Firex/Kidde 4618 Hardwire Ionization Smoke Alarm with Battery Backup
by Kidde
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List Price: Category: Tools See more product details |
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Tools and Hardware Reviews of Firex/Kidde 4618 Hardwire Ionization Smoke Alarm with Battery Backup
Customer Review: Smoke Detctors
Summary: 5 Stars
Great product. Watch out for price changes. I ordered 5 on 5/17 @ 10.61ea, then I wanted 10 more and the price was 12.68, just 5 days later.Customer Review: Best Function and Value in Smoke Alarm
Summary: 5 Stars
I have 7 of these in my house, and they are the best value for the purpose. The new design also makes battery changing a breeze.Customer Review: Smoke detector
Summary: 5 Stars
This was a replacement for a ten year old detector. Installation was a breeze and yes, battery is included.Customer Review: Fire detector
Summary: 5 Stars
Thank you! I hope I never need this product because of a real fire, but I feel safer now.
Thank you!
Customer Review: Avoid the beeps: be very careful installing the batteries
Summary: 4 Stars
One reviewer criticized these detectors for intermittent beeps. Here's probably why. The 9v batteries have polarity but the contacts are metal springs, not the snap-in contacts we are more familiar with for 9V batteries. The +/- markings are small and inside the case, so it is easy to miss them and to put a battery in backwards, especially once the unit is mounted in some hard-to-reach place like the ceiling. If you switch the polarity when replacing a battery, you may be setting up for a problem, and for some reason I don't understand this may not happen right away but only many days later. This can happen even if all of the batteries are put in the same way but with reversed polarity. The polarities of the batteries must match the markings or these units may beep often and intermittently (I believe this happens only with interconnected units).
I give this product a less than perfect rating because it is so easy to insert the batteries backwards and so hard to read the correct polarity. Furthermore, I found no mention of those polarities anywhere in the user guide; that advice should have been in the troubleshooting section. But these are otherwise very effective detectors and if not for this problem I'd have rated them as a 5.