Case Study: batteries
Our smoke detectors are always beeping about low batteries. It drives us nuts. They beep intermittently so it's hard to locate the beeping detector until it's 2 am and you can't get back to sleep because a smoke detector somewhere is beeping.
I devised a new system to thwart our battery problems: I would change all the batteries on the same regular schedule, which I decided would be New Year's and the Fourth of July (everything says to replace smoke detector batteries every 6 months). I dutifully replaced all the batteries on New Year's... only to find that one by one they have all started beeping again in the past two weeks.
What does that mean? Our batteries are lousy! They should have lasted at least three times as long as they did.
From now on, as much as it pains me, I'm not going to buy store brand batteries anymore.
