Hi folks, Is this problem related to my solar do you think? I have three floors and on each floor is a hardwired smoke detector. They are in series.Every once in a while the darn things blast me out of bed around 3AM, for no reason I can discern. Last night it happened again but they stopped by themselves after about a minute. The alarms are hardwired with a battery backup. If the power goes out the backup kicks in and will beeb once, softly, every 5 miutes or so to tell you it is on battery. But I'm not talking about the battery backup=these things go off full tilt. VERY upsetting. I'm off grid on a Trace 4024 (by the way, is that true sine wave or modified sine wave-anyone know?) w/outback charge controller and 12 L-16 batteries. Any ideas out there? Many thanks, Kavade

I would post this over on the Wind & Sun forum. I am guessing your inverter is a SW4024? If so it is a sine wave and should run anything you can plug in to it. Are you seeing any issues with any other electronics at the same time, clocks resetting, lights flickering? How is your battery capacity at 3am? Could it be a large load kicking in at the inverter dropping out momentarily? I know if I shut off my inverter and turn it back on all the alarms will squeal for about 10-15 seconds. I don’t know why they do that. Like you said if the power is out they beep every so often to let me know the power is out, but when I turn the power back on the squeal.

Battery capacity is fine, and no other electric items are acting oddly.

I suppose the immediate solution is buy a bunch of battery operated smoke alarms. But that doesn't help me
when it comes to whatever electrical problem might be causing the hardwired stuff to go off. I'd like to know what
is going on, just to know. Or maybe it isn't the solar, perhaps these alarms are, I dunno, sensitive to dust or something.

Yes, the inverter is a SW 4024.

See if you can blow it out, there are little probes in the unit and even a small bug like a spider can set it off.