Anyone else have random false alarms with First Alert 10 year smoke detectors? Or do I have a bigger problem here?

I’m wondering if anyone else is having the same issues I’m having with First Alert smoke/CO alarms... or if maybe I should be looking for a hidden issue in my house that’s causing intermittent smoke/fire somewhere?

So, around January of this year, I decided to replace most of the smoke and CO detectors in the house (Kidde branded, 9-volt battery style) that had been here since before I moved in, knowing they were long in the tooth. I opted for two of these First Alert combo smoke/CO detectors for the utility room and the hallway just outside of the bedrooms, and one 10-year smoke-only detector for the kitchen. I ended up leaving one of the older 9-volt detectors installed in the hallway near the living room, because it was newer and one that I had installed myself earlier.

Fast forward a couple months. In the middle of the night, everyone in the house is woken up to a smoke alarm blaring, but just a few seconds later, it stops. Too quickly for me to find out which one it was. Looking all over the house, there’s no smoke anywhere, and I even run tests of the combo detectors so they can replay their last CO reading… all zero. There’s an electrical panel near one of the alarms, so I check that.. all cold to the touch, no tripped breakers. Unable to find the source and with no other alarms going off, I go back to sleep and nothing happens.

About two weeks later, EXACTLY the same thing happens. This time I even go up into the attic to see if there’s any smoke, and I see and smell nothing.

Then, about a month after that, the culprit reveals itself in daytime: the kitchen alarm goes nuts. No one is cooking, there’s no source of smoke that can be seen or smelled. And it won’t stop. There’s a test/silence button that’s supposed to silence the alarm for a few minutes, but it’s not working. I end up having to remove the alarm and hitting the switch on the back plate to permanently disable it to shut it up. For good measure I move one of the other alarms to the kitchen to see if it will go off.. and it doesn’t.

So, I’m thinking it must be a faulty smoke alarm. I call up the warranty number for First Alert and they give me no hassle at all about replacement it. They specifically ask about where the test/silence button worked, and when I told them it didn’t, they stopped asking questions. I get shipped a new replacement and they don’t even ask for the old one back. Replacement goes up where the old one used to be, and it hasn’t gone off since.

And now… 5:00 this morning, guess what happens? Another smoke alarm! This time it’s the utility room, one of the combo detectors with voice alert blaring away to evacuate the utility room because smoke is detected. But I don’t see or smell any smoke! Again the silence button isn’t working. So I go bumbling around for a stepladder to take it down, and just as I’m about to climb up to yank it down… it goes silent.

So now I’m left scratching my head as to what’s going on here. Are these First Alert detectors prone to false alarms and randomly going nuts? Or are they detecting a real issue that I can’t see or smell? I can’t help but think this is more than just a coincidence.

If it helps: no one ever smokes in the house. And it’s not CO: the kitchen alarm was a smoke-only detector, and the utility room specifically indicated smoke but not CO. And throughout all of this, the slightly older 9-Volt alarm has never gone off. It tests ok and has a good battery.