Smoke alarm terror

This happened awhile ago now.... but we have learned that these cute boys are absolutely terrified of the smoke alarm. 

We have a Nest Protect because we were nervous about leaving the pups home alone all day with no way of knowing if there was a fire or CO emergency. The thought of them being trapped and us having no idea was too painful so we researched smoke and CO detectors that could notify us by text or email if there was a problem. Enter Nest Protect. 

This device detects both smoke and CO, and will verbally tell you which alarm is sounding. It also will give you a warning alarm before the real one if levels of either are rising so you can silence it if all you did was burn some toast. It also has different color alerts for different things, speaks in a human voice as well as sounding an alarm, and will notify you by text or email if something is wrong. Oh, and it lights up like a nightlight at night if you walk by to go to the bathroom. If you have a Nest Thermostat, it coordinates with that too! Pretty cool little device. We have ours in the dining room because that is the most central location. 

One time in February when David was working on the dining room and bedroom with Grandpa John, this detector was bumped and a lady's voice started sounding alerts. David said Ash and Pepper went crazy and spent most of the day hiding under the bed afterwards. We didn't think much of it again until I came home from work one day with plans to meet a new dog walker (same company, different dog walker - our first walker moved). I arrived home to find the walker and one of the company's managers on my porch, they had arrived early. They commented that they hadn't seen or heard the dogs through the window so thought I might have been out for a walk. Obviously, this set some alarm bells off in my head because I had not been out for a walk. 

We went inside and no dogs greeted us at the door. I called out for them and they didn't come. I started to panic thinking that they had somehow gotten outside or were injured. Jill, the company manager, said she heard faint whimpering. I found poop on the dining room floor (gross, but a clear sign that something had scared Ash). We followed the whimpering to the laundry room and saw Pepper sitting on the bottom shelf of a wire storage rack that's in there. He came out cautiously to greet me once I was in the laundry room. I didn't see Ash anywhere, but Jill noticed some more fur further back on the shelf and low and behold it was Ash. 

At that point we still had no idea what was causing their terror, but this is basically what the laundry room looked like. To be clear, the shelves and storage area aren't normally in this state of disarray. 

Ash and Pepper had knocked tons of things over, and chewed through a bunch of napkins as well as through the ironing board cover. I'm not sure what motivated the destruction, but we wonder if they were digging out of fright. Or just trying to get things off the shelves so they had a place to hide. 

While I was comforting the dogs we heard the Nest Protect beep a single beep, and both Ash and Pepper started to scramble again. I realized that we had a low battery or a malfunction of some kind (it wasn't a warning beep) and that the simple beep every couple of minutes had sent both of our dogs into absolute terror. Poor things! They'd probably been freaked out for hours while I was at work. We realized afterwards that David didn't have the email / text alert system set up correctly and that the Nest Protect had failed due to dust contamination on the device. The online FAQs told us to just clean it out gently with some compressed air - the dust buildup probably happened during our renovations. 

A couple of days after this our back hall smoke alarm sounded when we burned some tomato sauce on our pizza stone, and again the dogs began scrambling to hide and panting like crazy. We do our best to prevent this from happening now!