Agreed Talisker. On EVERYTHING you stated.
We gave up with the damn detectors. They are a real PITA. We’ve not only tried pulling the batteries, but have replaced every single one only to have it happen again and again. We’ve yanked most of them by now. The ugly mounts remain so we can place them again if the house is sold.
To hard-asses: stop adding insult to injury!
Ill-located, ill-suited units can be more trouble than they are worth. The story of the boy who cried wolf is instructive here.
It’s easy enough to say “oh, they should have figured out how to fix it themselves” but for those to whom a smoke detector might as well be magic, that’s kind of harsh. There are three kinds — ionization, optical smoke, and heat. Ionization is the only kind that is popularly sold in most places. I always supplemented mine with optical smoke. I had a friend who put up manually clock-wound, heat activated units in his house. I found out through trial and error that I needed to vacuum mine out because spiders and such were making their homes in and near them, leading to those blasted false alarms. None of the instructions I ever saw with them said “keep them vacuumed out.”
I hope the ones who judge from on high are plagued with their own false-alarm situations that result in an error on their part some day (though I would not wish a death or even property loss, I might wish a close call, leading to a confession of “But for the grace of God”).