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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Asklemmy
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IDK about you but I've always assumed any fire alarm might be real and will act accordingly. Sure most of the time it's a false alarm, but better to be inconvenienced by having to leave unexpectedly than die in an actual fire, "boy who cried wolf" style. Being annoyed by false fire alarms is a pretty good problem to have. It means the fire protection systems where you live are working so well you've never actually experienced or even heard about from your friends and family the horror of being in an actual building fire.
Also, there needs to be a distinction between an individual smoke alarm and a centralized fire alarm.
Individual smoke alarms are what you have in a single family detached house, at most they may be interconnected with a signal wire so all the alarms go off when a single one goes off. These systems are designed for a building small enough that a fire in any part of the building should be immediately noticeable and common mishaps that trigger smoke alarms like burning food can be very effectively communicated to everyone in the building. As such, they don't have a central control panel that you can use to see the status of the system nor do they automatically call the fire department. So yes, in your home (assuming it's detached) it can generally be safe to ignore a false alarm as long as you have inspected the entire house. I definitely wouldn't disable a smoke detector though, there are documented cases of families doing that because of a verified false alarm, followed by a real fire which burns down the house with them inside because they disabled the only protection system.
A centralized fire alarm is for multi family housing and commercial/industrial buildings. These buildings are large enough that it is impossible for any individual to figure out why a fire alarm is going off, but they also tend to have false alarm protection built in, for example, they may need both a smoke and heat detector in the same area to go off before issuing a general alarm for the entire building. In apartments and other attached housing, the smoke detectors in each unit are usually the former individual type and only the detectors in the common areas like hallways are apart of the centralized system. The logic is that smoke in a single apartment may not actually be a fire or at the very least it's being contained by the unit which usually has fire containment considerations as part of the design, but smoke in the common areas (meaning the smoke has breached the door) is more likely to be life threatening to everyone in the building. These systems are also the ones with the pull handles for manually triggering an alarm, and the vast majority of the time a centralized system has a false alarm, especially in a commercial building, it's because some shithead pulled one of the manual alarm handles. But, again, the nature of these buildings is that you literally cannot be sure there's no fire, and large buildings also have a ton of inaccessible space for wiring and ventilation and such, and if a fire is spreading through those spaces, you could be right next to it and not notice anything until the fire violently breaks through the wall (again, there are documented cases of this happening). So it's better to just GTFO and let the fire department clear it.