Review on BRK SC7010BV First Alert Hardwired Photoelectric Smoke and CO Detector with Voice Alerts by Rail Basri

In January of this year I bought nine of these devices, all of which are hardwired and interconnected. My wife is deaf in one ear so she can't tell where the sound is coming from. I figured voice alerts would quickly help her identify which room the alarm was going off in. It turns out that only the specific unit that is on combat readiness is reporting its location. All connected alarms only beep (no voice). It's still useful, but it means my wife has to walk around the house listening instead of focusing on evacuating (or resetting false alarms). If the nuances of how the voice prompt works had been explained in the product documentation, I would have found another device that better suited our specific needs. It's not that this product is defective, it's just that the documentation doesn't make it clear how the voice feature works when connected to other alarm clocks. Six months later we had a nasty alarm clock in the middle of the night. I tracked it down to what appeared to be a faulty unit and called First Alert customer service for a warranty replacement. They did an excellent job replacing them, but the rep made it clear that due to their photoelectric sensors, these units needed to be bled *monthly* to avoid false alarms. I have nine of these devices, some mounted on high ceilings, and running around the house blowing them out every month would be a painful way to ensure the family didn't wake up in the middle of the night to a nasty alarm. I wish I had known about these essential maintenance requirements before purchasing. The representative said that this requirement applies to all alarms with photoelectric sensors. Because of this limitation, I recommend considering an ionizing sensor alarm if possible, which doesn't appear to require any maintenance other than battery replacement. So, on the face of it, a good alarm with a few annoying caveats that I wish I'd known about before buying lots of them. 11 months later we had two more alarm clocks with nasty conversion problems. This doesn't apply to all of these devices and as far as I can tell this is a premature failure. I can't tell if it is related to the environment they are in (one bedroom or the other bedrooms) but I highly doubt it. I'm reducing my rating from 3 to 2 stars because I don't trust them enough to reset them without waking up the whole family. I feel like I wasted a lot of money buying detectors that initially looked great but turned out to be a real disappointment after less than a year of ownership. avoid it Update (6/12/2020): Downgraded to one star in the middle of the night after several more false alarms. The last one caused a false positive on multiple devices at once. I can't even begin to describe how frustrating it is to wake up to a bunch of these noises at once, I have to run around the house to find the ones that are "talking" about their location and turn them off in a way that quiets others. Between frequent false alarms in the middle of the night (always the middle of the night and never during the day!) and the inability to quickly figure out where the trouble spot is in the house, I don't need them. I will temporarily disable communication between the devices (so that only the alarm goes off) until I can receive new alerts from Kidde or from a manufacturer other than First Alert. It's terrible.