I am in the process of finishing a basement. One of the circuits I am using passes through a box that contains a smoke alarm. This smoke alarm is wired using 4 wires (ground/neutral/black/red). The red wire is part of a 14/3 wire that goes upstairs in the house (not sure where). My question is why does this smoke alarm have 2 hot wires (black red)?

Thanks for any help.

Black would be the hot wire, red would be a communication wire to set off all of the smoke alarms at once. The detector may have black and orange wires (as well as a white grounded conductor), the black wire would go to the black conductor, the orange wire to the red conductor. The white wire goes to the white grounded conductor and green or bare (if it has any) goes to the green or bare equipment grounding conductor.

The smoke detector actually has a yellow wire which is connected to the red wire on the 14/3. I would like to test these alarms since I had to temporarily disconnect them. How do I accomplish this? Is pressing the test button going to set off the other smoke detectors in the house? Or do I need to blow smoke into the alarm?

Yes, the yellow in this case would be correct.

The test button on any detector should set off all detectors connected to the system.



[This message has been edited by sparky66wv (edited 03-05-2001).]