Posted by By Oretta Croushore, Property Manager for Home Rental Services
We are already a month into the new year. Hopefully, any resolutions you chose to make a few weeks ago, are still serving you well. I’ve never been very good at setting and keeping New Year’s resolutions. It took me well into my adult life to realize traditional resolutions are just not for me.
I used to have a friend who was a picky eater. As she got older and started having children, she realized she did not want to pass her food fears on to her children. She started adding a new food item to the menu every year. Though exploring new foods has never been a challenge for me, it helped me to see that there’s a different way to set annual goals for myself. Instead of feeling like I had to set some major life-changing goal, which was going to be a memory by Valentines Day, I’ve learned to give myself little challenges.
Bingo Card for the Year
For the past few years, I’ve set reading goals for myself, thought about something I wanted to learn to do, movies I want to watch, etc. This year, my daughter introduced me to the concept of a bingo card for the year. It turns out, filling all twenty-five of my spaces is more challenging than I expected! I still have several boxes to fill. I thought it could be rewarding to add some work-related challenges as well as personal ones. (After all, there cannot be a work/life balance without both work and life.)
Smoke Detectors
We’ve recently been discussing smoke detectors as a team. And you thought property managers were boring?!? You should hear the rousing conversations we have about furnace filters and plumbing repairs. Party animals, all of us.
We all know we’re supposed to check the batteries in our smoke detectors when the time changes.
Do you have any idea how old your smoke detectors are? I would have told you we bought our carbon monoxide detector just the other day… We started having issues with it (which were not remedied with a battery change.) My husband looked at the unit and found the expiration date. Turns out, it was way overdue for replacement. Most smoke detectors or smoke/CO detectors have a 10 year life span.
As a team, we wondered exactly what this meant in relation to smoke detectors. If you’re testing the unit and you get the, “beep, beep, beep,” it’s good, right? I mean, I don’t throw out milk just because the date on the carton has passed. After doing some research, we learned that it’s the internal sensors that start to degrade. Basically, the whole nervous system of the unit becomes unreliable. It is more prone to false alarms, which are annoying. However, it also becomes less reliable in being triggered in the event of a fire. That’s way scarier than spoiled milk!
Tracking and Replacing Expired Smoke Detectors
One of the things on our property manager bingo card this year is to implement a system to track and replace expired smoke detectors. The expiration date on detectors is located on the underside of the unit. I’m sure the manufacturers of these units are just waiting to hear my idea on how to make their products better, so here it is: put the dates somewhere a person can see them without taking the whole dang thing down! This piece of genius advice is free of charge but if the folks at Kidd or First Alert want to send some royalty compensation, gratuities are always appreciated but never expected.
The first challenge is finding out which smoke detectors need to be replaced.
We get eyes on the property at move out and move in when the inspections are completed. This is a great time to take a moment to check the dates on smoke detectors along with the batteries. If there are detectors in need of replacement, we will coordinate making that happen. For the detectors still within their lifespan, the expiration date written in black Sharpie on the side of the unit will give the needed visibility for the future.
For occupied houses, we are enlisting the help of the resident. We will share a short Google form for them to fill out after they check the detectors in the house. There is also an option for them to opt out of checking them if the detectors are located in a vaulted ceiling or if the renter is simply not able to do it.
The next task is to find a way to make this trackable.
I’m a girl who loves reports. I like data, and I like ways to track that data. I love long, romantic scrolls down a spreadsheet. (Most anything can be solved with a spreadsheet.) The property management software we use, AppFolio, has tons of reports and even more ways to manipulate those reports to see what you want to see. Unfortunately, there’s no field in the software to record the expiration date of smoke detectors in the house.
We had to put our thinking hats on. There is a place in AppFolio to record fixed assets for each property. This is where we can record installations of new appliances, HVAC systems, etc. We have many options for how much or how little data we want to include in this area. We found out there’s a way to add smoke detectors. By using the warranty expiration field, we now have recordable data!
Once we have this data in our system, we can create a regular report alerting us to expiring detectors. It’s a bit of a dopamine rush for me to get in front of this task that is important, but felt so daunting. It looks like my bingo card will soon have a check mark on it!
If you have spaces left on your 2026 bingo card, fill one of those spaces with “check the expiration of my smoke and/or CO detectors and replace as necessary.” Resolve to give yourself some much needed peace of mind while living a safer and healthier life all at once!
Home Rental Services Blog 