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.

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.

Bad UI.

Pulling the battery completely will simply cause them to beep incessantly.

---

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.

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.

Good UI.

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.

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.

Yeah this stuff isn't really that tough. A single button that disables for 30 minutes would work perfectly. Maybe this device has that?

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.

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.

http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/fire-protec...

Is that because the statistics show otherwise, or just that we don't collect statistics on it?

So when people die, it's rarely ever the case that the alarms had been disabled for some reason?

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.

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.

So yes, I think the Nest smoke alarm does have a major upside: people in my situation would actually use it.

Like the nest?

I would. You would. But we're not the norm. Not all products are designed toward the DIY crowd.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are two solutions: 1) make it easier to temporarily dismiss the alarm. 2) read the instructions and place the device properly

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.

Only in the US and Canada, most of the rest of the world uses the ISO standard universal green "running man" without letters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_sign

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.

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.

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.

This requires being very organized. If you are that organized, hats off to you. Many people (myself included, I admit) aren't.

Of if you live in a majority of the US, when you change the clocks, change the batteries.

Neither of these schedules will sneak up on you. If you don't change them and it wakes you, it's your own fault.

Sorry to sound snarky, but it's not _that_ complicated.

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?

However if you insist on focusing one a singular viewpoint then I will remove myself from the conversation.

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.

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.

So there are only two choices? Dead or obnoxious sounds in the middle of the night?

Change all the batteries and go back to sleep.

You've been reading this thread. Have you replaced the batteries because of this thread? or decided to check the batteries because of this thread?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/fire-protec...

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.

Poor placement of the smoke detector, I believe.

I'm not sure if that disabled it for a few minutes or what.

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.

I mean, that's what my window is too.. Bigger than actual windows.

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 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.

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.

One little crumb burns and all of the fire alarms in the apartment would go off, not pleasant at all.

I'm just throwing that out there.

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 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've never set them off by cooking, even with occasional accidents of food burning.

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.

Did you read the description at all? You can only dismiss warnings not alarms. You cannot dismiss life threatening situations.

"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.

It seems that the Nest will specifically tell you with words that it has detected CO, so you'll listen.

I wouldn't be surprised if the CO detection can'd be dismissed since you would never really want to dismiss it (unlike smoke).

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.

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.

http://support.nest.com/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-s...

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?

https://store.nest.com/product/smoke-co-alarm/

Hardwired alarms are also required for major renovations. However, you basically have to take it down to the studs before this requirement is triggered.

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.

Yes [0], although this is obviously country specific.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Installation_and...

http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2013RS/fnotes/bil_0009/sb0969.pdf

"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.

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.

Specially after tearing out a Benjamin for this gold-plated gizmod and showing it off to friends

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.

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.

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.

[0] http://support.nest.com/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-s...

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.

Who manually resets their clocks anymore? All of my clocks auto-set for DST. And what about people in Arizona?!

/tongue-firmly-in-cheek

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.