I performed what is apparently called a 'shoryuken' by a colleague when I became incensed over the fire alarm screaming out over a fried egg I had allowed to smoke. Pulling little bits of beige plastic out of my knuckles gave me a moment of reflection to consider how technology can improve and disrupt our lives.
For the 20 dollars a regular smoke detector costs, I believe they should already have a large button you can press on the side that indicates "I promise everything is fine, I am in the house, alert, and am about to cause an issue. Please unconditionally do not beep for the next 30 minutes." That would replace everything good about this wifi gizmo.
Have you tried pushing the "test" button while it's going off? On mine it's "test/silence" and works exactly as you describe. This is a very common feature and in some places is actually required by building code.
It's unsafe to encourage people to pull the battery during a false alarm.
The beauty of the nest device is that it doesn't need a button. All you need to do is wave.
A button requires you grab a chair or broom to activate... and that can be dangerous. Additionally, those test buttons work for 2 mins before it starts sounding again.
You can buy a smoke alarm with a "Hush" button separate from the test button. Press the hush button and the alarm won't go off for the next 15 minutes. Easy & cheap. Since alarms are usually mounted near the ceiling, it helps to be tall.
Some smoke alarms have the battery holder in the front - pressing a button opens the battery holder and turns off alarm power. This is a de facto hush feature, albeit less safe than a hush button (because people will often forget to close the battery holder, leaving the alarm disabled).
I do not understand why people buy the cheapest possible smoke alarms for $8 rather than spend $13 to buy one with a hush button or $20 to buy one with hush + lithium battery (~10 year) built-in, e.g.,
In a very small condo I have two smoke alarms upstairs, two downstairs and an extra one that I just put here and there for fun (for instance, in it's current location it tells me when my neighbor is smoking outside his back door adjacent to my unit). I also have a CO alarm that _never_ goes off unless I'm testing it.
When I was a condominium association president I first offered free smoke alarm batteries. I soon realized that some would not ask for batteries and others would remove them from units. So instead I offered them an upgrade: new smoke alarms with hush + lifetime lithium battery which they could not disable without destroying. Problem almost solved: when in a unit I would sometimes find the new smoke alarm lying on a counter, uninstalled. I then offered to install alarms.
I was, of course, not surprised to read today's drudgereport headline: "FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: American adults dumber than average human". We now seem to live in an idiocracy:
I don't think a $100 premium is worth that especially considering placement can solve many of those issues. What WOULD be worth the $100 premium is if the sensors combined with the Nest thermostat could give me a better picture of my environmental health settings in the household or workplace. However, I don't think Fadell & co are prepared to launch something like that yet. I'll pass on the Protect and wait for something else.
The nest thermostat on the other hand is one the top of my list if/when I get my own long-term home.
If there's a fire to the extent you're continually waving within 8 feet of the sensor then chances are it's one of the alarm types you can't silence [1]
The ones I've had, even when you hit the "hush" button, it still makes a loud chirp every 60 seconds to let you know that it's hushed, but still detects smoke. This chirp scares the crap out of my dog.
Offtopic, but I used to rent a room in a huge old row house here in DC with a fancy "networked" fire alarm system. When one goes off, they all go off. You could turn it off by holding a button on the alarm... but it had to be the alarm that went off first. Makes sense from a design standpoint, but as far as I know there was no immediate way to determine which alarm that was, so there was a lot of running around with a broomstick (tall ceilings) pushing buttons.
In the college dorm I lived in, there was one networked system for the entire building (which was four ~80-bed dorms). It was so ridiculous that most people just stopped leaving when a fire alarm went off (the buildings are made of concrete and other not really flammable materials because it's Southern California) but the administration claimed they couldn't turn down the sensitivity.
Most of these also have dual battery/120v power. So there are usually 3 wires coming into the alarm: two (black + white) for 120v power and the third (red) for 9v signal. The usual way around this feature/problem is to disable (disconnect) the signal line at each alarm.
More than once my dog has tried crawling thru the bathroom wall to escape the noise. False alarms got bad enough when I was learning to cook a steak right that just the sight of the cast-iron frying pan would send him into hiding.
Yes, majority of fire deaths involve a non-working detector. Considering how severely & irrationally people react to false positives, anything that calms people into not permanently disabling the device is good.
A huge added functionality they could have implemented would have to roll in a home security function in there too. If they notice that someone has entered the home at an irregular time the app should send some kind of notification to the owner.
Maybe there should be an API for other developers to add that in?
Agree. All I can ask for is a giant 'false alarm' button and maybe that the controls not be located on the damn ceiling. I think everyone hates smoke detectors because they're such a hassle.
Really? Because mine does that... although it only goes off for like 2 minutes. It's quite handy since mine is poorly located and will activate when there's too much cooking smoke in the kitchen. I'm short so I keep a step-stool under the cupboard, and the alarm is next to the cupboard. Works for me.
You should replace it with a photoelectric smoke alarm, which is less susceptible to nuisance alarms. In fact, manufacturers are now starting to label them right on the package: "Best for kitchens and baths."
The problem is my last two apartments have had pretty high ceilings, so I've had to bust out the rolling pin/step stool to stab at it. Meanwhile my ears are bleeding out. And then when you have those networked alarms where after a certain amount of ringing, the rest start ringing, it turns into an "oh shit, silence the first one, gogogogo" situation
Nest is very adept at charging large amounts of money for solutions to small problems. Dealing with the shortcomings of modern smoke detectors is a minor annoyance at best, and (at least for me) isn't worth anything even remotely approaching what Nest is charging. Keep in mind that this detector provides no increase in safety, and if anything is a regression because it postpones alerting the user to prevent the annoyance of false positives. You are paying only for convenience.
Adequate smoke detectors can be purchased for $20. Is the minor increase in convenience really worth shelling out over 6 times that amount, possibly at the expense of safety?
(EDIT: as others have pointed out, this also serves as a carbon monoxide detector. The implication from the product page is that this product is designed to be placed on the ceiling. What could possibly go wrong?)
I was going to agree with you, and then I remembered the night that the smoke detector in my rental started chirping every few minutes. It was around 3 AM. We had really high ceilings, so if I stood on a chair, I could almost reach the smoke detector to disable it. It took a solid 15 minutes of my standing on my tippy toes trying to figure out what would make the chirping stop. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I was mere minutes away from using a baseball bat.
It turns out it was the smoke detector's "self-destruct" chirp. A new battery wouldn't even do the job. Had to buy a new smoke detector because the old one had reached its age limit.
That night if you had asked me to pay $100 so that I could go back to sleep and not have to worry about THAT CHIRP, I would have whipped out my wallet so fast.
We just moved into a condo which had a very old [Nov 1999] BRINK's home security installation that we didn't intend to use.
When we first moved in all the keypads said: "CALL 1-800-<WHATEVER> FOR SERVICE. NOT READY."
We were not interested in a home-alarm service, so we simply left them alone and went about our move.
Fast forward 3 months: these alarm pads would start beeping in the middle of the night.
We had a friend watching our house during the day: they'd _never_ beep during the day, not once.
Around 1AM though they'd go off and starting chirping in 15 second intervals.
The first night: we were able to silence it by hitting "CANCEL" on the keypad.
On subsequent nights we could silence it for [what seemed like] a random period of time between 15 minutes and several hours.
Perhaps it was just the sleep deprivation, but I swear by the fourth night you couldn't shut it up for more than 5 minutes at a time.
Fed up with the alarm: I headed downstairs, pajama-clad, with my multi-tool and a flash light.
---
Turns out: this is the "low battery alarm" -- we cut open the strongbox and disconnected a sealed lead acid battery and shut off the breaker. (Which coincidentally takes out our CO alarms, but it was worth it for the peaceful slumber.)
The battery did test bad so I disposed of it. (Shame: I wanted to repurpose it.)
It seems that these sorts of "self-destruct" alarms are DESIGNED to (A) go off when you're likely to be home (night-time hours) and (B) they are hard to ignore (e.g: exhibit some kind of non-deterministic pattern.)
Because the alarms are so annoying, people often end up disabling the alarms and never replacing them. That's dangerous in the long run. In the short run it's dangerous to try to disable an alarm in the middle of the night. I wonder if anyone has ever died from a fall while attempting to stop the chirping in a sleep-deprived state.
That's the thing: we still haven't replaced our CO alarm.
Given how integrated it is into the BRINKs panel: it's doubtful the CO alarms would've even worked while the BRINKs panel was powered but unactivated.
Now we are left with keypads [we don't want] and deactivated CO alarms bolted in to our freshly painted walls. sigh
I'm not particularly annoyed by the behavior itself: false alarms don't bother me, and a low battery alert is definitely a useful "error code."
What bugs me is that it should be easy to dismiss the "low battery warning" for _at least_ 8 to 12 hour windows. Long enough that you can actually get some rest and deal with it in the morning / after your shift.
Might make sense for fire alarms: but this home alarm system had a battery that was in a sealed strong-box in a midwestern US basement.
tl;dr: the battery, in this case, was in a room that is continuously controlled for humidity, temperature, and in this case: light.
--
The system usage should also be pretty static: as our house guest was home and presumably tripping the motion sensors all day. (Yes: even though the system was unarmed _and unactivated_, our motion sensors still appeared to be _sensing._ -- It's purely coincidence, but this ordeal started right around when the Internet was in an uproar over PRISM & the NSA.)
Retiring to our unprotected bedroom dwellings for the evening would've only _decreased_ the system's draw, if it had any impact at all.
That night if you had asked me to pay $100 so that I could go back to sleep and not have to worry about THAT CHIRP, I would have whipped out my wallet so fast.
See, you say that, but it isn't just one smoke detector. It's ALL of them. My small house alone has no fewer than 4 plus a CO detector. That's $500, real money to save me from an occasional hour of lost sleep or, at worst, an extremely rare night? The value proposition just isn't there.
The Nest Protect adds several hardware components that a traditional smoke detector doesn't have, including an ambient light sensor, a distance/motion sensor, a multicolor LED, and WiFi. If your only problem with the current smoke detectors out there is the chirp, then it can be solved by adding just the light sensor and LED, which is not a large cost addition. The additional cost of adding networking hardware, creating a protocol for these to talk to each other as well as the thermostat, and creating a mobile app just to configure the nightlight is what really drives the price so high here.
Hopefully the innovative ideas that they are using for conveying that a battery is low or stopping the alarm from going off when cooking make it into other designs. Quite frankly I don't see the benefit added from networking my smoke detectors.
Exactly. I have no interest in adding any more computer networks or nodes to my home, nor do I wish to provide Internet services on public IPs, etc. I don't need the complexity in my life, nor do I need the attack surface (nor the trade of legacy annoyances for modern annoyances).
BUT, I do need a smoke detector that doesn't make me want to kill myself every time I interact with it - I already have printers for that. Here's hoping there's an easy way to completely disable all networking on these devices...
I understand that conventional smoke detectors can be irritating, but I still don't see how an experience like that is worth an extra $110. I suppose the calculus is different for people with far more money, but for most people, I don't think that smoke detectors pose a large enough annoyance to warrant buying the Nest.
