For almost two months now I have lived in this rental house with two semi random roommates. Don’t get me wrong, I knew one of them from work… kind of. It just so happened that we both needed new homes at the same time, and his girlfriend came along. It’s been a pretty good situation so far, but there have been some mysteries. For instance, we haven’t been able to figure out why the smoke detectors in our kitchen were constantly going off. It seemed like every day we were rushing around, punching at the air quality control detectors, and desperately trying to get the screeching sounds to stop vibrating through our house while comforting the terrified dog. We tried everything to improve the indoor air and limit the amount of smoke coming from our stove top, but it just seemed like the air contamination monitors were too sensitive to keep in place. We wound up putting the smoke detectors in our bedrooms, and hoping our kitchen air kept itself separate from the sensitive devices. Well, today I solved the great mystery of our touchy smoke detectors. It turns out, it’s not the smoke detectors fault, but the ventilation fan in our kitchen. All this time we have been using the ventilation fan over the stove to filter out the smokey particles as they were created. Today, while I was cleaning the stove, I noticed something new. There is no filtration device in our ventilation fan. Without an air filter or activated carbon in place, all the overhead exhaust fan does is pick up the air from our stove and shuttle it up higher to the ceiling… right where the smoke detectors are located. I bought a new air filter online for the exhaust fan, so now we have working smoke detectors again… and the dog isn’t so scared of the kitchen.
