Um, no, I cannot say that I have ever mistaken the spiky sprinker head for the flat round red-light flashing appearance of a smoke detector; but I will have to keep this in mind for any future instances in which I am impared in both the visual and sensory departments.

But in seriousness... wow, that just bites. I hope you guys are able to get the landlord to let you move to a different unit. If he protests, just throw out the mold issue and say one of you has a mold allergy and you can't stay there for health reasons.

In the house I lived in during my junior/senior years of college, we had a similar situation with water, but caused by a very different situation. Our washer/dryer were on the second floor right next to my bedroom. The washer broke one year from old use and lack of maintenance. Basically the tube that fills the main washer basin up with water somehow detached itself from the place it is connected and was just pouring water on the outside of the basin rather than the inside - meaning it was basically just pouring it onto the floor. We figured this out the first time when one of my roommates put in a load of laundry, and when we were both in the living room we heard dripping in the kitchen and realized what had happened. Then despite the warnings to not use the machine until the landlord fixed it my other roommate (one of those people who is insanely intelligent yet simulatenously a complete moron) throws in a load of laundry one day and leave for class. We come home to water gushing through holes and light fixtures in the kitchen ceiling, and about 4 inches of standing water in the laundry room. Quite fun to deal with for sure. Especially since the landlord replaced the washing machine but did nothing about the water that had soaked its way into the walls and hard wood floors. With the hot and humid DC summer that soon followed, I don't even want to imagine how much mold is now growing in that house. EW.