If you want to know, remotely, if your house is burning down, you can spend $450 a year for a monitoring service and who knows how much for a system that dials them in case of alerts, or you can buy Nest.
I see this as priced against monitoring services and systems that phone them.
The problem is Nest doesn't connect to a central monitoring center (as far as I can tell) and many insurance companies require central monitoring. I would love to have these, but I won't buy them if the insurance company won't sign off on them.
Well, if your house is burning down, and you're not in it, there's not anything you can do anyway, and you finding out before you get home doesn't change anything, so that's not that useful.
We're long past the point where you should be replacing smoke alarm batteries at all.
Put in a lithium battery. The lithium battery will last for the entire 10-year life of the smoke alarm. Thus, you should only replace smoke alarms -- not the battery.
In fact, these days, they're selling smoke alarms with sealed non-replaceable lithium batteries. This prevents people from attempting to use an alarm past end-of-life, and thus getting a false sense of security.
Oh whatever LOL. It'll be marketed as lasting a decade and value engineered to only last a year. You don't increase profits by making things last longer. By being sealed and making it chirp you'll force people to buy another instead of simply unpluging the battery.
The problem with a nanny state is eventually people rebel. The future of smoke detection is high profits for mfgrs and residents will spend an hour their first day in new premises disabling and disconnecting the devices. The overall effect on safety will be a profound net decrease, although theoretically on paper we'll never be safer.
I seem to recall seeing my first lithium battery smoke detector back in the 90s. I certainly haven't bought a non-hardwired detector that wasn't one of the 10-year lithium battery type in the past decade. (You'd have to ask my electrician what he just installed in my renovated house, I haven't looked too closely at them yet.)
Haven't given me any problems. Haven't heard about them giving anyone else any problems. You seem to be dismissing something that already has a proven track record. Why is that?
How much did the loss of sleep last night cost the above poster in their job the next day? It isn't about how much money you have, it's about how valuable your time is.
Unless you're a freelancer/contractor, the loss of efficiency probably costs you nothing. It costs your employer, so maybe they should be funding your smoke detector?
This reminds me of the HN post I saw a few days ago for a wake up call service - someone suggested "$20-$30 a year" for it. For an alarm. To wake you up.
While I don't doubt that people out there will pay for both, let's not kid ourselves that it will be a mass-market product. The value proposition is way off.
Smoke/Carbon Monoxide detectors have been an enormous issue for me.
Many of the detectors that use a 9V battery backup have a poorly designed chamber holding the battery. Often the battery doesn't make good contact with the metal contacts inside the detector. This results in constant false positives that the battery is low. When it actually does run low, I'm forced to start this cycle over and over again of: find "new" battery, alarm still chirping, is the "new" battery really low or is it the battery chamber misaligned again, etc.
The dog loses another 3 months of her life from stress whenever this happens. I've never seen an animal so scared of a constant chirp.
So when these things start chirping at 2am, and I can't tell if the batteries in the drawer are brand new, instead of dealing with a scared dog, and possibly buying yet more new batteries, the detector comes off the ceiling and ends up in a drawer of blankets to dampen the noise as the chirping takes awhile to die after the detector is removed from power and battery removed.
Additionally, I help with many things around our condo association. I'm constantly changing batteries in these detectors. But first I need to find them. You hear a chirp that the battery is low, and now you have to find it somewhere. Maybe it's in the common hallways of 3 floors of units, or maybe it's a unit owner's. This involves me walking around the building trying to catch one in action of chirping.
I've been a loud detractor of Nest in the past because of their use of Facebook ads spamming my friend list, but I welcome an intelligently designed detector and am going to gladly spend the money to buy at least two of these and will hopefully get the condo association on these. The dog is going to be very happy. :)
> the detector comes off the ceiling and ends up in a drawer of blankets to dampen the noise as the chirping takes awhile to die after the detector is removed from power and battery removed.
You can generally hold down the test button to quickly drain the internal capacitance (sometimes with interesting audio effects).
I bet there are CYA reasons that current smoke detectors are as annoying as they are.
Smoke detector or not, it is inevitable that there is going to be a fire, and people
will get hurt, and nobody wants to be the maker of a smoke detector that wasn't as
annoying as possible about signaling for battery replacement.
With the nest and the text message, I would worry about the text number/account credentials
getting stale/lost over time, and then when someone gets hurt in a fire there will
be liability shenanigans.
I wonder if they could use the motion sensor to alert people of a low battery. I'd much rather hear a chirp every time that I walk by than while I'm half way through a good night's sleep.
>> Often the battery doesn't make good contact with the metal contacts inside the detector. This results in constant false positives that the battery is low.
This is probably not bad design. The smoke detector is trying to tell you something.
It can hook into an existing Nest thermostat and turn off the HVAC, which could be a source of fire or CO. It also can serve as a low level light at night that's motion activated, so you can find your way down the hall without turning on the full set of lights.
Yeah, it's a bit pricey, but it's definitely better than the Thermostat for value and more within the price range I'd expect for a Nest device.
That's a nice safety feature. The other nice feature that most of the commenters here seem to have missed is that these devices are designed to improve your Nest's auto thermostat feature by knowing where people are in your house. You are basically putting an extra sensor for the nest in every room.
Actually, that might be the deal /maker/ for me. I am away from home for a day at a time, then when I work from home I'm nowhere near the thermostat, so the whole "sensor" thing doesn't really work - which, to their credit, they told me, before I purchased.
As a homeowner, it's way in the other direction for me. The thermostat does an excellent job of saving us money through our heating bills. And compared to other thermostats that can talk to a phone app or web app, it's cheap.
This however, will cost more than a comparable sensor for our simplisafe security system. It doesn't call into a central monitoring station, so I can't get the same insurance discount I do now. Nightlights are, imo, more or less of a solved problem, so I don't see that as really adding value.
I don't see this as priced against a $20 smoke alarm. I see this as priced against a smoke system that phones a monitoring service so your home is protected while you are away. These systems are easily $60 - $100 per unit plus the base station plus a recurring fee ($45/month in my area).
Nest pricing is far cheaper than the combination of these, while giving you active remote monitoring peace of mind.
I don't mind the chirps but I do often have huge problems finding out which fire alarm has a low battery - as some of our ceilings are (I think) 14ft going up and down a ladder multiple times isn't a lot of fun...
[A few years back our neighbouring apartment had a nasty fire - so I went out and bought a lot of fire alarms, fire blankets etc. - we weren't at much risk as our walls are about 1m thick sandstone. However, it did mean I ended up replacing all of the batteries in the "new" alarms at roughly the same time.]
My solution is to just go an replace them all. Much faster than trying to track down the one, especially in a 2 story house where the chirp echos and isn't repeated very often.
I don't know that one brand is that much better than another. But for something like a smoke detector, you'd probably feel better buying one of the big brands.
Just make sure they're lithium, non-rechargeable batteries, with an expiration date about 8 years in the future.
At their price point that is a pretty damn expensive convenience? How are they any different in requiring batter changes? At 129 I will just laugh it off as another appeals to people want others to think of them differently.
Nest is trying to market the same way as Apple does, they appeal to Vanity through different directions. Expecting people in the market segment to feed off each other.
The article says it pretty well. There are no horrible chirps, it'll alert you in a humane way that hey, your battery is low and you need to change it.
They've clearly found a problem (current alarms suck) and have made a solution. Just because you don't see the convenience doesn't mean other people don't, as is clear from the comments here. Once you get burned by regular smoke detectors in the middle of the night, you would pay good money for a product that actually fixes some of these issues.
My smoke alarm is connected to the mains electricity. No need for new batteries ever. Just a simple extension from the power outlets in the attic and down through the ceiling.
As I said, some of them have no overly obvious battery compartment. Either it's on the backside, or internally and you have to unscrew it open. Not all have an obvious battery compartment.
And it's incredibly annoying when you have to climb onto a chair/table/whathaveyou because your ceilings are so high you can't naturally reach it.
The one in my last apartment even had a big button in the middle. I thought I might be able to press it in order to turn off the alarm temporarily. That was not a good idea.
The one in my last apartment was electric, but I believe still had a backup battery. And still chirps like the devil if that goes out, but you can't even just remove it, because then it'll chirp at you for not having a backup battery in place. And there's no way that I know to turn that chirp off.
See how that might be annoying in the middle of the night with high ceilings in the first place, and no replacement battery available?
To be honest they also look kind of cool, while average smoke detectors don't. I imagine this being a big factor, since you're going to have one of these on the ceiling in every room.
There are a whole lot of product types where an adequate one from Walmart costs $20, but plenty of people spend $100+ on better ones. For instance, anything you can put in a kitchen. Not sure why so many objections to this product even existing.
This is also about those of us with means helping to mainstream the technology. As we buy and help work out the bugs the technology will (hopefully) become cheaper and more widespread. When this happens we'll find low cost and intelligent devices become more accessible and hopefully become standard fare in new homes. It has practically happened already for the smartphone. Who says it can't, and shouldn't, happen here?
When owners of commercial buildings disable life safety features, it is not uncommon for the Fire Marshal to require a fire watch (trained personnel on site walking around 24 hours a day) until the system is operating correctly.
A residential smoke alarm system without a battery as backup power source is not operating correctly[1]. A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms[2].
In the time it takes to download and install a smartphone app, one can probably replace all their smoke detector batteries - NFPA recommends changing them twice a year when clocks get reset for daylight savings time.
These are first and foremost alarms not detectors because there is no other annunciator device. Using the device in the way the manufacturer is suggesting - i.e disabling portions of it's alarm system - is how people die in dwellings.
Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.
This isn't disruption, it's fucking stupidity.
[1]Outside of retrofit applications, smoke alarms are required by the National Electrical Code [NFPA 70] to be hardwired and when located in a room used for sleeping on an arc-fault protected circuit. The battery is for backup.
[2]Though the kitchen is the most common location for a fire in dwellings, kitchen fires are among the least likely to be fatal because cooking usually is attended and occurs during waking hours. Many building codes also require a fire extinguisher to be located in the kitchen for new construction.
We all recognize the importance of fire safety, but there is no excuse for the design of smoke and CO detectors to be so painfully obnoxious. If it motivates homeowners to disable them, it is a bad design, isn't this obvious?
When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery.
I could go on, but all this is familiar. All they need is some thoughtful UI, and the Nest model looks excellent in this respect. It does not compromise safety - it will still go off if a human doesn't interact with it right away. It has other flaws (wifi required? no thanks; and probably expense) but this is an improvement over the "dumb" models.
Ambulances don't play cello sonatas. Minefields aren't marked with rainbows and kittens. The user interface for current smoke detectors is very thoughtful. It is based upon experience.
When alarms don't alarm, people often die.
When alarms are ignored, people often die.
Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug. The inconvenience of being kept awake by a smoke alarm battery tends to pale in comparison to the inconvenience of being kept dead.
Making them only once every thirty minutes is a bug not a feature.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by one of my smoke detectors beeping once because its batteries were low. But it stopped beeping, and did not flash or give any other noticeable indication that its batteries were low. There was no way to determine which smoke detector it was. (Or at least, none that I could figure out at 2:00 am.)
