Things that go beep in the night.

Yeah, I hate those beepers. But they are used, because they are the least expensive way to make a sound you will hear. They tend to be frequency restrained as well. If they could simply lower the pitch, they would be ok, but that makes them much less efficient.

Until last week, I had a microwave that was beepless. It had a mechanical timer which rang and actual bell. But it passed away and is no longer a working appliance. :(

I doubt I will be able to find another.

I have a particular dislike of the ones in fire alarms that invariably start going beep every 5 minutes and very loudly at 4 in the morning when temperature and battery terminal voltage is at its lowest.

Most irritating recent one was our house burglar alarm which started doing the same thing and then the control panel would helpfully start beeping to say "low battery/battery fail". You could reset it but it would do the same thing again the next night and again until the service engineer was able to come and swap the battery (about 2 weeks).

It found itself with heavy acoustic damping foam taped over the front.

I know the system has quite sophisticated anti-tamper features or I would have swapped it myself (and I haven't been able to pinch the engineering access code).

I'm not sure why it reacts so badly to backup battery failure - the battery really only comes into play if the mains supply fails.

A number of years ago I had a customer call me to report a "beep"!! She could not locate and suspected it was a smoke detector.

Since I am deaf at high frequencies I decided to take my wife along. The three of of around the house and me up a ladder trying to find the "beep" >>> 60 second delay <<< "beep" for 45 minutes. Finally found out that the Dishwasher Door was OPEN!!! End of my day!!

Hope you enjoyed the read!!! ;-)

Les

[...]

"Steam heat" from "The Pyjama Game".

"Tick-Tock Tango" played by Ray Martin & his Concert Orchestra.

I replaced the thermostat at our cabin with a simple single-knob analog type and glued down the couple of switches. Guests were always snarling up the digital one.

Every programmer on the planet, all 900 million of them, reinvents the user interface. And two buttons do everything.

When I get a new microwave oven, if I can I open it up and kill the piezo buzzer. I hardly need five loud beeps to tell me that the thing has finished warming my coffee.

The wall-mount unit is programmable to not beep, but of course after a power failure it forgets.

There's nothing in my bedroom that can beep. All such have been trashed or smashed... the ultimate beepectomy.

Piezos are cheap.

Piezo sounds are hard to localize. They bounce all over the room(s).

Maybe people can localize wideband sounds, sort out the echoes, better. Like wideband radar.

Frequency too high for angle-of-arrival estimation to work.

People actually require the wideband. When electronic ringers on desktop phones first appeared, with pure sinewave ring tones, people were always being fooled and would answer their own phone in reply to a phone across the sea-of-desks bay. Turned out that the ear estimated range by the change in spectrum as a sound travels, higher frequencies being attenuated by range more than low frequencies.

The old electro-mechanical telephone ringers worked better, because they had many harmonics, and the two bells in the ringer were at mutually prime fundamental frequencies, all chosen to be urgent but not annoying.

Anyway, in modern electronical systems, what will work is to generate a pulse train (not square wave) at a few hundred Hz (but not a multiple of 40 or 60 Hz), and feed it to a speaker wideband enough for multiple harmonics to be heard. People will hear the missing fundamental, reconstructed from the harmonics, and will be able to estimate distance to the sounder.

Joe Gwinn

I suspect that Bell Labs researched that. I toured Bell Labs when I was a kid. Super cool. They had a gigantic anechoic chamber that was spooky, with a springy taut wire floor, felt like a trampoline, halfway up.

I think the issue is that a speaker costs more than a surface-mount piezo.

Yes, it was Bell Labs, in the 1950s if I recall. I read about their ring-tone design in the BSTJ.

That's exactly it. I have had a lot of trouble with electronic alarm clocks whose ringer is too high (4 KHz) for me to reliably hear, especially when asleep. Didn't even cause odd dreams.

Turns out that the solution is to buy radio alarm clock, even if you will never use the radio. Having the radio function forces them to provide a reasonably good speaker and suitable audio amplifier.

Joe Gwinn

What, you're one of those people who are a sucker for rom-coms?

So am I.

Yikes.

If a thief intends to enter, he will cut off the mains, then wait a day before entering.

Chickpeas is three hours. Ok, not the oven. My cooking range timer maxes at 99 minutes.

You ever cook a turkey? A roast? A roast chicken? A leg of lamb? Kielbasa and sauerkraut? Baked potato? Slow cooking with a dutch oven?

To mention just a few.

Telephones in open-plan offices seemed[*] to have been designed specifically to make it impossible to tell which phone was ringing unless you made a good guess and confirmed it by putting your ear next to the thing. The warble they used must be the worst possible signal for determining direction.

Sylvia.

[*] Past tense only because it's been many years since I worked in an open plan office.

I wasn't so much thinking in terms of giving users a choice, as using a ring sound that was easier to locate. The apparently standard frequency varying warble being hard to improve on if one actually wanted to defeat direction finding.

Sylvia.

You can't really stop a professional thief but you can certainly encourage them to go next door where the alarm is less of a challenge.

It wouldn't do him any good at all with my alarm system. The standby current is remarkably low - he would need to wait at least a week (assuming the battery wasn't almost flat - which it was last month).

I don't think the very hot weather did it any good at all.

Yes, that's why I have one.

My beach place was entered 3 times; stolen stuff was minimal: a fan, a cheap microwave, my father's binoculars. They didn't even bother with the small and heavy tube TV. No damages to doors or anything. When they left, they left the door open, and I didn't know for a month.

So I invested in a connected alarm, and it stopped. Now the nuisance are the batteries. The smoke alarm which they convinced me to install has a loud beep every now and then when the battery is down, and I don't dare to change it my self. They tell me I can do it myself, they even mail me the battery, but I refuse, I say I'm scared of heights. It is not only the ladder, I would fall one level more because it is in the stair well.

Indeed they are and infrequent enough to be a PITA. Especially at 4am which is when they tend to start doing it for low battery!

A sharp click is much easier to get a bearing on since our eat or be eaten evolutionary systems and hearing are geared to turning to face a predator or prey that makes the mistake of snapping a twig.

On the other hand if you make warning beeps too annoying you get (at least) two major modes of failure along similar lines.

Silencing the warning alarm the wrong way (expensive mistakes) eg.

Leaving the real problem to get worse whilst you figure out how to switch the damned alarms and klaxons off to be able to think(TMI). They spent something like the first 15 minutes trying to silence alarms!

A chirp is better to locate, but many cars have sufficiently good sound insulation these days that it can be a real challenge to hear and locate emergency vehicles until they are really quite close to you.