Theres always multiple alarms blairing at you,

Heh. You have no idea...

During university, I lived in a house rented out by someone whose clue train was missing both the caboose and the engine. This place was a single family dwelling that had been converted into a duplex. I lived in the garage-room. In our half of the house, there was a smoke alarm on the ceiling between my room, and the next room (and our doors were in a corner). Two feet away from that (i.e. in the hallway) was a second smoke alarm. Five feet away from that in one direction (the front hall) was a third alarm. Two feet away in the opposite direction (on the wall above the door in the kitchen) was a fourth alarm. Five feet away in the third direction (over the stairs to the basement) was a fifth alarm. There was a sixth alarm in the basement, and a seventh up in the hall between the upper two rooms. I think it was in my second year living there that, while hunting down the source of an irritating cricket chirp, we discovered the eighth alarm (with a dying battery) in the crawl space/furnace area.

Note that the other half of the "duplex" had their own set of smoke alarms (three of them, I think).

We set off the kitchen alarm almost every time we cooked anything -- even just boiling water was enough to trigger that thing. We suspected it was due to improper venting from the hood over the stove, which consisted of an anemic fan connected to vertical section of 2" diameter PVC pipe, connected by a 90 degree elbow to an 8' length of 2" diameter PVC pipe that ran along the wall to the outside. We suggested to our landlord that perhaps the pipe needed to be bigger to allow proper venting. We came home one day to discover that he had replaced the vertical chunk of piping with a 6" diameter pipe -- but had left the 8 feet sf 2" pipe as it was.