Any possible action was useless (I had no batteries handy), so I went to bed.
Thirty minutes later, same thing again. Awakened, couldn't tell by which smoke detector. I could think of nothing to do other than to remove all the batteries in all of my smoke detectors.
The fire alarms in all of my dwellings to date are wired into the mains.
Pulling the battery completely will simply cause them to beep incessantly.
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The BRINKS home security system I recently battled with (see my post elsewhere in this thread) had a lead acid battery that was used much like a UPS.
Luckily ours was a deactivated installation. Had it been an active installation there would've been NO WAY to disable the low battery alert aside from replacing the battery. (As disabling the panel entirely is the only option; which would've triggered a call to the police.)
Good luck replacing a 12V lead acid battery at 1 AM ... I have trouble finding them during my waking hours. At least there's a chance you'll have a decently charged 9V cell tucked away in a desk drawer.
>I could think of nothing to do other than to remove all the batteries in all of my smoke detectors.
The whole point is if you are kept awake all night by beeping THE VERY NEXT DAY you should go out and get new batteries so you aren't kept awake the next night. It is an urgent warning requiring an urgent response.
By being able to disable it or by removing the batteries you are apt to forget to install new ones, defeating the purpose of the warning on a life saving device.
You're not only saving your own life, the lives of your family, but the lives of the firefighters who don't have to enter the building to search for you because you woke up and got out in time and were able to tell them that everyone was out of the house safely.
I think you're missing the point people are trying to make: what matters is how people actually behave, not how they should behave. If the current design of smoke alarms causes people to disable them - irrespective of whether or not they should - then the design can be improved.
I'm not missing your point at all. People's behavior is reflected in the statistics regarding fire deaths and injuries as collated by the US Fire Administration.
It is collected solely for the purpose of saving lives by the very people who go into burning buildings and find the bodies. Claims on a website hawking smoke detectors as objects of desire are made for other purposes.
The statistics don't support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms. And the Nest website doesn't back up their claims with data.
You assert that it's a binary choice between obnoxious false positives and life-saving potential, but this is because current smoke detector design is at a local maximum which optimizes for life-saving potential. There's absolutely no reason to think that a fundamental redesign of the smoke detector interface (rather than incremental improvements) can both be less obnoxious and equally life-saving.
As a concrete example, I've been trying to get a friend's parents to install (!) a smoke detector for /years/. They cook incredibly smoky food (lots of yogurt-marinated meats on a dry cast-iron pan) and both they and most of the other members of their immigrant community have removed any smoke detectors near their kitchen because the false positives are so onerous. If it were possible to provide them with a device which they could easily disable during cooking, they would be more protected for the rest of the time.
Additionally, the specific statistics you cite are not designed to determine whether people are disabling their smoke detectors due to false positives, and so have no bearing on that component of the discussion.
My $30 detectors purchased last year have this feature. Not the magic hand-waving part, but if you press the button, it becomes less sensitive for 30 minutes.
I don't see any statistics in the document you cited that are directly relevant to "the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms", in one way or another.
Indirectly (on p. 8 of the first document), it looks like 8% of fatal residential fires had smoke alarms that definitively "failed to operate". A much higher percentage are ambiguous, with it being unclear if the alarm operated or if there even was one in the first place. That is certainly compatible with the notion that people disable their smoke detectors because of the nuisance.
Someone else posted this elsewhere, but it's also relevant here. Statistics from the National Fire Protection Association support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors over nuisance alarms:
Smoke alarm failures usually result from missing, disconnected, or dead batteries. When smoke alarms should have operated but did not do so, it was usually because batteries are missing, disconnected or dead. People are most likely to remove or disconnect batteries because of nuisance activations. Sometimes the chirping to warn of a low battery is interpreted as a nuisance alarm.
If my smoke detector makes an obnoxious sound during a controlled fire (like cooking) the product is defective.
You are ignoring the real problem here. The problem is "people who are inconvenienced by their smoke detectors such as an alarm going off when toast is burnt, tend to disable them - leading to death. How do we solve this?" Its quite obvious the solution isn't "Don't disable them" because if it was I'm sure nest's product wouldn't exist.
As a product designer, its very hard to change human behavior. If humans are disabling smoke detectors because they are inconvenienced, either the product is wrong, or user education is wrong. I'm hard pressed to believe you are going to educate people to not disable their smoke detectors while cooking, when people still by and large drive without seatbelts.
I think you missed the "A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms" part of the original statement.
Lets also not forget the people that rent. As a renter I cannot make changes to the house without approval from the landlord. I can, however, replace the smoke detector and leave the one that came with the house in a drawer until I move out.
The statement "A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms" may very well be true but it doesn't matter. People have and will continue to disable their smoke/CO detectors if they are annoying. The ability to simply wave at the detector to get it to shut off (Like after burning your toast) means that people will simply wave to shut off the alarm instead of disabling it.
Even with what I know about fire death statistics, best practices, and what not I have disabled fire detectors before for any/all of the following reasons:
* Low battery alarm
* Going off at just a whiff of smoke
* Randomly making noises even after replacing the battery
Now you can say that it was incredibly stupid of me to disable them, and it probably was, but that doesn't change the fact that people's first instinct is just to disable it.
Often placing it sufficiently far away from the kitchen isn't possible. I have a fairly large—by NYC standards—apartment. Our smoke alarm is around 3 corners and 20 feet down the hallway, but it goes off LIKE CRAZY. Basically if the stove gets hot, it's going to go off. We have 11' ceilings, and nothing I can stand on in the apartment is tall enough for me to reach it. After waving towels at it and poking at the silence button with a broom handle ad nauseam, I borrowed a ladder and took it down before cooking a big dinner for guests. I know I should reinstall it, but the silence has been fantastic.
So yes, I think the Nest smoke alarm does have a major upside: people in my situation would actually use it.
Not to sound too snarky, but I would look at your cooking technique. Also, as others have mentioned, a better smoke alarm may also alleviate the problem.
Cooking properly frequently requires lots of heat and creates smoke. Peek into a commercial kitchen sometime. I suffered a childhood of sad, grey, rubbery steaks until I grew up and learned you're supposed to sear them. Same with many other types of food.
Totally—when I moved in I figured I must have been burning everything so I started cooking more carefully and at lower temperatures, which didn't help. I searched the model number when I took it down to see if other people were having similar problems, and if I recall it's a new, high end FirstAlert model that goes for around $100, which puts the Nest at a pretty competitive price point, too.
So let's say the builder is a dumbass and placed it incorrectly. What homeowner is going to move it? I would guess the percentage is something along the lines of 1%.
I would. You would. But we're not the norm. Not all products are designed toward the DIY crowd.
No I wouldn't. My detectors are wired, and moving them means rewiring, which means tearing apart the entire ceiling. Not gonna happen, not by me and not by anybody I need to pay to do it. Luckily my builder wasn't a dumbass.
Seems a little myopic. The issue I believe is that enough of us in our home have experienced enough false alarms that basically give us a 'boy who cried wolf' mentality when it comes down to it. Few of us will risk staying in a building when the alarm goes off, even if it is a drill, because false alarms in those systems seem seldom.
Thus, the ability to handle a false alarm gracefully is much better than having to disable the alarm in a permanent fashion for a temporary situation or struggle with containing a smoking meal until the irritation is over.
As far as analogies goes, If ambulance sirens were used by their operators to beat traffic for say...a sandwich and we all knew, it, we probably would ignore it much like China, for example, does. But because the belief is that the siren is turned on only for explicit emergencies, we pay attention to it.
Minefields is also a poor analogy. A more accurate one would be a mine detector. If a mine detector would give off a false alarm every time it came across a stick, people would fail to heed its warning in a real situation. They in effect would learn to ignore it and then that one time they did go in a minefield they'd be blown to bits.
Furthermore, The vast majority of ambulance sirens heard are for emergencies, and the vast majority of people who've ignored a minefield or it's detectors have probably died stepping on an ignored mine. I'm guessing the many smoke alarms going off have been for false positives, if they weren't, we wouldn't be having this discussion which it seems everyone hear has experienced or knows someone who has.
> The issue I believe is that enough of us in our home have experienced enough false alarms that basically give us a 'boy who cried wolf' mentality when it comes down to it.
I'm a bit confused.
What the hell kind of shoddy product are you people buying that triggers on something that isn't smoke? Or are people talking about situations where there is smoke, from something burning, but that burn is small and contained and safe?
EG Burning the toast - you don't need an alarm because you know it's the toast. Except it's possible for toasters to stick and for the bread to catch fire and for that to spread to the kitchen cupboard which is over the toaster, and etc. Some people don't stay in the room when the toast is cooking.
Better placement of the alarms - not in bathrooms or just outside bathroom doors, and not in kitchens or just outside kitchen doors - helps.
> a mine detector would give off a false alarm every time it came across a stick, people would fail to heed its warning in a real situation. They in effect would learn to ignore it and then that one time they did go in a minefield they'd be blown to bits.
Smoke detectors are detecting smoke. They're not detecting cups of coffee or Bic biros or other unrelated things.
You're right, a smoke detector is detecting smoke... but some smoke is expected (like cooking) and some smoke isn't. The product addresses the problem of context. When we expect the smoke, it is a false positive, when we don't...it's positive. Many of us have made the mistake of ripping out the battery in frustration and leaving the smoke detector disabled despite the risk of living without a smoke detector.
As for your proposed solution. Drilling holes in the walls and ceilings, re-patching the the old installation point and doing this over and over to try and find a balance point of safe and convenient seems to fail the cost-benefit analysis compared to this product for me. I'd much rather buy the damn thing, leave it installed where it is as opposed to shifting it around.
My analogy of the mine detector was more about false positives in general usage, I guess if I were to correct it further, it would be a mine detector that couldn't detect an inactive/benign mine vs a malicious one.
So, people put smoke detectors in bad places. Why do they do this? The boxes in the UK clearly tell you where to put them.
Other people move into that property, and remove the batteries. Leaving the cover open? Leaving a flashing LED? Leaving a "no battery chirp"?
> Drilling holes in the walls and ceilings, re-patching the the old installation point and doing this over and over to try and find a balance point of safe and convenient
Measure twice, cut once and all that. :-p
I realise that I made many posts about this, but I do agree with you. Many people do it, and it is a problem, and it's good that companies are thinking about getting working detectors into homes, and I look forward to hearing about Nest saving lives because people have working detectors and not detectors without batteries or somesuch.
What exactly are you confused about?
Scenario A
1) Toast burns, no fire but lots of smoke
2) Alarm goes off, it's annoying so you wave your hand and turn it off. Problem solved.
Scenario B
1) Toast burns, catches fire and your whole kitchen is burning down.
2) You run like hell
Why would being able to disable a false alarm easier make it any less safer?
Edit: I'll also point out that EVERY single time we cook a steak in a cast iron pan in our apartment the smoke alarm will go off. It's really annoying I have to be the one trying to figure out how to silence the damn thing.
