We had an interesting night in the Fallapartment last night. At about 1:30 a.m. one of the alarms went off. It was the normal screeching siren plus an artificial electronic voice yelling something about “smoke” and “evacuate”. So we got out of bed to see if we could puzzle out what was happening. We didn’t smell any smoke.
The Fallaparment is 115 years old now, and it is filled with dozens of legacy items such as alarms and bells and other undocumented devices. We have no idea what items are live and what items are bricked, or even what some of them are for. Our landlords have not given us a clue how anything is hooked up or how it works. There are no wiring diagrams or instruction manuals. We had to find and download a manual for the thermostat from the internet last month just to turn the heat on.
So, what to do in the middle of the night with sirens blaring?
We called the Fire Department.
The Fire Department came out (with flashing lights) and checked it all out. The showed us which smoke detectors are still live and how they work and how to reset them. They told us that a false alarm like that is generally caused by an insect getting into one of the sensors. Here is a photo of the general state of the smoke detectors in the house.
The firemen ripped the battery out of that one trying to find the culprit. That one was not functional, but you can see how filthy it is. Here is the one we think was the culprit.
It is clean now because we knocked most of the spider webs off of it, but you can still see some of them in the photo.
I suspect that there is a deaf spider somewhere in the basement of the Fallapartment. I hope it isn’t the one that eats the other spiders.