units. These units differ form the crappy builder ones in most homes in four ways:
- they use an enclosed, sealed, rechargeable lithium battery so you never need to replace batteries in the unit
- they are very low profile, taking very little vertical space
- they have seven minute “Smart Hush” feature that gives you 7 minutes to clear smoke from a non-emergency cooking fire (alarm goes off, press the hush button, it resets in 7 minutes)
- they are way more expensive, on the order $46 each (though we are still searching)
I think the real costs comes out to be a wash, but these fancy detectors mean less ladder climbing and annoyance for me.
If your smoke detectors are 10 years old, you should replace the entire detector.
If you are replacing expensive 9v batteries every year (and you should be) that adds up, and this might be a better option.
If you are interested; let me know.
Update: David discovered that this specific detector is only good at detecting actual smoke from open flames and not so good at detecting the ionization from slow smoldering electrical fires. We may end up doing a mixed solution with some of these and some that use two methods of detection.
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