I feel your pain...trust me!! A few years back...i came home to my fire alarms going off. At that time i had just my siberian husky...the poor dog was upstairs wayyyy in the back of the closet...looking for an area that wasnt so loud. The poor baby was shaking. Later we found out one of our fire alarms was defective.(we had just had the house built too..thank you mr electrician
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Now every year..we pick a day around the same month (we chose november) and change ALL the batteries. With hard wired alarms its so hard...cause when one starts to go...they ALL start to go. So we'd rather be safe than sorry.