Smoke detector is keeping me from cooking in my new apartment

February 26, 2016 8:09 PM

I just moved into a new apartment and am having trouble with my smoke detector. Should I get a new one, or is there another fix?

I just moved into a new apartment and the smoke detector is in a hallway between my galley kitchen and bathroom. My first night there, I heated up a frozen pizza in the oven, and it set off the smoke alarm. Three times.

After that, I tried several things to direct smoke and steam away from the smoke detector. I thought I had hit on a good solution with having the bathroom door closed (the bathroom has a fan that won't turn off) and a nearby window open. This worked fine for cooking on the stove.

But tonight I tried to roast some potatoes and the smoke detector went off twice, once each time I took the potatoes out to check them. THEN it started chirping. It was driving my poor dog crazy with nerves, so I went and found a neighbor with a stepladder and he changed the battery (yay for nice new neighbors).

Now I'm not sure what to do. Should I get a new detector, maybe a photo-electric one? Is there something else I should try first? I remember reading once that smoke detectors with low batteries can sometimes be oversensitive, but googling has not confirmed that.

Other things to know:

- I don't think it's that the oven needs to be cleaned - it had clearly been cleaned before I moved in.
- So far it doesn't seem like cooking on the range triggers it, though that could just be luck (I haven't done anything on the stovetop that would create smoke yet).
- The exhaust fan is useless - it's attached to a microwave above the range and just vents above the microwave, towards the ceiling. So it would probably make things worse.

If I didn't have a dog, I would just try cooking again now that it has a new battery and see what happened. But my dog was shaking for literally an hour after this episode so I would prefer to spare him the stress if possible.

posted by lunasol to Home & Garden (16 answers total)

I'm not sure what you can do, but I came in to say that you shouldn't assume that you can replace the smoke detector if you want to. If you're renting, your landlord is presumably responsible for keeping the place in line with the local fire code. So if you end up deciding that the detector needs replacing or re-locating, you should probably call the landlord and have them do it.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:39 PM on February 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd replace it. But first, you can try taking it down and cleaning off the sensor. A dirty, dusty sensor will increase the chance if false alarms.
posted by The Deej at 8:51 PM on February 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Fortunately I have the landlord's ok to change the smoke detector. He will not let me move it, as it is wired into the ceiling.
posted by lunasol at 8:52 PM on February 26, 2016

My wife is a serious cook, so this is an issue for us. We switched to photoelectric a few years ago and it has been way better. They only seem to go off when we're doing seriously smokey stuff, like searing meat.
posted by ghharr at 8:54 PM on February 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

Do you have a friend who would dogsit (at their house or a park) while you experimented?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 9:05 PM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Check if your oven door is loose. We had this exact problem moving into our current place a few yrs ago, and it turned out that one edge didn't seal quite all the way.
posted by mannequito at 9:17 PM on February 26, 2016

Put a shower cap over the smoke detector while the oven's on. Remember to take it off afterwards.
posted by entropyiswinning at 10:02 PM on February 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Yeah, when I had my first apartment my solution to this was to tape a tupperware container to the ceiling over the smoke detector when I was cooking, but obviously that's a bad idea you should not do if you don't want to end up dying in a fire by accident.

Probably you should just call the landlord and ask them a) what the previous tenant did about this, if anything and b) if it's okay to switch to a better one.
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 12:51 AM on February 27, 2016

Get a battery operated one that sticks to the ceiling and get an electrician to deactivate the wired one. Test the new one with a broom handle once a week.
posted by tel3path at 2:49 AM on February 27, 2016

When I was buying smoke alarms recently, they had a bunch that were labeled for kitchens, meaning that they were supposed to be less prone to false alarms during cooking. If you do go shopping for a new one, looking for that kind of labeling might be a start, as would one of those smarter alarms that can be told to ignore a temporary bit of smoke.

And I agree with the suggestion of having your dog out of the place while you experiment. Can he spend an afternoon at doggy day care? Even just installing a new alarm always means some chirps and beeps as they are connected and disconnected.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:33 AM on February 27, 2016

Yes, get some headphone style ear protectors. Very easy to damage your hearing otherwise.
posted by tel3path at 4:02 AM on February 27, 2016

Our family joke is that the first step of cooking is taking down the smoke detector. The second is calling "Dinner's ready" when it inevitably goes off.

It may just be placed poorly- no matter what we do, our smoke detector WILL go off if we use the oven, or if there's a lots of steam, or some smoke, or if we open a cookbook.

You may need to have it moved.
posted by raccoon409 at 5:34 AM on February 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

We were having this problem whenever we opened the door between the garage & house if it was a hot summer day. Our smoke detectors are hardwired and loud--everyone's hair shoots out, not just the cats', when they go off. Fortunately, the guy who checks our fire alarms/smoke detectors at work came by & I asked him. He said, blast it with canned air to clean off the dust/whatever that gets stuck in there. It worked.
posted by Nosey Mrs. Rat at 8:55 AM on February 27, 2016

This happened to me, down to the clean oven and the crappy exhaust over the stove and the love of cooking and the rental with the hard wired smoke detector and everything.

I hate to suggest this because it's expensive, but I got a Nest Protect (the smoke/CO detector) thinking it would be useful because you can silence it via the phone app if it goes off while cooking. Instead, it's solved the problem by just not being over-sensitive and I've never had to use the phone app to silence it. It's pretty great.
posted by misskaz at 10:02 AM on February 27, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks for all the advice. Based on the suggestions here, I decided to try a new detector, and the management company actually had a newer photoelectric one they were able to put in this morning. When the guy looked at the old one, he could see that it had a blinking red light, so hopefully that was the problem.

I'll update again after I try baking something. Fingers crossed!
posted by lunasol at 4:09 PM on February 27, 2016

Response by poster: Further update: two weeks in and no false alarms yet! (knock on wood)
posted by lunasol at 2:52 PM on March 17, 2016