> The user interface for current smoke detectors is very thoughtful. It is based upon experience.
Is that so? It's not because it's a commodity device built with "lowest bidder" mentality out of the cheapest possible materials?
There are a lot of things that we are stuck with that are just plain stupid -- like emergency exits that are illuminated RED, the universal color of "stop", and only written in english. But the function of a smoke alarm doesn't have to be one of them.
I think you're spinning straw men here man. Reading the documentation it's clear this device sounds an audible alarm at the same concentration as old fashioned devices. It just has an add'l feature of an early-warning spoken alarm. And the wave to dismiss is no less safe than the push-button-to-dismiss that is commonly used.
>There are a lot of things that we are stuck with that are just plain stupid -- like emergency exits that are illuminated RED, the universal color of "stop", and only written in english.
Only in the US and Canada, most of the rest of the world uses the ISO standard universal green "running man" without letters.
You seem to be disturbed about this. Have you had close friends suffer this fate?
If not, you should cool your jets. Because this product aims to:
1. Make it less likely for people get annoyed at their smoke alarm and turn it off
2. Add a CO sensor which when paired with a Nest thermostat will turn off
your gas furnace
3. Save more lives than are currently being saved.
Ambulance sirens don't rarely have false positives, because there's a human operating them. If ambulances frequently drove around with their sirens on while not actually in a hurry, people would find it obnoxious, and they would quickly learn to not actually trust the sirens as a signal of a real emergency.
Maybe everyone here is just dancing around the point. A fire alarm that saves your life isn't annoying, it's awesome. A fire alarm that goes off cus you suck at making grilled cheese is annoying and has to be ignored and have it's batteries pulled until you can clear out the crappy cooking.
So the point is that smoke detectors today aren't "annoying," they're inaccurate. Their inaccuracy is a liability.
Nest's alarm doesn't seem to solve that dangerous inaccuracy.
Those things only matter if people use them. The page is claiming that many people would rather their smoke detectors just be off than to have to deal with their annoyances.
I'm not being sarcastic, but I wonder what the intersection of the sets of people who leave smoke detectors disabled for convenience and people who are willing to pay $120 for a smoke detector looks like.
As an aside, I genuinely have no idea what the fuss is about. In my entire life, I have never been bothered by a low battery smoke detector alert. I take 5 minutes and change the batteries in my detectors twice a year and they never ever beep.
> I genuinely have no idea what the fuss is about. In my entire life, I have never been bothered by a low battery smoke detector alert. I take 5 minutes and change the batteries in my detectors twice a year
This requires being very organized. If you are that organized, hats off to you. Many people (myself included, I admit) aren't.
I don't have any clocks that need manual changing. Haven't for years. And I rarely know what the date is unless some external stimuli makes me check. It's just not relevant to my daily life.
Your experience is not mine, and mine is not yours. Why is it so offensive that someone has tried to make my life better? Is it just jealousy that they didn't work on one of your problems?
I'm not even really conscious of microwave clocks still being a thing. I guess my microwave probably has a clock, dunno why I'd ever set or use it, though.
I just checked, apparently my stove has a clock, too. It's not set to anything resembling the current time.
Neither of these appliances are things I would ever look at when I want to know what time it is, so I just file them under things that are not clocks.
My clocks no longer require manual changing, and those that do I end up replacing... I haven't been sure when daylights saving time starts/stops for a while now and have been caught off guard when I end up being early at work because my body naturally woke me up at a certain time.
Why waste so many batteries? Ultralife last a lot longer ($4.50 bulk price / 8 years) per cost than alkaline ($1.50 bulk price / 1 year) and are less work.
From an expected value perspective, being kept awake by a smoke alarm has robbed me of more of my life than [chance of fire]×[chance of death]×[crappiness of dying]
If you asked the neighbors who might die in the fire stared in your place or the fire brigade who would have to run into your burning domicile to save you, the equation might change.
On the anniversary of the Chicago Fire, it might help to keep in mind that your smoke detector isn't just to keep you from dying a horrible death, but others as well.
> Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug. The inconvenience of being kept awake by a smoke alarm battery tends to pale in comparison to the inconvenience of being kept dead.
So there are only two choices? Dead or obnoxious sounds in the middle of the night?
> When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery.
Or, more likely, disable the device and forget about it. Which is what the OP says the fire department blames for deaths in home fires. The problem is real, and this device addresses it. It goes much further, and the wisdom of that is debatable, but some change is certainly needed.
>"We all recognize the importance of fire safety, but there is no excuse for the design of smoke and CO detectors to be so painfully obnoxious. If it motivates homeowners to disable them, it is a bad design, isn't this obvious?"
If you're being woken up by low batteries or disabling your smoke alarms - no, you don't recognize the important of fire safety.
>"When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery."
The battery backup in a typical residential fire alarm can last several years. Spend a few minutes and few bucks replacing the batteries once a year and it's unlikely you will ever have this problem.
I certainly expect a $130 alarm to offer something over the typical $20-30 counterparts and it appears this one does, but I certainly don't consider support for handwaving or delayed alarms to be among the benefits.
If you have an alarm that warns you only every 30 minutes, spend a little and get new alarms
A 30 minute interval is bad design, mine are like 30 seconds to 1 minute (been a while) plus they have a yellow LED when battery is low, red when dead or removed, and green when all systems go
> Over-riding their primary purpose for the sake of occupant convenience violates the basic principles of life safety.
For me, anecdotally, this isn't the case at all.
I had a fire alarm near our kitchen that was so sensitive it would go off at the drop of a hat. We kept removing the batteries because it wouldn't shut up. Occasionally after eating we'd forget to re-enable the alarm.
So, for me, the override is very much a welcome feature that improves safety. In fact, I think I'll be buying one.
I lived in an apartment where there was no fume hood on the stove top, the smoke detectors were in the living room half-way between the doors to the outside I was told by apartment management to open while cooking and the kitchen.
Basically whatever I was doing the damn alarms would go off. They were so sensitive that they would go off if I was boiling a pot of water, or if a single crumb in the oven "burned".
In the end the alarms ended up on my table, and every time when I would go cook I would remove the battery, and replace them when the time came.
My smoke alarm goes off semi-regularly when I cook, but I never remove the batteries when that happens. I just open up some windows, turn on the range fan, and start blowing air across the detector with a broom. The very principle of taking the batteries out bothers me, I wouldn't do it unless I had replacement batteries in my other hand.
How many people actually disable smoke detectors when they insult their cooking, and how many people just think that this is what other people commonly do? I suspect this is one of those "problems that everyone thinks that everyone else has, but few people actually do."
> How many people actually disable smoke detectors when they insult their cooking, and how many people just think that this is what other people commonly do? I suspect this is one of those "problems that everyone thinks that everyone else has, but few people actually do."
Every single person with sleeping babies? The people that need a working smoke alarm the most and are most likely to have sleep deprivation and most likely to forget to replace the batteries.
I also know most of the people I'm related to have pulled the batteries at one point or another. Unless you think it's some genetic defect to have struck both my mother's and father's lineages, that probably points to a wider problem, too.
At my mom's house growing up, we just did the wave the towel at it trick when it went off, which worked remarkable well. No windows open, nothing fancy. Just some vigorous towel waving for about 15 seconds. It would go off if you did so much as overboiled water.
Poor placement of the smoke detector, I believe.
I'm not sure if that disabled it for a few minutes or what.
I would have loved to have a range fan or a kitchen fume hood. However in my case opening a window meant opening the sliding glass door.
You are standing in the middle of my apartment, to your left is the sliding glass door, right above you are two smoke alarms, and to your right is the stove top/kitchen.
No matter how much I would have loved to open a window and turn on a range fan to solve the problem the damn smoke has to travel underneath/past the smoke alarms to go outside. No, my kitchen did not have a window in it.
I know a LOT of people that were living in that apartment complex that while they lived there removed the smoke detectors from the living/kitchen area and replaced them for the once a year that maintenance would come by to replace the batteries...
The maintenance guy even recommended to me to just take them down.
It wasn't really a danger either, there was a smoke alarm/CO detector in every bed room (which was 3 ft from the other smoke detector, but you can close bed room doors while cooking), along with a full building alarm system.
*>So, for me, the override is very much a welcome feature that improves safety. In fact, I think I'll be buying one.
You had an improperly installed fire alarm, so the safety-improving feature for you isn't to properly install a fire alarm, but to simplify the overriding of the alarm so you can continue to ignore an improperly installed alarm?
I'm saying this in a friendly way: you're being ridiculous. :)
I bet greater than 95% of residential fire alarms are false alarms. Now, perhaps all of those people should call a contractor and get their house rewired. (Even then, false alarms would not be reduced to zero.)
Or, perhaps, the fire alarms should be improved so that people can dismiss false alarms without pulling out the batteries.
If you're getting enough false alarms that removing the battery is a common occurrence, yes, you should get one fire alarm moved probably a couple feet. Which is not saying to get your house rewired in the slightest.
A good use of an override is for when something goes wrong. For instance, when you burn something in the oven and smoke comes through to the living room. You find the source of the problem, you turn off the alarm, and you deal with airing out your house. Something went wrong, you told the smoke alarm to be quiet because you're dealing with it, and you dealt with it.
The problem with your situation is that the smoke alarm is placed in a manner that makes your normal way of life be detectable as something going wrong. That isn't what overriding is meant for.
Moving a smoke alarm in my house would require re-wiring. Their primary power is wired, and they are all interconnected (one triggered detector will sound all the alarms).
In my apartment complex where I had this issue, it would have have required re-wiring, AND the apartment complex wasn't at all interested in making sure the fire alarm didn't go off if I was making toast...
One little crumb burns and all of the fire alarms in the apartment would go off, not pleasant at all.
At the easiest level, the "rewiring" is the least of the problems. When you move it, you now have to make a new hole in the ceiling to mount the unit and pass the wires through AND you have now left an old hole in the ceiling that will need to be patched, textured (to match) and painted (to match). However, depending on the direction your ceiling joists run compared to the direction the wires run in the ceiling AND the direction you need to move the unit, you might have to create a new hole in the ceiling big enough to get a drill in there to drill a hole through the ceiling joist to pass the wire into a new area of the ceiling. That is more to patch, texture and paint. While not something very difficult for a skilled tradesman [tradeswoman, tradesperson(?)], it is not something the average person is going to do satisfactorily themselves and would likely want to hire a skilled person to do it. Moving a wired smoke alarm isn't really much easier than moving a wired ceiling light.
This is common behavior. Yes, it's not "ideal" when considered along a single "safety" dimension. But when you're having a dinner party and you have a really annoying beep because you burned the main dish and you're already anxious, etc., it's a hell of a let easier to just disable the alarm.
Nest lets you "hush" the alarm without disabling. /Huge/ improvement.
I'm amazed that everyone is claiming the alarms are installed improperly. Aren't most of you in big cities in small apartments like me? The alarm is going off if anything happens when you live < 800 sq ft.
The fact that you're legitimately burning something and you smoke alarm doesn't go off is more of an indication that your smoke alarm is ineffectual than anything else.
