Fire Bell Wakes You For Work By Shaving Years Off Your Life

fire-bell-alarm-clock

If you suck at getting up in the morning [Jake Lee] has a solution that will make sure you don’t get fired from your job. Unfortunately it’s going to scare the life out of you — but maybe we’re just not hard enough sleepers to appreciate the value in an alarm clock that’s so horribly loud.

At first we wondered where he got the bell but it looks like you can buy one for about fifteen bucks. We’re not saying you should hide one of these under your best friend’s bed, but the cost of the bell does put it firmly in the worth-it-as-a-prank price range. [Jake] used rigid and flexible conduit to connect the bell to a power source, and the control panel shown on the left. He uses the LED backlight of the bedside alarm clock to drive the base of a transistor, switching a relay to trigger the bell. The big button on the grey box makes the wailing stop (seriously, cut your volume before you hit 0:30 in the clip below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P91WX58Lmy0

 

38 thoughts on “Fire Bell Wakes You For Work By Shaving Years Off Your Life

  1. Lets see, either “hack” together a loud bell to wake me up and forever doom me to being single, or learn how to wake up like a normal person – Hmmmm, tough call.

    No one that’s getting a consistent 6+ hours of sleep should need anything that loud to wake up. Maybe he should see a sleep doctor.

    1. 6 hours? Maybe if you’re 60+ the recommended amount of sleep afaik is 8 hours. I’m 27 and if i get any less I’m a complete zombie and my immune systems starts slacking. I would also think it depends what you do during the day and how filled your head is with thoughts when you go to sleep. Amount and quality is not always comparable in efficiency.

      1. Agreed – the worst kind of sleep I eve have is when I dream about work: it feels like I’m getting a lot done, then when I wake up, none of it is done. The absolute worst days ever.

        Thanks, HaD about the volume note: I might have spilled coffee all over my keyboard when that bell went off.

    2. Oh, also, it takes different things to wake people up (needless to say really?). I have a friend who’s brother is an exceptionally deep sleeper. He simply doesn’t hear the alarm clock. I suspect this is a similar case. And in this situation “one cannot simply walk into mordor…eh.. learn to get out of bed”.

    3. I have a friend that has trouble waking up regardless of how much sleep he gets. I was his roommate in college, so one Saturday I decided to see how long he’d go before waking up on his own. Answer: 16 hours. He said he’d already been to a sleep clinic, but they tend to focus on people being unable to sleep. They had nothing constructive to say to or do for him.

      “Learn how to wake up like a normal person” is a monumentally dumb thing to say for so many reasons.

      1. Since 95% of the population can wake up with a nominal source of prodding, requiring a freaking Fire Alarm is by definition “not normal”. Either the person can’t get to bed sufficiently early so they can wake up at the required hour (so they are the source of their own problem), or there’s something mentally or physically wrong (hence the “see a doctor” recommendation).

        Instead of encouraging people to make a “work around device”, why not encourage them to fix their freaking problem (or should that be “freakish problem”?).

        Your one personal observed story hardly qualifies as “fact” to apply to all people who can’t wake up normally or to all sleep doctors/clinics (the sleep clinic at my hospital treats dozens of “can’t wake up” people a month – some are hard of hearing, most are clinically depressed, and some are just too stupid to go to bed early enough to wake up in the morning).

  2. Many years ago I had a problem sleeping through alarm clocks. I wired a car alarm siren to a 12-volt power supply that was plugged into one of those timers used to turn lights on an off at set times (like if you’re going to be out of town and want it to look like you’re home). That sucker would make me jump out of bed every morning with 104 db of siren goodness.

  3. I set up a succession of alarms, set to go off about 10 minutes apart:

    1. Smartphone alarm with a siren sound effect
    2. CD alarm clock that blasts Reveille
    3. 70s doorbell buzzer that rattles around in a coffee can

    Everything is connected to my PC UPS. The buzzer runs off a wall adapter plugged into a clockwork lamp timer, with a remote Christmas light switch in the middle to disable it. That sucker goes off as late as I can possibly get up and still leave on time. The phone almost always does the job, but when it doesn’t that buzzer-in-a-can sounds like the apocalypse first thing in the morning.

    (Yes, I have this stuff plugged into a UPS. Everyone should have a UPS; they’re great for keeping the clocks and small electronics going during a power outage, and a good one can run a lamp or two for hours.)

  4. This would never work for me. I am know to get violent if woken up too quickly. It will get destroyed the first time it wakes me. My alarm is set to a classic music station, and the volume is real low. Otherwise destruction will ensue..

  5. he i had a multistage alarm when working.

    i’d be known to turn off things while still asleep.

    so i spred the off buttons througt the apartment.

    each one got more disterbing untill i had something similer to this bell.
    noisy
    AAAND it would tip me out of bed

  6. I have one of those little alarm clocks on wheels – it jumps off the nightstand and moves around the room (you have to get up and catch it to turn it off.)

    It’s collecting dust on a shelf now.

  7. very old hack, the alarm klaxons that are louder and have a trumpet horn have been an alarm clock hack for decades.. Grandpa had one in his garage that went off around supper time every day, neighbors hated it when they were out of town as it would go off for a solid 5 minutes if nobody cancelled it.

  8. You should never use a fire bell for this, they have other ones used for non-fire signalling (it makes a different, slightly less grating tone). (think like a school bell).

    The idea being that if fire bells are used for signalling non-fire events, people will become complacent or mix them up when there is an actual fire.

Leave a Reply to EirinnCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.