12 February 2009

Chirruping

No, this is not a blog entry about birds. Two days ago I was downstairs and heard a strange sound from above - very brief, less than a second, but shrill. My instinct was that it was a bird on the roof, but then I realised that it wasn't quite natural. My next thought was that it must be someone next door - they're often making drilling / sawing sounds as they've been doing some rennovations to their house. I came to the conclusion that they were sawing metal pipes (they did have their gas heaters removed the week after we had our central heating put in). Only when the sound began to repeat at regular intervals of about 3 minutes or so did I realise that it was coming from our house.

It turns out that when the battery is low our smoke alarm 'chirrups' (it actually uses that word on the alarm). The smoke alarm was here when we moved in and to my knowledge it's not happened before. I think every house I've lived in has had a smoke alarm, but this is the first I've ever heard chirrup.

2 comments:

Scriptor Senex said...

This happened to Nana and Grandpa and it drove them up the wall - almost literally - trying to identify the source of the sound. As both were hard of hearing they had difficulty identifying direction and it was only when I visited that it was solved. Much to their relief!

Mark said...

Yeah it used to happen to my Grandma as well. Although not being able to reach up to do anything about the sound she used to just knock the smoke alarms of the ceiling using a broom. Could make quite a mess and goodness knows how many smoke alarms she smashed beyond repair!