Strange device on top of wall

anking

Cant figure out what kind of device is it.
Please help )
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DexterII

I'm thinking that it might be a door bell, or maybe a remote telephone ringer, from when we had rotary phones and party lines. When was that, the 80's? Or maybe a bit earlier. :-)

mickey cassiba

See any black sedans parked across the road?

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Mickey

One of these hammers will fix it.

vsheetz

The aliens put something like that in my house to monitor me...

vsheetz

Alarm, door-bell, some kind of sensor. Got wires? Where do they go?

Wildie

To me it looks like an air conditioning register!

CoconutPete

I'm tempted to say that's a "common bell" or whatever you want to call it for the phone lines. My grandparents had one - the phones rang as well, but that thing RANG when someone called.

DangerMouse

Unscrew cover, show us what's inside. Po)

DM

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Maintenance 6

It's a heat detector. The house I grew up in had one in every room plus an annunciator and a test button in the upstairs hallway. Somewhere there should be a box with a large battery in it. Like a lantern battery. Probably installed 1950s.

Wildie

I installed lots of heat detectors (rate of rise for fire alarms) but never happened upon one like this. Of course, in the 50's I was in high school.

It appears to have adjustable louvers. I wonder what the function of these would be.

Maintenance 6

I agree it doesn't look like heat detectors do today. The louvers let air circulate through the device. They aren't really adjustable. If the temperature gets above a certain level, a set of bi-metal contacts close and send a signal to the control box which activates the alarm. At our home it was a loud sort of buzzer mounted outside the bedrooms. Just below it was a test button. The old man made a habit to pushing the button every few days. This was in the days before smoke detectors. I remember holding a match under one of them to see if it really worked. It did. Today everybody realizes that smoke if far more deadly than heat, but in the 50s and 60s it was probably state of the art for a home.