Wow, you guys sure have some adventures!! I'm not on MTF for a couple days, and here there are EIGHT pages in this thread to read...!!
Well, I have my own story in the meantime:
We got snow last Tuesday night. Along with the snow, we've had more severe winds than usual up here on the side of the mountain (25kt steady, gusts to 75kt+) for days, and then a couple inches of ice storm on top of that; so I hadn't slept well for several nights in a row, which made me really groggy. And cranky. And not thinking clearly. Thursday night/Friday morning at 12:30, the smoke detector in the hallway starts to scream. I'm immediately out of bed, full of adrenalin, running around and looking for smoke.
No smoke AT ALL to be found in the house. (I always use a flashlight with a narrow beam to check this, always - your unaided eyes are typically not good enough.) So with no smoke, I do the trick of waving a broom at the detector, and it shuts up. For three seconds. Then it starts screaming again. I'm thinking, we have the snow and the winds and the cold, so it's probably a voltage sag, and the detector will quit in a couple minutes. Also, it's 12° in the garage where the ladder is, and my warm pink feet are telling me, 'no way do we want to go out there', so I just say (threaded-fastener) it, and go back to bed. I gotta get some sleep!
An hour and a half of semi-sleep later, the power quits altogether. Now it's just the roar of the winds outside, and the house temperature starts to plunge. I use a CPAP, so that's dead, and it's tough to sleep without it. I check the local utility's app on the phone, and report the outage. Try to sleep.
About 7:30AM the power comes back on, and my CPAP starts up. Oh, this is wonderful. I can get some sleep!
And then the smoke detector starts to scream again.
Back out of bed, head for the garage and get the short ladder and a set of side-cutters. The smoke detector is on the same circuit as my CPAP, and getting to the extension cords requires opening the garage door. Which I'm not going to do, mostly undressed and with 12° and 30kt winds out there!
I try the ladder, and my knees start hollering at me for the stupidity. Not wanting to risk weeks of agony, I abandon the ladder against the side of the hallway and go for one of the "grabbers" in the house - one of those things with the U-shaped pincers on them that shelf-stockers use. The smoke detector continues to shriek in defiance. I get the pincers fitted to it, and -no kidding- the tone of the smoke detector goes up two octaves, like it's a living thing that I'm trying to kill. I can't get the pincers to twist it or get it off the ceiling, so I abandon that effort and its tone comes back down to where it was. I go back to the garage for my 16-oz framing hammer. The smoke detector sees me coming, and pauses briefly in its shrieking, then resumes. I start pounding on the sense port with the hammer, and suddenly the tone starts changing like the HAL computer in
2001 A Space Odyssey.
The smoke detector finally DIES a painful death; I put the hammer where I won't do something stupid like kick it, then sweep the pieces of the housing to the side of the hallway to deal with later. I have a spare smoke detector, so I pull that out, energize it, and put it on the top step of the ladder that's leaning against the hallway wall.
I got three hours of good sleep after that; and the next night I got ELEVEN hours of blessed rest!
And today, the ice is melting to the point that I'll be able to get to the car or the truck, and a new smoke detector is due in the freight in a few days.
Merry Christmas, everyone!