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Pop the cover off ( most have a swing out faceplate) inside you'll find a black round screened chamber. That chamber is usually removable. What hapoens is over time the chamber simply collects dust that's floating around. The detector adjusts for that until it goes out of the parameters and it sees the dust as enough of a obstruction to consider it a fire.
Remove chamber and use a fine brush to clean the dust. Then spray some compressed air from a can to blow the rest out. Reinstall.
If it's not serviceable get a new one. Dust will eventually get in the chamber. Doesn't matter if you had. Construction work done.
If there's any suspicion that they're 15 years old, I wouldn't bother mucking around, just replace them. Better to only have to mess around with the things once. When I bought my house, it was 20 years old. It had a couple hardwired detectors. I suspected they were original to the house, so I replaced them. It probably took me longer than 6 months to get around to that but I do feel better this way.
BTW there's not a chance it's a combination smoke and carbon monoxide detector is it? You might want to confirm, perhaps with an separate CO detector (you do have one of these in the home right? With anything gas you certainly should), that this is not the problem. Some CO detectors have a readout that will display smaller levels than will set off the alarm; that would be helpful info to know if there is some level of CO in your house that could be read by one of these. Maybe it is spiking at some point here and there enough to set off an alarm?
Have you dusted near one of them recently? Not the smoke detector itself - something nearby? In one house whenever I replaced the air filter that was located nearby, any dust that may have been on the grate or the filter would inevitably set off the smoke alarm later that day or night.
Yep. We had detectors go off in the middle of the day one day. These are the kind that are wired together so when one triggers they all start beeping. A moment later they all stopped. I did a full house inspection and saw nothing wrong. I pinpointed the one that was alerting (the only one whose red light was flashing) and started removing it from the ceiling when a small spider jumped on to my hand, ran down my arm, and leaped off in to parts unknown. Scared the u-know-what out of me. But we haven't had any alarms since.
Yep. We had detectors go off in the middle of the day one day. These are the kind that are wired together so when one triggers they all start beeping. A moment later they all stopped. I did a full house inspection and saw nothing wrong. I pinpointed the one that was alerting (the only one whose red light was flashing) and started removing it from the ceiling when a small spider jumped on to my hand, ran down my arm, and leaped off in to parts unknown. Scared the u-know-what out of me. But we haven't had any alarms since.
Yep. We had detectors go off in the middle of the day one day. These are the kind that are wired together so when one triggers they all start beeping. A moment later they all stopped. I did a full house inspection and saw nothing wrong. I pinpointed the one that was alerting (the only one whose red light was flashing) and started removing it from the ceiling when a small spider jumped on to my hand, ran down my arm, and leaped off in to parts unknown. Scared the u-know-what out of me. But we haven't had any alarms since.
Oh I think I'd rather the alarms go off than feel a spider on me
Detectors have a life span. It's been mandated for awhile that at the end of their life they will chirp every minute or so. You can't defeat it nor would you want too. We just had to replace all 7 in our house. The new ones have a 10 year life, the old ones 7. Like people have said, check the dates.
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but I do feel better this way.
