Smoke Detector Battery Issues - fall 2011 battery change

We, for the first time, tried purchasing the Lowe's house brand batteries rather than a name brand from Costco.

Since October  we have been getting sporadic calls about chirping smoke detectors. At first we simply replaced single batteries as they failed. As we became more suspicious of the battery quality we began changing all batteries in a home when one failed. Unfortunately, we did not keep track of whose batteries had been changed out, still thinking that it was probably a single package of bad batteries.  We have now had enough failures that we are offering to replace batteries at your convenience for no charge. Call us to schedule an appointment if we have not already changed yours as a result of this problem.

Not all problems will be solved by changing batteries. Smoke detectors have a life expectancy of 10 years based on the product manuals accompanying new smoke detectors. 

We have a claim in to Lowe's, but at present they are still selling their UtiliTech brand batteries. They  maintain that these were isolated incidents, and to date have only offered to refund batteries that we bring back in. We feel the problem is bad enough that we will absorb our labor and the cost of new batteries.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.