blownstang01 wrote:
RobWNY wrote:
I found the answer. It can take up to 10 minutes for the alarm to "Warm Up" before showing solid green on battery power. Everyone can disregard this thread.
Exactly! That's how my Safe-T-Alert works. Directions say it takes approximately 2 minutes before it will work and go to solid green. Interestingly I just had to replace it as I was getting a fault....alternating green-red and a beep every 30 seconds or so. The manual says to replace every 60 months and the man date on the back was April 2013, still can't figure out how it magically shows a fault almost exactly 60 mos later. LOL
That's actually pretty simple; the little embedded computer inside maintains a countdown timer of how long it's been powered on (in non-volatile memory of some sort) and switches to "end of life" mode after it's been five years. There are also non-digital components that would work as a long-term timer, but these days a little microcontroller chip is so inexpensive that I'd be rather surprised if they did something else (and they probably want one anyhow to operate the detector for things like automatic recalibration if needed, detecting and ignoring some spurious alarm conditions, etc.).