That's not clear at all. The smoke from some toast burning and the smoke from your kitchen being on fire aren't necessarily the same in amount/duration/composition/distribution. Obviously an ideal detector would take such things into account and reject false positives.
I do not know the degree to which this is possible in practice, but certainly it's been true basically every place I've lived that the smoke detectors very rarely reacted to "typical food burning incidents."
I live in a tiny apartment. I have two detectors in my flat. I have another just outside the door. They're all tested twice yearly by contractors (and the fire extinguisher is checked).
I've never set them off by cooking, even with occasional accidents of food burning.
What guarantees are there and how does one locate a fire-alarm installer that offers a perfect installation that is impervious to toast burning or strong ovens? Any evidence that safety is degraded between the ability to wave off an alarm versus the oft-used removal of batteries? As the saying goes, the lesser of two evils -- we're only human.
All of our alarms are connected so when one goes off they ALL go off. We have a particularly sensitive alarm just a few feet from our kitchen. It goes off nearly every time we cook bacon. It has a large button right in the middle that will shut it off for a few minutes. It makes a fairly loud chirp when it has reset itself. The pantry is near so it is not too difficult to grab the broom and push the button with the handle. It would be nice to just wave my hand instead grab the broom. Same functionality... just better implementation.
I agree with original comment about the hand wave to dismiss feature. It shouldn't be made easy to dismiss an alarm.
At first, it seems like an awesome feature when you know the source of fire. e.g your kitchen.
But consider CO alarm cases. Top 10 reviews in Amazon for a Smoke alarm + CO detector talk about how CO alarm saved their lives. Most of the reviewers at first thought it was a false alarm. If it was Nest they would have "easily" dismissed it and probably died.
But that said, other features like motion detector, night light, syncing with Nest thermostat to shutoff the heater, cool design, make it a good buy. As long as I don't dismiss all alarms by default.
I did. Maybe I missed the fine print. It seems like you can dismiss warning and alarms.
"You can wave your hand in front of Protect to dismiss the beeping — essentially, like pressing snooze on an alarm. As long as the situation doesn’t worsen, then your smoke alarms will never sound."
"For severe issues, Protect may opt to bypass the "heads up" warning and simply sound the alarm"
Still it doesn't say that this hand wave feature will stop working in these severe situations.
Ofcourse, I am sure they will iron things like this out before shipping.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but all combined CO/smoke detectors I have ever owned have a distinctive alarm for CO. Usually a spoken alert warning of CO.
Indeed. a lot of this thread seems to be assuming that the makers are morons who didn't consult anyone, and have obviously made a product that is unusable and dangerous.
It sounds like you know what you are talking about, but I'm confused as to which portion of this product you are unhappy with. Is it the "wave to disable" feature? If so, I tend to agree -- that seems like a bad idea (it simply is too easy to dismiss something that could be worse than you think). But I assume that other smoke alarms have this feature too in button form (I don't know, I haven't had a false alarm in years)?
If that's the issue OP has with the device, then I don't understand why. They made the statement that, "[t]hough the kitchen is the most common location for a fire in dwellings, kitchen fires are among the least likely to be fatal because cooking usually is attended and occurs during waking hours." This is in reference to their assertion that alarms which trigger from cooking are probably inappropriately placed and should (presumably) be further from the kitchen.
So if you're awake, in the kitchen, attending cooking, and you dismiss the alarm, how is this different from having no alarm in the kitchen? It seems like it would be an improvement, full stop.
My mains powered detector has a disable button. It is interconnected to the other alarms in the building so it is essential to have a way of not waking up my neighbors when I burn toast. It works perfectly for me, but for an older person or someone who couldn't reach it could be difficult. A child proof button lower down would be better.
Sanctimonious bullshit like yours gets people killed. You're going to have a hard time pleading honest ignorance on this one; it has been clearly and repeatedly explained how false positives and bad user interface design in safety-critical equipment cost lives, and this company is trying to do something about that. If you're not going to be part of the solution, stop being part of the problem.
> Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.
The system does not allow you to wave away what it considers life-threatening alarms. Nor does it allow you to wave away a worsening situation.
Note that alarms can only be silenced in the room that triggered the alarm if the detector determines the alarm type to be a warning (and not as threatening).
Your angry comment makes it sound like the creators didn't consider safety at all — while in all likelihood they paid a great deal of attention to safety, also noticing there is a lot of room for convenience to be added in a modern smoke alarm.
> In the time it takes to download and install a smartphone app, one can probably replace all their smoke detector batteries
Are you suggesting that getting on a ladder in each room and then removing and replacing the batteries for each smoke alarm is faster than downloading a single app on a smartphone?
I'm confused. It looks like they're selling battery and wired versions of the device, and the wired version also contains a battery backup (according to the specs page - click "Show Detailed Specs" and it says it comes with "Three long-life backup batteries"):
I've never seen a residential smoke detector that wasn't primarily (and solely) powered by a 9-volt battery. Is hardwired power required for new construction?
Hardwired smoke alarms have been required on new construction in the US since the 1989 NEC. It usually takes a few years for cities and states to adopt the newest NEC revision. However, by now, all states have adopted at least 1989.
Hardwired alarms are also required for major renovations. However, you basically have to take it down to the studs before this requirement is triggered.
The requirement for renovations will vary based on locally adopted codes and their interpretation by building officials. In more affluent areas, the tendency will be to require upgrades along with relatively minor work. In less affluent or rural areas, the tendency will be more libertarian - i.e. building codes and their enforcement are subject to the political process.
The middle part of my house was built in 1920 and didn't have electricity at the time, then it had uninsulated wires on insulators, then it had wiring with crumbly insulation (the natural rubber gets hard).
When we added onto the house, we put in smoke detectors (in every bedroom and hall) that are powered by the AC mains, have backup batteries and if one goes off, they all go into alarm.
If my house is ever destroyed, it will probably be an electrical fire, but my family will know about it early.
I don't know about everywhere, but where I live (Oregon), many of the new homes have detectors that are not only wired for power (with battery backup), but also wired together such that an alarm at one will fire all of them. The devices seem to be mostly ordinary smoke detectors except for that connection.
Have you ever taken them completely off the ceiling or just opened the battery cover? My house has 120v/9v detectors and when I was installing fire alarms in new construction, all residential multifamily and hotels had 120v smoke detectors in the units which are interconnected. They also have 9v batteries for backup. Marriott hotels actually specify 24v system smoke detectors tied into the main alarm system. I know Home Depot sells battery only detectors but those are generally for retrofit applications. A contractor will likely have to install 120v in anything new being built.
It varies by state, but in Maryland, new construction requires it, and older houses are required to install detectors with sealed-in, long-life batteries or AC detectors by 2018:
Not enough thought has gone into some of these features. Take this:
"If Nest Protect’s carbon monoxide alarm goes off, your Nest Thermostat automatically turns off your gas furnace"
In a winter vacation scenario this could be disastrous. Nest decides to turn off the furnace, but the homeowner is away and unreachable. It doesn't take long for the temperature to plummet, causing water to freeze and burst pipes.
I think you'd want to know right away that you have a CO leak. You can call in an emergency utilities guy to drain the pipes - the internal insulated ones won't burst within a couple hours. And as the other commenter says, you can almost certainly restart the furnace or cancel this action.
In every single apparent I have rented I have turned of the fire alarm. Usually after the second or third time it goes off thanks to me cooking.
The same is true for my friends. Once they found a hidden old alarm where they wanted to bury their alarm. Apparently the previous renter also hated fire alarms.
One time the alarm kept beeping even after I pulled it off the wall and pulled out the battery. Holding it under water is a great way to stop that beeping.
No, I don't care what the statistics say, I don't smoke and I am not worried about dying in a fire. And this is AFTER I got caught in a real fire when crackheads started one a few floors down from me in a very old building I used to rent in.
Strangely I am usually a risk minimizer in the rest of life. I never speed for example.
This is a long very long way of saying this fire alarm will in my opinion save lives. I for one would NOT rip this out of my wall and drown it, specifically because of how it works.
UL 217 requires that silenced alarms can only be done so for a maximum of 15 minutes. If someone's home and burned their dinner or forgot to open the flue, is 15 minutes so bad?
Here is a clip from a radio talk show where a caller happens to have TWO smoke detectors chirping in the background because of low battery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phKAYe9T08A
Google 'Loveline Smoke Detector' and you will get about 40 to 60 unique calls of just these two radio hosts getting calls where the caller happens to have a low battery chirping in the background.
> Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.
It's a good thing that overriding their primary purpose isn't what's happening here, then.
It's sad to see this kind of negative, angry, straw-man stuff as the top comment.
In what way, exactly, does this product reduce safety? The fact that you can silence it more easily than a regular alarm? Do you think that "ease of silencing the alarm" is a large factor in whether or not an alarm is taken seriously? Did you not read the description, and not realize that silencing an "emergency-level" alarm is impossible?[0]
Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't understand what the problem is. Making a safety device less safe for convenience might be stupid, but making a safety device more convenient without reducing safety is not.
sorry, but you are ranting fucking nonsense. The fact that you think everyone should just do as they are told, does not make them do so. No one in their right mind would leave an alarm enabled that is destroying their quality of life due to pets or a child sleeping. They will disable it and forget/procrastinate on fixing it.
The truth is, products like this will save lives. Screaming like a neanderthal in favor of Jurassic tech that people disable because it doesn't do its job right is not going to decrease mortality due to fires.
No, because the situations where you do want to shut the alarm up (usually when you've burned something in the kitchen), you are basically saying "yes yes, I know, leave me alone"
But if you were asleep and were woken up by an alarm, you obviously don't know what it is.
Plus, the added benefit of the smoke alarm saying "Smoke in <some room>" is much more useful.
The more interesting thing here is how it interfaces with the thermostat and makes both better as a result. Turning off the furnace when the carbon monoxide alarm is triggered is worth it by itself. For those of us living in snowy climates with children, this is a big deal on its own.
In addition, the improved awareness of when you're home, extra safety lighting, etc are all interesting as well. I don't see this as a smoke detector a step towards a smarter, safer, more energy efficient house. Perhaps the discussion should be about what else it is, not necessarily that takes on the main role of a extra fancy smoke/CO detector.
Note that a smoke detector should be on the ceiling, and a carbon monoxide alarm at ~1.5m high on a wall. Putting it on the ceiling as well could very well result in late alarms.
(Source: a friend who nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning)
That's true for CO2, but CO is actually slightly less dense than air (1.20 kg/m^3 vs 1.23 kg/m^3 according to Wikipedia), and tends to mix with air or rise slightly above it:
Read the instructions on your CO or smoke alarm about where to place it. It's true that most CO detectors are designed to be placed on walls, but combo detectors are often built to be placed like smoke detectors, on or near the ceiling. You want to prevent both false negatives and false positives.
Where are sources of carbon monoxide poisoning? The only two off the top of my head are near the garage and the fireplace. You could augment this system with 2 more plug-in type CO monitors that would put them lower on the wall. For any other room that doesn't have a CO monitor right now this is just a bonus.
