A New Kind Of Smoke Alarm Hell!

I certainly hope you are smart enough, and have a few bucks to have a smoke alarm or two.  Even then, who hasn't had a visit to SMOKE ALARM HELL.  The fact is, due to batteries or other issues, this things can malfunction and cause you a very unpleasant night.  I bought one of the advanced alarms and found out it gets even worse than an occasional chirp.

There are now selling smoke alarms with ten year batteries. The alarm is completely sealed. It's activated with you twist it onto the mounting base. After that point, the only way to stop a malfunctioning alarm (until you can look at it later) is to kill it COMPLETELY.

Mine went off at 10:00 p.m.  We hit the reset button.  Then it went off at about two hour intervals afterwards.  At 4 a.m. when it went off and I had to get up anyway, I found my daughter stabbing at the back off it with a large knife.  It's hard to decide what to do with one of these. If you kill it, it's dead forever. If you throw it in the front yard it might wake the neighbors. If you put your boots on it and stomp it into a million damn pieces you may break something else, including your foot in the process.  I can tell you one thing for sure, I'm not buying one of these sealed ones ever again (if I get a choice).

So what caused it to malfunction?  I have a pretty good guess. I think it was a humidifier.  Here in Lubbock when you run a humidifier with tap water it releases a fine white grit into the air that can clog up your air conditioner filter (I found this out after an $80 service call).  I'm betting that even though we cut WAY back on humidifier use, that that grit messed up the sensors.  I guess I'll never know though because my daughter stabbed it to death.  So have you had this problem?  Have you had any luck with these sealed remotes?  Would you prefer a firey death over an alarm going off every couple hours?