Here's a question no one has asked: are you sure your house isn't burning down?

I roll a spot check.... 14

Well, then it's been burning very slowly for the last 12 hours. We'd have had plenty of time to evacuate!
I'm now researching fire alarms. The only thing I'm sure of is that I will go out of town to buy them. Walmart only sells the Kidde ones and they aren't getting goood reviews!

I'd shut off your circuit breakers. I'd rather use candles and flashlights than stand that racket for more than 5 seconds.

We ended up getting USI Electric USI-5204 smoke detectors. I believe Mr. Swanie got a 6-pack of them at Home Depot. We haven't had a single problem with them since he changed them out on Christmas Eve.

The USI model that we have has a few nice features like a side slidding drawer for the battery so you don't have to pull the smoke detector off of the ceiling to change the battery. It also has a silencer button too.

swanie

Just shoot me now, PLEASE!

So I go out to the garage to get Z's lunch out of the freezer and it's not working either! So I go to the breaker box and start flipping all the switches(someone here had asked about them) since none have popped, nope that has no effect. Well I shouldn't say no effect Z freaks out and grabs a flashlight( Um, it's daytime), the computers all start buzzing( I know I should've turned them off), and all the clocks are flashing.

I finally got ahold of my brother and he sends me to all the electrical outlets that have these little red/black buttons and tells me to push them. Can you tell I'm really good with this stuff, not!

At least the freezer is working now and the fire alarms don't seem to have the little red light flashing every 90 seconds for the moment! So I can hope that my houses little hissy fit is over for now and my husband can deal with this when he gets home, lucky him!

Thanks for all the replies, at least it gave me somewhere to start!

I'm still researching to buy new ones though!

So it sounds like you did have a partial power outage if the freezer wasn't working, and they were on the same circuit as the smoke detectors. The red/black buttons would be the test and reset buttons for the gfci (ground fault circuit interrupt) circuits. It's quite possible one of them tripped, and your pushing one of the red reset buttons fixed it. (all conjecture on my part of course).

Dammit! It's going off again!! My head hurts from all this noise!

Is your freezer still working?

Yep! If I had any wits left I'd be nearing their end!