BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!

Warning: This post contains no knitting content.




Well, it was an exciting weekend, at least.

Maddie and I went to Virginia Beach visit my parents and Mia (the family dog) this weekend.  All was going well, and I was cuddling in bed on Saturday morning with my two favorite fluffballs when all of the sudden- BEEP!  BEEP!  BEEP!  BEEP!

Then the beeping stopped.  I got up, checked to make sure that the smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors weren’t blinking red, climbed back into bed, and tried to calm down the animals.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!

*Sigh.*  I got out of bed, and went to go get my father.  He had worked really late the night before, and was trying to sleep in.  I think he figured something was low on batteries, and was trying to ignore it and go back to sleep during the non-beepy periods.  By this point, it had stopped, but Mia and Maddie were getting really agitated, I was getting a headache, and it needed to be taken care of.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!

We spent the next several minutes walking around the house, trying to figure out exactly which smoke detectors were going off.  This was pretty difficult to do because they only beeped intermittently, and of course they wouldn’t do so when were standing close enough to an alarm to figure out which one it was coming from!  The alarms had now beeped several more times, Maddie was hiding under the bed to try to get away from the awful noises, and Mia was glued to us like a shadow.

To be honest, I figured that the alarms were malfunctioning.  I didn’t smell or see any smoke.  Neither of the animals were upset by anything besides the beeping, and aren’t animals supposed to sense that sort of thing first?

Finally, my father decided to go check on things in the attic as a last-ditch effort.  The AC unit up there definitely smelled like some sort of electrical burning, and there were burnt pieces of foil on the ground.  Public Service Announcement, in case anyone cares: The average lifespan of an AC unit is 15-20 years.  My parents had been living in that house 20 years, and never replaced the AC unit.

We shut off the AC immediately, of course, and called the repair guys.  To their credit, they got someone out really fast.  The technician declared that it would take $500 to fix the AC unit, and that’s still really only a short-term fix- the unit really does need to be replaced.  Really, it’s not worth it.  However, my poor parents are currently stuck without air conditioning until they can get a new unit, which should take about a week.  To be honest, I’m really kind of glad that I’m back home in my nice, air-conditioned apartment!

We were so very lucky with the way that this turned out.  The smoke alarms went off and alerted us that there was an issue.  We were able to find the issue and neutralize it before it could turn into an actual fire.  Can you imagine what would have happened if no one was home?  The house could have caught on fire, and Mia might have been in it.  

Morals of the Story: 1)Smoke detectors annoy the heck out of me sometimes (especially when they go off when I’m cooking and not even burning anything), but they are really important, too. 2) If your AC unit is getting up there in years, get it checked out!