I bought a SA304CN  yesterday. The main reason I bought it was for the mute feature. My understanding was that I could mute the alarm BEFORE it went off. Unless I am mistaken, it doesn't seem possible to do that. The instructions, which are horrible, say that to mute, I should press the silence/test button. The escape light will turn off. Well, the only way to get this to work is to have the alarm go off and then turn it off. 

I want to cook and not have the alarm go off, not cook and then have to turn the alarm off. 

It seems I can get around this by opening the battery door. That will work for me but they should design an alarm that would allow us to turn it off (for 10 minutes, say) by means of a dedicated switch, not one that sounds the alarm nor should we have to wait until the alarm goes off before we can mute it.

(It says "Mute" on the package cover and then they only use the word silence in the instructions. Why?)

The instructions are printed with a type that is too small to read and 98% of them are irrelevant. Simple, large-print instructions on A) installing the unit, B) testing it, and C) showing us how the mute feature works are all most people need. 

In the instructions it says to line up the battery with the + and - symbols. Those symbols are nowhere to be found. There is some raised text inside the battery compartment but it is practically impossible to read. If they used a high contrast color like black on the white background we could read the info.  That's just bad, cheap design. 

I figured that the correct way to put the battery in was seemingly the only way it fit. This was not intuitive. There are no visible traditional looking contacts when you look in there. The white posts that the battery comes in contact with are not easily recognizable as contacts. I discovered that by fitting the battery the only way it seemed to fit and then pushing the test button would get it beep so that must be the correct orientation for the battery. If they had clearly marked + and - symbols, we wouldn't have this confusion. 

The instructions say there is an LED. I have never seen it. They do not tell us where it is in the instructions. That is really bad. I would have more confidence that the unit was properly set up and ready if I could see the LED flashing. Do they mean the Escape Light? If so they should say so.

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