Gas heating of water in bathroom and/or kitchen is a very popular one. We had this discussion a while back here on HN, basically US doesn't have them, but Europe and UK still has a lot.
Perhaps the CO is generally produced mixed with other more heavier gasses and is colder, thus less conveyant.
I can't find source but I found a pamphlet that mentioned that when in fire you shouldn't try to crawl on the floor for risk of CO poisoning, or something.
CO is a product of combustion, and will therefore be hotter than the ambient air in most cases. The primary reason manufacturers say CO detectors should be a bit lower on the wall is to avoid false positives (well... not really false, just alarms for events you don't really need to worry about). A little CO emission is expected during the normal operation of gas/wood burning appliances. A CO detector at the ceiling might go off when it detects these little 'puffs' of CO. In practice, a CO detector should be averaging the level of a couple minutes, and not worry about short transient peaks (which is what I suspect the nest detector does).
If you're in a fire, stay low and get out. Source: I'm a firefighter.
There certainly are, although they're not typically intended for home usage. But in industrial/commercial setups which use CO2 (beer/drink-cellars, dry-ice handling, pressure pipe-flushing, etc) they're relatively common. Obviously they're always detecting some level, but they're set to trip or alarm when concentration hits some threshold over ambient. http://duomo.co.uk/CO2_Alarms.aspx is just one example.
Low-O2 detectors are also common, and approach the problem from the other direction. They're more useful for N2 or other inert gases, since you're less concerned with toxicity and more with plain asphyxiation. IIRC they're used in some places to enforce "No riding in the same lift as the liquid-N2 dewar" safety rules.
Not really, you can buy CO2 sensors COTS for HVAC guys to prevent "stuffy" rooms. Its industrial grade product and price and you won't be buying them at walmart but the UI is very HVAC-dude oriented. Also if you sell dry ice you're supposed to own a permanently wall mounted one even if you officially keep the stuff outside (depends on local building code and licenses and regs I'm sure)
There's a different UI for combustion gas analyzers, most any HVAC guy owns one if he does furnace work. They're about an order of magnitude more expensive and the ratio of CO2/O2 tells you quite a bit about the level of draft (and they usually have a CO sensor too which only comes into play when draft/mixture is tremendously rich)
Everything I've seen shows that it generally tends to mix with air or rise slightly due to its slightly less dense weight, and all the sources I found say you can either use the ceiling or wall.
Due to the second law of thermal dynamics, I question the battery status of your friend's CO detector, as CO will fairly quickly equalize throughout the area.
I think this comment should be much higher. I agree, this isn't just a fancy smoke/CO detector just like the Nest isn't just a thermostat with an iPhone app. It's a thermostat that will save you money by automatically adjusting to heat/cool your house as needed. This is not just a smoke/CO detector but rather a way to network all your detectors together, have them tell you (Actually talk to you) where the fire is, easy dismiss ability, night light, remote monitoring, and more.
I see this as the real value to those with potential CO sources in their houses. You pay out the nose for home insurance all the time and rarely need it. The proposition here is insurance that if another piece of hardware malfunctions and could possibly kill you, these two devices working in tandem can possibly save you or someone else in a home.
The point of the Nest Protect is not that they are selling a fire alarm. It is that they are selling peace of mind. You trust it more, because you interact with it more. It talks to you, you can see it glow green, it lights up when you walk under it. Sure, you can replace all your batteries really easily. But do you KNOW that the alarm is going to work? You never interact with it until your life depends on it. Nest increased your interactions with the device, thereby increasing your trust in it.
I really hate the peace-of-mind marketing gambits. They almost all revolve around creating a fear you didn't have before, and then proffering to save you from your newfound fear.
Which part do you hate, that humans have the biological flaw of fear/ego being their greatest motivator or that we live in a market economy that feeds into it?
"Predictably Irrational" is a brilliant book about this subject. Consumers do not buy things rationally. And the answer is not simply exploitation by marketing companies (although that is a big part of the narrative).
> Sure, you can replace all your batteries really easily. But do you KNOW that the alarm is going to work?
Sure. Push the button labeled "Test." (Cover your ears -- you should still be able to hear it.)
Seeing the green glow on the Nest doesn't tell you that it'll wake you up when it goes off. So you have to test it anyway. Which makes it no better than a regular detector, from the assurance perspective.
Hmm, perhaps Nest should update their terms of service? This clause in particular should make someone think twice about buying a safety device from them:
(c) Reliability of Notifications. You acknowledge that the Services, including remote access and mobile notifications, are not intended to be 100% reliable and 100% available. We cannot and do not guarantee that you will receive notifications in any given time or at all. YOU AGREE THAT YOU WILL NOT RELY ON THE SERVICES FOR ANY LIFE SAFETY OR CRITICAL PURPOSES. MOBILE NOTIFICATIONS REGARDING THE STATUS AND ALARMS ON YOUR NEST PRODUCTS ARE PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY – THEY ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR A THIRD-PARTY MONITORED EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION SYSTEM.
Worth repeating:
"YOU AGREE THAT YOU WILL NOT RELY ON THE SERVICES FOR ANY LIFE SAFETY OR CRITICAL PURPOSES"
Don't buy a safety device from a company that claims this!
The word 'Service' is capitalised, implying that there's a definition elsewhere in the ToS. I found it at the end of the very first paragraph.
"The term 'Services' means the Site, Web App, Mobile Apps, and MyEnergy Service" (NB those terms are defined earlier in the same para).
In other words, don't rely on the above things for life safety. That sounds fine to me and I also note that the video does not show alarm messages being sent to phones (though I'm sure it's a feature).
A better question is in the absence of the above, will the alarm still go off if there's smoke/CO etc? In the UK, I doubt you'd be able to 'disclaim' your way out of it and there are probably minimum functionality/safety standards required before you could even market safety products. I'd expect the US to be similar.
It's still not clear. The services and the products seem to overlap, especially as it is all software (the smoke alarm certainly has firmware/software on it to make it operate more intelligenttly)
As the ToS also states:
"AS DESCRIBED BELOW, YOU ARE CONSENTING TO AUTOMATIC SOFTWARE UPDATE OF THE SERVICES AND OF THE PRODUCTS CONNECTED TO THE SERVICES. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, YOU SHOULD NOT USE THE SERVICES."
The software, hardware and services are all closely tied together. The ToS has links to them all, and a failure in one part could easily be blamed upon the services and hence Nest could claim no responsibility.
Again, I am not seeking to blame Nest here, I think they just need to update the ToS to make it crystal clear that they do think their new smoke alarm is a safety system and can be relied upon as such. Terms Of Service are often horrendously written and users should complain about such things to fix them.
Product is also a defined word [1]. I do understand what you're getting at but I disagree about the overlap you allude to. The ToS does delineate the difference between Services and hardware (Product). Failure in the firmware or software on the Product following an automatic update is clearly not an issue with Services (note deliberate capitalisation).
I'd say the terms are pretty 'clear' about the differences in Services/Product but, as with all ToS, you need a fairly high reading level and sufficient time to properly understand them. That's why I put clear in quote marks. You may be arguing that they could be expressed in more human terms but that doesn't make them any more specific.
Where did you find this? The only place I could find it was on their terms of service page (http://nest.com/legal/terms), in which they explicitly are referring to the website & associated apps:
>> The term “Services” means the Site, Web App, Mobile Apps, and MyEnergy Service.
I don't think that this applies to the actual alarm... good thought though...
It is unclear at best. The ToS do mention that they are '...all for use in conjunction with Nest hardware products' so I'm not trying to be deliberately misleading in claiming that they relate to the operation of the smoke alarm.
I'm sure that Nest don't mean anything bad but the ToS and its legal reach is far from clear. This (to my knowledge) is the first safety device that Nest have produced, the ToS had been written earlier to make it plain that you shouldn't rely on their other products for safety. They need to update the ToS for the new product, basically.
Find a household safety device (smoke alarms and such) that doesn't have similar warning. If they did guarantee it worked 100% of the time and it malfunctioned for whatever reason, they would be opening themselves to a lawsuit.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in Canada, if you try to sell a safety device and put in your TOS that the device should not be guaranteed to provide any safety (even when used properly), the courts will throw out your TOS.
You can't sell a safety product and then pretend it doesn't do anything.
I'm interested in the number of people in this thread who have little idea about how their smoke detectors work - where to put the batteries or what the flashing LED means, for example.
Smoke detectors are a safety critical device which save many lives each year.
It's fucking stupid to not know where these are, and how to keep them serviced. Recommendations are that you test smoke detectors each week. 9v batteries are, for this purpose, dirt cheap. Change all of them at the same time. Or buy a more expensive detector with a 10 year battery. (Or buy the Nest device.)
* Once a week test each alarm by pressing the test button till the alarm sounds.
* Once a year change the battery (unless it’s a ten-year alarm).
* Twice a year open the case and gently vacuum the inside using the soft-brush attachment to remove dust from the sensors. If it doesn’t open, vacuum through the holes.
* After 10 years it’s best to get a whole new alarm.
If you're living in an apartment building you can get fire alarms which tell you the zone an alarm is triggering in, which tells you what detector is having a problem with its battery.
Some people are comparing the Nest device with regular smoke detectors. That's gently misleading because the Nest alarms can link. That's nothing new, plenty of alarms link, but they are all more expensive than just a regular alarm.
>Smoke detectors are a safety critical device which save many lives each year.
From what I can tell only in places with wooden buildings though. e.g. I don't know of a single house that burned down. Not one in my entire life. Its just a non-issue here (South Africa).
The closest I can think of is a house that was leveled by an exploding gas cylinder. (Attempting to melt gold on a gas flame in backyard shop...)
You have nothing that is flammable in your house? What about electric fires? What if your computer caught fire in the middle of the night?
I grew up in a brick building. We had two house fires there when I was growing up, though neither in my apartment. Sure the house didn't burn down and they were pretty self contained, but those were still potentially deadly situations. Luckily all the tenants escaped.
The most common way to die in a house fire anyway isn't by burning, its by smoke inhalation. If there is a fire in the next room billowing smoke, you aren't likely to wake up and you're going to inhale all that smoke.
>You have nothing that is flammable in your house?
Curtains I guess. And wooden furniture. The only real hazard is the sofa and thats a good 1.5 meters away from anything that could cause a flame.
>What about electric fires?
Nope. Our electrical codes have always been light years ahead of everyone else & other places are still trying to catch up. e.g. SA required ELCBs in 1954. UK in 2008. USA...hopefully soon.
We also don't get tornadoes, floods, earthquakes or blizzard. Well actually we do have earthquakes but you'd need to pay attention to notice.
The only real danger in terms of fire is lightning. For that the at risk places have these massive free standing lightning spikes ( http://i.imgur.com/Sv0pdre.jpg ). They're like 30m or something so if the calculations are right then its +- bulletproof. Finding a pic on google was quite a mission, so I'm actually kinda curious now how other countries solve the lightning problem.
>What if your computer caught fire in the middle of the night?
Its on an aluminium stand, which in turn is on ceramic tiles. I'd imagine the ELCB would trip long before it even caused a flame though.
