Ask HN: Can my landlord detect that I've unplugged my fire alarm? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can my landlord detect that I've unplugged my fire alarm?

3 pointscactusface8 comments

My apartment building landlord does these annoying monthly tests of the fire alarm early in the morning. I have a speaker in 3 different rooms. I unplugged the nutted wires (2 red, 2 black) from each speaker, capped the wires with the nut, and shoved the whole thing back in the wall. Hopefully, this makes the noise go away. What I'm wondering, is it possible for the landlord's fire alarm system to detect that I unplugged the speakers? Is this common?

Note, I haven't unplugged the smoke detector, that is a separate thing. These are just externally controlled speakers.

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Just don't disable the telescreen. They'll notice that.

1. Probably not.

2. Even if your landlord does detect, what's he going to do? Kick you out? Probably not. He'll simply tell you that you can't unplug the system for insert reason here. Worst case, he'll charge you the cost of labor to fix what you've disabled.

I don't want to get on bad terms with him, plus I don't want him to find it. I really hate the noise, it's awful. I think he has to give me 24 hours notice before entering to fix it if he does find it at the next fire drill test, since it isn't an emergency. In this case I can reconnect it all. Still, I would rather avoid that, that's all!

How are speakers usually wired? Are they in parallel or in series? This makes a big difference when you just short the wires together, and my guess is that they are in parallel which makes connecting them with a wire nut the wrong answer.

I'm not really sure what you mean about in parallel or in series. There's only one resistor endpoint, the speaker. Then there are 3 speakers, each in a different room.

There are two black and two red wires going into each speaker. I don't really understand why one red and one black doesn't suffice, but anyway the two red ones are next two each other and the two black ones are next to each other at the two points where they connect to the speaker. These four wires are connected to two red and two black wires coming out of the wall. I just labelled the eight wires so I could match them up again later and undid the four nuts, leaving one nut on each end of the live wires coming out of the wall. Then I just shoved the speaker assembly back in place, and you can't tell from the outside that it's disconnected. I hope that was clear? I didn't short any wires together, I put the wire nut back on a live end to be paranoid.

One speaker is apparently wired like this:

  RWin - Rnut - RSin - speaker - RSout - Rnut - RWout
  BWin - Bnut - BSin - speaker - BSout - Bnut - BWout

where R = red, B = black, W = wall, S = speaker. But I don't think you can tell about series vs. parallel from that relative to the other speakers.

Except this: it's perhaps in parallel since there are two red and two black; in series you would only need one red and one black, right?

It sounds like you are fine then.

Thanks for looking it over.

Actually, my landlord found out and is coming to inspect all the apartments on my floor now. I guess I better put it back...

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