"WHAT'S THAT BEEPING?"

...asked Terri, while we were tuning in the news at about 10PM last night. Since it wasn't our usual station, I listened closely to hear if one of the news anchors was beeping. Unsure, I hit pause on TiVo (everything "live" on TiVo is really just freshly recorded) The beeping was faint, but from someplace else. I wandered the downstairs, ear cocked. Not here, not there, getting fainter, now I hear it better.

The bedroom: A beep - really a chirp - was chirping about every ten seconds. That's why the search took time; you could walk by it and it'd chirp 5 seconds later and you'd be rooms away.

I thought I narrowed it down to the air conditioning control, perhaps in need of a new battery? Though it flashed the message: Change filter, I just doubted that they'd wire that to a bird's ass (the chirper).

I consulted our collection of ring binders - when we moved we vowed to be organized ORGANIZED! and have ring binders with every applicable manual or instruction hidden in clear plastic, on the page you cannot find.

But I persisted and located the heat control unit instructional booklet. Ah thought so! Just grab in here and here and pull up and...

I was standing in the bedroom holding the control unit proudly when Terri walked in. I had figured that since the battery was invisible, I'd have to take the plate off the wall. I waved the control unit around and said, I think it's this. Terri went to and pointed at the alarm system and said - it's THIS. She was right.

So after I put the control head back on (turning off AC but not knowing until much later) and searching through the library of important documents we saved, I found the code: *2 would tell me what was wrong! CALL SERVICE was wrong - great. Call service, where I'll bet they'll charge me $50-100 to show up and replace the battery and 'test the system.' Test THIS! Online I ordered the lead-acid IM1240 and will install it myself.