Lots of things are wrong with South Africa (Crime, HIV, road deaths etc), but they nailed the electrical codes & fire dangers 50 years ago.
The future of these is interesting to consider. After a software update...
- Stream music across the house
- House-wide doorbell tone (after they sell you a $99 doorbell kit)
- Hook up to security system
- Remotely audio monitor your home (babysitter, cheating wife/husband)
- Siri type functionality. I can wake up and say "Weather" in my bedroom.
- Alarm clock
At this price point they won't be popular enough to really ignite further innovation of the devices though.
Poorly designed smoke detectors are a real problem. They can be overly sensitive to some kinds of fire and completely miss out on other kinds. Tests are extremely irritating and difficult to perform, so people don't perform the tests. Low battery warnings are just irritating enough to let you know there's a problem, but not consistent enough to let you know where the problem is. (I once replaced every battery in every smoke detector in the house, twice in a week, before I finally figured out that the low battery chirp was coming from a long-forgotten CO detector behind the refrigerator.) And nuisance alarms can be very difficult to dismiss, so people disable the alarm entirely, and then have even more difficulty getting it back in place. These are real problems.
The Nest smoke detector ($129) seems to solve these problems. The thing is, if you've got these problems, you've probably spent less than $20 on smoke alarms in the last decade, either living with whatever came with your house/apartment, or buying the cheapest ($5-10) smoke detectors on the market. User-friendly smoke alarms are available for about $30, and they solve most of the same problems the Nest solves. They're not as slick, or network connected, but they'll do the job.
I absolutely love my Nest thermostats, and I think they were worth every penny. I'd buy them again in a heart beat. So I have faith that this will also be a great product. But the problem is that my house needs two thermostats, but 12 smoke alarms. If I only needed 2 or 3 of these, I might be tempted. But I can't see spending over $1500 on replacing my smoke alarms. I suppose maybe they don't all need to be replaced, but if it doesn't interoperate with my other hard-wired smoke alarms, it could actually be a net decrease in safety (if the non-Nest alarms start going off and the Nests don't).
Same situation. I have two Nest thermostats and I love them, but there's no way I'm going to drop close to a thousand dollars on replacing all my current (functional) smoke alarms. The price point is just wrong -- I hope they adjust it down the road apiece. I'd rather spend them money replacing lightbulbs with LED.
Yes. Ever since I got the thermostats, I've wanted add-on sensors for other rooms. The placement of the thermostats in my house is not great for setting the temperature in the rooms I actually care about, so it would be great to have additional small sensors in the primary living areas. It seems like they could make it an all-in-one device -- a Nest extension that works with both the thermostats and the smoke alarms.
Would like to see a model more like Ninja Blocks (base device with inexpensive remote sensors) then the idea of buying several more expensive components.
Would have been ground-breaking if the Nest smoke detector was a $20 or $40 networked addon to the original Nest thermostat.
Its probably just me but both of Nest's products are not necessities. I mean they are nice to look at but I don't care much about the problem they solve for me to go and switch. And they are usually twice the price of a regular one so there is that.
I wonder what the split on Nest thermostat sales is between new construction/refurb builder/contractor installations vs. "end user". Whatever it is, I think the smoke detector will be more skewed towards the former.
$129 is a lot for a consumer, especially without all the immediately tangible and potentially cost-saving benefits of the thermostat. But for a developer selling a condo, being able to advertise "Nest fixtures throughout" might be worth $1000.
I love my pair of Nest thermostats, but don't feel motivated to buy this.
The link text says "Smoke Detector", but I only found "Smoke Alarm" on the Nest page. I used to work for a smoke detector manufacturer. It's been over 10+ years, but there was a clear delineation between home "smoke alarms" and commercial "smoke detectors". Detectors had central monitoring and usually were linked to an outside service. Alarms were standalone and sold to consumers.
One thing that's interesting is that the video shows it uses photoelectric smoke detection. Most home systems use ionic detection, which is better for large particulates. When these sound, either the house is already on fire or you burnt the steak. Photoelectric detectors are better for detecting small particulates - the smoke before the fire - and they are less prone to false alarms.
> Most home systems use ionic detection, which is better for large particulates. ... Photoelectric detectors are better for detecting small particulates - the smoke before the fire - and they are less prone to false alarms.
Other way around. Ionization detectors are more sensitive to small particles, while photoelectric detectors are more sensitive to large particles.
Large fires tend to burn "cleanly," producing smoke particles that are not too visible. While smoldering fires tend to produce lots of visible smoke -- the type that a photoelectric detector will identify.
[Slaps forehead.] I got the fire type / particle size reversed. The sad thing is I actually took the fire marshal's exam on the subject. But I guess, like in college, the moment I walked out of the exam room my mind became a clean slate.
I don't think the definition of detector is a stretch here, depending on how Next implements it. The units will talk to each other, so presumably there is a master node playing the monitor role, and it could certainly phone home in an event same as the thermostat unit does.
Is it, really? I mean couples routinely blow that on 1-2 dinners out without any thought at all, at least in the demographic they're targeting. You're paying something like a 2x purchase cost for a much smarter, well-connected device – that seems well within the range that upscale consumers will pay for almost any sort of better made appliance or furnishing.
Most fire departments will also give them to you for free. My brother is a professional fire fighter and always has a box of them in the back of his truck to hand out to people. They'll even do volunteer events where they'll come and inspect your house to make sure you have proper placement and they're not too old.
At $60 each I might replace the 5 I have in my house, at $130 I don't think so.
A photoelectric smoke detector seems to be around $20 on Amazon and CO alarm is ~$30, so you're right - it's between 2-3 times more. I was basing my comment on the actual pricing seen on the shelf at hardware stores here (DC), which is higher.
That said, it's hard to compare the base price without starting to talk about features: i.e. the cheaper detectors on sale around here tend not to have things like the LED needed to tell which of 5 alarms is currently going off. That part costs a few pennies but the pricing jump to get it much higher, at least for what was on offer at my local Home Depot last year when we replaced everything.
As other people have pointed out, the Nest detector uses photoelectric detection and multiple of them will link together. Comparing it to a $20 ionic detector is apples to oranges.
Having recently bought a newly built house, I'd say that it's more likely that they'd offer the option of Nest fixtures throughout for the low, low price of only $1,000 extra.
In my area building codes require they install smoke and CO detectors. One such contractor just advertised their new condos as being super intelligent.
I just tore one off my ceiling and threw it into the garage at 3am just last week. I was excited about this one until I saw the price. $129! Yikes! I got a few lithium battery detectors at Home Depot for $20 that are supposed to last for 10 years.
I have a box full of shards of smoke detectors that I have ripped off the ceiling and hurled down the stairs because they went off while I was cooking, or making tea, or sneezing nearby. The nest thermostat is fucking stupid, but this smoke detector appears to be a genuine improvement. I would pay twice this price if it works.
Why do you think this? It's been a huge win for me. I routinely forget to adjust my thermostat when I leave the house, even sometimes on out-of-town trips. You could argue that I'm just a dumb idiot -- OK, that's fine -- but this hasn't been a problem since I got a Nest. Add in the other (relatively minor) energy conservation features and the savings have been pretty big.
I found this line in The Verge's interview with Tony Fadell (Nest's CEO):
"And if the Protect senses a carbon monoxide problem, it’ll instruct the thermostat to shut off your furnace."
That is of utmost importance. That alone makes it by orders of magnitude the safest carbon monoxide detector made. The integration is going to make all the difference.
I want my future home to be setup with this stuff.
My only disappointment: It does not report back temperature to the Nest thermostat.
This will find its biggest market (I think) in NYC apartments - you only need 1 usually, and tiny unventilated kitchens are a near guarantee to send off an alarm.
I lived in an apartment where we essentially had a broom handle hanging next to the alarm because it was inevitable, and during Sandy blackout the thing constantly chirped because its landline was disconnected. Not a good experience.
I love these new takes on old devices, however, my five $15 smoke, heat and co2 detectors from different brands have been proven and tested over time...
I wouldn't want to be the one that finds the first bugs in this new nest smoke detector.
And even if it's tested well I really don't see why I would want to pay upwards of $100 for a smoke/co detector, when I can get them for about $10. It's a device you buy and don't want to use, ever. I'd rather spend the money on routine checks on possible CO sources (oven, heater, ...).
Normally I'd agree, but the current crop of devices demonstrably have exactly that problem - they get disabled because of chronic false-positives. So some improvement/complexity is called for.
I would also agree about limiting the complexity, but I do think there's something to be said for the benefits of having the additional technologies the Protect offers, coupled with the ability for the Nest team to update them ([1]) as improvements are found.
It seems to me that as usage increases, the Nest team can use that data to come up with additional features that could incrementally increase the safety of your home over time, however small that increase might be. The obvious caveat being that the updates need to be safe as well, but I think the long tail of a product like this could be increased safety over time, which to me sounds attractive.
Not to mention the benefits this adds if you already use a Nest. We have two in our home and the ability for it to know more about the temperature in different rooms is something I've wanted since we installed them.
By law my house requires 3 (that I can remember) smoke alarms. $390 to use Nest Protects instead is far too far above the price of convenience, even $130 is about $100 more than I think a good smoke detector should cost.
Nest's marketing seems to target a wider range of people than that which I think would be interested in their products. I've worked in an Apple reseller, I've seen how much disposable income most people have, and Nest are massively over-targeting their products. These are for the guy who used to buy 2 iPods, in case one broke.
This is a home expenditure. It's not for a temporary product like the ipod. Lots of people have entirely different budgets for permanent objects in their home. Upgrading that beige blemish of a smoke detector purely for looks will be worth $130 to many.
My city requires a smoke alarm both outside and inside each bedroom. For my 5 bedroom house, that's over $1000. But the fact that I've had to wake up 3 times in 3 years in the middle of the night to disconnect all 5 "exterior" alarms to clear the "carbon monoxide" (low battery) noise makes it kind of worth it...
I think (just like the thermostat). This is a trojan horse. Nest trying to get a sensors into your home. Specifically presence sensor in every single room of the house. This will be their foundation for a vastly improved home control UI. They will take the lessons they learned with the learning thermostat temperature control and use that for the rest of your home, with the input being location, number of people, etc...
At least that is what I would do if I were Nest :-)
I like my Nest thermostat, but I'm more inclined to add smoke detectors from Simplisafe to my security system. They're cheaper, and offer more of an insurance discount because they report to a central monitoring station.
I would've liked to see Nest go more towards home automation, or work with window AC manufacturers to integrate Nest controls on their boxes. I'm not too keen on Nest branded smoke detectors.
Why is this not a dual-band wifi repeater (and maybe even bluetooth audio device, as well)?
I was really hoping that all the stuff on the ceiling would take advantage of the prime physical position there once it all became smarter. As it stands, I love what Nest is doing but I'm pretty underwhelmed by this. The motion sensor integration with the thermostat is a good start.
So they should only offer it on the wired ones. Would be quite a good sell, actually (probably best left as an unsupported "hack" so Nest doesn't have to provide support for failed wifi topologies).
