I encourage you to educate yourself on this issue and rethink your position on eliminating a profoundly successful safety program. Better to make sure detectors working properly than having more fire & EMS calls for service because they are not. You’re not seeing the big picture.

And the houses are close together in the Villages. If your neighbor’s house catches fire because they didn’t change the batteries in their smoke detector, it might spread to your house.

Agree. We gave the fella that changed ours a couple of years ago. Would have gladly paid $20 or so for the service. Of course that would have unfortunately added another level of controls for the service. I suppose some method of billing could be created

I would like to add a few pieces of information; a friend of mine is one of the people who will do the replacement.
The 9 V batteries should be unopened.
Thank you for mentioning it has to be the day you call but you need to call between 8:00 and 8:30 AM. The appointment is all day like the cable guy, but they will be there usually in the morning.
I agree it should be done once a year even if that's "overkill". We were told up north to do this when you change the clocks (since our house in New York was not hardwired we did it twice a year). But here I would urge you not to do it at that time. Because it's habit for us they are in inundated with requests then. Pick a day meaningful to you (like your child's birthday) and call around that day.
Look thoroughly for all of the smoke detectors. In my first house I thought they were six but they were seven so he left the easily reachable one for me to change later (although he would've come back). Interestingly enough, my second house has the identical floorplan, but only has six.
One last thing. If you are in the first year of your house, I would not wait more than a few months after closing before you call and change the batteries. New homes are supplied with bulk batteries that rarely last the full year.

I asked the Public Safety Department for their data on how many houses they provide the service for per year and the annual cost. They have not responded. But, anyone who thinks that the service costs nothing is just wrong.

That explains why my detector started chirping (low battery) within the first year!

My new house batteries lasted 4 years. I don't know what is meant by "bulk batteries", but every First Alert detector comes with a new battery preinstalled in the detector. You pull out a plastic tab to activate the battery. And, the device is designed to chirp when the battery level is low, so you know when to replace it.

Wow…. Just wow!

🤐

I would disagree on new build batteries. The day detectors were installed all but 3 chirped. Batteries changed, because builder found them annoying. During our walkthrough, every detector was chirping. Batteries changed while we were at walkthrough.

Week later 1/2 chirping, we changed all of them with new batteries. Chirping stopped.

:BigApplause: Took the words right out of my mouth! :thumbup:

When I was in grade school, the fire chief came to our school and gave us a talk on fire safety.

I still remember some of them. Don’t play with matches. Stop, drop, and roll!

To my knowledge, this was a free service. I don’t think the school paid him for the talk!

There are two full time employees whose job it is to replace batteries. Not sure why you can’t find it in the budget but there is money for this service in there.

I don't doubt what you said, but I don't think the builder buys detectors without batteries. The detectors come with a battery and there is a date of manufacture on the detector. Sometimes new houses sit for awhile before they are sold.

We had this house built, at property everyday, to basically take pics, and pickup trash that would end up buried in our lawn.
Builder can buy detectors any way they choose. When we built our homes north, we contracted most of the work. I ordered detectors without batteries.

Worker arrived at this house while we were there with packing box of detectors that were in sealed factory box and units without any box at all, just a bunch of detectors.

Given the amount of factory boxes on the floors, next day we guessed ours were out of the box except for one.

I don’t think it saves fire or EMS (unless they are for falls off ladders) calls, but it does make it more likely people get out of the house before the fire engulfs it. I think that may save the fire fighters from having to rescue as many people. This reduces the risk for them.

So, the benefit is fewer falls off ladders and increased safety for the firefighters. Both are good for the fire department and are certainty worth any minor cost to the department.