Why do smoke alarms keep going off even when there's no smoke?

By MVS Chandrashekhar, Assistant professor of electrical engineering, University of South Carolina

Editor’s note: MVS Chandrashekhar is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of South Carolina. In this interview, he explains how smoke detectors work and why they sometimes sound an alarm for what seems like no reason.

Why do smoke detector alarms go off even when there’s no smoke?

The most likely reason smoke detectors go off unexpectedly is that people aren’t changing the batteries in them often enough. In most sensors…

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