I meant more for voice recognition stuff that is keyword activated. Presumably with better mic coverage we will eventually not have to hit the button to activate siri/now.
Wow, after my experience with Nest thermostat, there's no way I'd risk having a Nest Smoke Detector. I had Nest Thermostat for 3 months. Initially I loved it, but then it kept "think" I was gone when sleeping on the 3rd floor wake to a freezing house. Ok, minor annoyance, disable that feature. Then after a long business trip I came home late to again find a freezing cool house, but this time the Nest had bricked itself. Rest didn't help, support didn't help. So since there is no manual override, I had to uninstall it and reinstall the 20 year old "programmable" thermostat that actually worked. Since I had to uninstall it I told Nest they could have their brick back and refund me.
Now they want me to take that risk with a smoke alarm bricking itself??? Crazy.
Pretty cute, waving at the alarm to shut it up, which is what people often do anyway to try to get smoke from cookie away from it. Would have been more fun to just be able to yell shut up at it, though. :) Although I guess you have a user training requirement for that.
This smoke alarm looks very complex, and the amount of risk increases with the level complexity. For such a complex product, I would want to know some insights to the following.
What safety standards have been applied to the software development and product development?
Does it need wifi to work correctly?
Can you connect it to the mains power?
How secure is the wifi connection? ie Can it be hacked for malicious purposes?
etc.....
For something so critical to a life and death situation, I want something to function as simple as possible.
Security of the wifi device and it's connection to the internet.. not enough people are talking about this.
So many "internet enabled" devices out there are poor on security. I would love to hear from the people behind Nest on how they plan to take on internet attacks.
Thanks for that link. I suppose it's good that some effort from experienced people has been made, but this really concerns me that the security stiffening was a "side project" of some Google folks.
"Board member and investor Bill Maris of Google Ventures says that some of Google’s security team helped stiffen Nest’s safeguards as a side project."
I don't care what anyone else says, this is a genius idea. I cannot believe that nobody has ever thought of creating a smart smoke alarm like this before. I think many of us have been guilty of taking out our smoke alarm batteries when it goes off because you like your steaks well-done or burnt your toast because you had to pee. And I know a few people guilty of removing the batteries from smoke detectors because they're chirping that the battery needs to be replaced and can't be bothered to replace it, which is plain stupid and dangerous.
The one issue with smoke detectors that Nest solves is not the annoyance of it going off during dinner, it's the annoyance of when you have multiple smoke detectors in close proximity and you can hear one of them chirping randomly that its battery needs replacing, but you don't know which one it is. You stand around like an idiot waiting for it to chirp again, but it's so random you get frustrated waiting and give up. The colour coding aspect of this product alone is something even generic cheap smoke detectors should integrate to better show when batteries need replacing. I think it would save lives.
I bought 2 Nest thermostats and have been happy with them. The $500 price for the pair was a bit steep but it was not insane. This looks nice too and at $130 for one it does not sound that bad... at first. But then as I count off all the units I need to replace in my house... I get to 12. I have 12 freakin' smoke alarms in my house. I don't think I'll be dropping $1600 to upgrade my house with Nest Protect. :/
I loved the idea of caring about design and making expensive, excellent versions of simple household products.
But I think they really jumped the shark with this. I reeeeally don't like my smoke detector having a million apps in it, and needing an app to connect to it. If it is at all connected to the Internet (and not just a closed-loop system), that's pretty scary to me unless the security model is absolutely sound.
Are you married? If so I'm surprised if you've never gotten the "OMG I THINK I LEFT MY HAIR STRAIGHTENER ON AND I'M SURE THE HOUSE IS BURNING DOWN. Can you go check?" phone call. (Which, incidentally, has resulted in several hours of lost time at work but no still no sighting of the wild forgotten-plugged-in-hair-straightener)
I love my Nest thermostat but don't feel the need to buy this product. Speaking for myself, my smoke detector and I already have a great relationship. It stays out of the way and blares its siren when it thinks my house is in danger. Those of us in newer homes often have hardwired detectors that rarely require battery replacement. And I don't want or need yet another app that simply tells me that my house isn't on fire.
I think the disappointing part about this product is that I feel like on a priority list of classic household items that Nest would be wise to reinvent, the home smoke detector isn't high on my list. One thing I'd love for them to create and sell to me is a build-your-own home alarm system that uses my home internet connection as a means to connect to a monitoring center and provides a good mobile app experience. I've been shopping for an alarm for a while and all of the current products out there are terrible and archaic compared to what a company like Nest could provide.
What problem does this solve? For the 5 times a year the smoke alarm goes off because I'm burning something in the kitchen, I have to get a chair to push the 'hush' button?
"Wave to disable"??? Are you kidding me???
Sorry - anything could accidentally disable a life-saving device is pretty darn stupid. Someone, somewhere, will die because of this.
I've developed something called the smoke detector condom. It is essentially a zip-lock bag with a string tied to it. All you have to do is place the zip-lock over the detector and it prevents bacon in the morning from setting off the alarm. Then the emergency release string can be pulled on unannounced landlord visits.
> No more frantically swinging towels at the smoke alarm to quiet it down. If there’s a nuisance alarm, just stand under Nest Protect and wave your arm to hush the alert. As you wave, your hand should be 2-8 feet away from the alarm.
What happens if one of my cats is sitting under it and scratching the floor or playing with a toy..
Right, because people who don't have smoke alarms in their house don't have them because they are annoying. I suspect most of these people can't afford them, or are low on their "buy" list for money reasons. Not sure how an expensive smoke alarm will solve that problem....
Actually we have 0 smoke alarms in our house exactly because they are so annoying. On the day we moved in, they went off 6 times while we were making dinner. They were all off the ceiling later that evening.
I'm guessing that like the Nest thermostat they have an external web site (nest.com) you can register the device with, and then perform config via that site.
I wonder if anyone's sniffed their Nest's traffic to see if it's encrypted?
"It senses carbon monoxide and connects to your Nest Thermostat through your Nest Account. So it can automatically shut down the furnace, a possible source of CO poisoning, when the carbon monoxide alarm goes off."
so ... what if your Internet connection is down ?
Further, even if it isn't, why[1] would you ever want your thermostats and/or fire alarms talking to some third-party, for-profit company and existing on public IP space ?
Do I misunderstand how this works ? I hate typical smoke alarms with a passion, but I'm not replacing them with something that can be DoS'd or requires Internet to function properly...
[1] Other than blind, stupid pursuit of new and shiny
I don't see why it would require Internet access to function as a normal smoke alarm. I'm sure it still goes off just like a normal alarm if there is no Internet connection — you just lose the convenience of multi-room notices and the furnace changes.
Home alarms used to just be a buzzer you attached to your door that had a switch to turn it off.
Along came the company that added a pin code and connected the system to a phone line to monitor it for you. If the alarm tripped they could call the police on your behalf.
Sure, the phone line could get cut, but you're still no worse off than you were before.
I'm unsure that it requires the internet, just a router and AP to direct connect the two devices together. Furthermore, if the the furnace is the root of the CO emission it would be a boon to have the nest thermometer ask for forgiveness vs ask for permission to save you from death.
It doesn't require internet to function properly - it still works as a smoke and CO alarm without internet. It can't shut down your boiler for you without internet - like most other CO detectors.
The thing that draws me to Nest is not the product value but the design. They are beautiful, well thought out products. I probably won't buy a Nest Protect, as my pain point isn't that high, but it's sexy as hell.
The motion detector is a trojan horse for introducing other functionality. It could probably serve as a general alarm system as well, with a software update.
What are some other apps that can come from an always-on wifi-enabled set of sensors?
I love this. My one question is why they chose white and black as the colors.
This is obviously a premium product, and if you look in interior design magazines it's clear that people prefer metal fixtures for their lights / switches / fans. Stainless steel, bronze and brass seem by far the most popular choice for high end lighting, and it seems like this should match that theme.
White could "disappear" better into the ceiling, but with their product design of having a light flash whenever the room lights are turned off, it seems like they want to be a noticed/appreciated part of the room design.
When I hear arguments like "I'd pay one hundred extra dollars just to not hear that chirp at 6AM", I think we all know who the target audience for this product is. The average joe doesn't have $120 per smoke detector to casually shell out. It would be nice if the Internet of Things movement started moving toward things that everyone can enjoy, rather than just making toys for rich startup guys. (Grand Street, I'm looking at you.)
While this is very cool, I'd like to hear more in regards to how multiple Nest thermostats can work together. Ideally there would be one expensive unit and several other attachable units, much like how you can extend Wifi range. The carbon monoxide detector would make for a great addon unit, a "plugin" of the master smoke detector unit.
Love my Nest, have had it since they were first available.
Took a smoke detector off the wall with a crowbar a few months ago because it was 3am, I couldn't sleep because of the damned beeping, and I didn't have any spare batteries nor the desire to find a chair or ladder to stand on. Replaced it the next day, but at least I got back to sleep.
I don't want to connect to my appliances using a phone. I also don't need a high-tech smoke detector. I have them in all rooms, they work, no false alarms. If I need light, I turn on the light.
A device for gadget nerds. Unnecessary for the rest of the world.
Anyone complaining about the price of a $120 smoke detector aren't the target market. I would buy these in a heartbeat if I could (I'm in AU). The pricing is irrelevant for even the small amount of extra life quality this product affords.
I live alone. I stress out about something happening when I am not at home. Yes, I will be safe if there is a fire when I am gone, but I would love to know if my house is about to burn down. This will help alleviate some of that stress.
Good invention, but too pricey. His thermostat is great, but I need three for my house. No I don't have a huge house, but I designed the hydronic system well. Each part
of the house can have it's own temperature.
Another impressive product. And a clear demonstration that they want to be something more than a thermostat manufacturer. They are indeed becoming the Apple of household devices.
I imagine they need time to build up the necessary experience to support the product well. Nest's support, the one time I had to call them, was outrageously good. Within about 10 minutes the engineer had figured out exactly what was wrong with my wiring setup, and, more or less blind, walked me through the discovery and installation of a common wire.
I confess that in my last house they were always going off, not just because I burnt the toast but just because I made some toast. Or because I took a shower. Or lit a candle. I moved them several times but could never find a spot that was simultaneously far enough away from the toaster, stove, shower, microwave, dinner table, grill, and fireplace. Silencing them required getting a ladder and only lasted a few minutes, never enough to prevent a second activation.
Because they were going off all the time the batteries went out in months, and they would start chirping loudly at random intervals around 3 a.m. It would wake you up then you couldn't figure out which one it was and once you decided it was a fluke and went back to sleep it would do it again.
I did bad things to those smoke alarms.
In retrospect maybe they were just a bad batch and needed to be replaced but historically I hadn't experienced much better. I've moved since then and haven't had trouble with the new ones yet, knock on wood.
For the 20 dollars a regular smoke detector costs, I believe they should already have a large button you can press on the side that indicates "I promise everything is fine, I am in the house, alert, and am about to cause an issue. Please unconditionally do not beep for the next 30 minutes." That would replace everything good about this wifi gizmo.