Citation: http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fire-saf... which says that 60% of people who died in a housefire were in a building that had no operating smoke alarms. A few more quotes:
"Surprisingly, the death rate was much higher in fires in which a smoke alarm was present but did not operate than it was in home fires with no smoke alarms at all."
"Smoke alarm failures usually result from missing, disconnected, or dead batteries. People are most likely to remove or disconnect batteries because of nuisance activations."
Not sure nest would win if it was easier to disable. Have you ever had a smoke alarm that goes off every couple hours? You can't sleep. Doesn't matter if you can turn it off with a wave.
And let's say you reach the point where you instinctively wave so it doesn't bother your sleep, now what happens when there's a fire?
False alarms are the problem. From the video and reports, it appears the Nest Protect has real problems with this.
With the nest, the alarm turned by itself for no reason, you don't cook in bedroom, he even said that he got notification when he was at work.
Two different reasons, your situation was that smoke alarm was too sensitive, perhaps you placed it close to the oven, here the alarm fires for no reason, and it is not the kitchen one, but bedroom one where normally you don't have smoke.
That is, in fact, a false alarm.
The behavior described by cowsandmilk is highly predictable: provide false alarms, and people will almost always disable or bypass the alarm.
Be aware that battery powered smoke detectors are a retrofit, and do not meet building code requirements. They are better than nothing, but failure due to disconnected or missing batteries is already in the realm of worse than the worst thing that can legally be built today.
They're two separate concepts. We should make it really easy to temporarily silence a smoke alarm (for, say, 15m or 4h), so that people almost never have to fall back on incapacitation.
And mandating wired ones does not address the problem. People still incapacitate them, by unplugging them. More generally, people will always find a way to silence a smoke alarm, and the regulators' goal should be to ensure that they do it in a temporary way.
That's what happens when you can't easily silence a smoke detector. Needless to say, after this treatment they didn't work so well - the only good thing about such a design is that it sells more smoke detectors. For a long time we simply didn't have any that worked though. We do now, but none of our replacement ones are linked together anymore - too much of a nuisance to replace the wiring she ripped out while silencing them.
I can show you the table of contents, though: http://ulstandardsinfonet.ul.com/tocs/tocs.asp?doc=s&fn=0217...
According to a quick google, all smoke detectors in Maryland are required to have a hush function by 2018. So... pretty sure that isn't prohibited by regulation there. FEMA says the best smoke detectors have a temporary silence button. I guess maybe there are some states that prohibit it? Seems awfully foolish though: temporary hush buttons save lives.
Since both Nest and other smoke alarm companies say this, I conclude there is some regulation to this effect.
The Nest device in the video did not appear to be experiencing high levels of smoke.
But Nest's website says UL's rules forbid the silencing, and I see no reason to think Nest would lie about it.
Smoke detector user manuals might vaguely allude to such a law to justify crappy engineering, but that's not the same as a citation to specific Federal, state, or municipal codes, or even an insurance underwriting code.
"The U.S. model codes and installation standards require smoke alarms and smoke detectors to be listed in accordance with the Standard for Single- and Multiple-Station Smoke Alarms, UL 217, and the Standard for Smoke Detectors for Fire Alarm Signaling Systems, UL 268."
http://osfm.fire.ca.gov/firelifesafety/pdf/Smoke%20Alarm%20T...
Why are people carrying water for this idiocy? Nothing in the document you linked has anything to do with the subject at hand. Fine, whatever, you're not supposed to be able to mute the detector in the presence of heavy smoke. But there is absolutely no prohibition against a mute feature in general.
Poor engineering on Nest's part led to a situation where a poorly-thought-out regulation came into play. Neither condition is defensible... yet look at all of the people in this thread trying to defend one or both.
(Yes, I'm moving the goalposts to a certain extent, as I was mistaken about there being no law against silencing a smoke detector in the general case.)
A smoke detector company sells a safety product, if that safety product fails they could easily be sued for the lifetime earnings of a dead individual (or even family in some cases).
So that requires that these companies have insurance, and in order for insurance to cover them they must meet certain insurance dictated requirements, which can be anything, but UL specifications are an easy thing to point at (to both protect the company from liability and insurance from payouts).
So while in some locations there might be no government regs, insurance is making regulations all on their own, and these companies can either play along OR risk paying out up to millions of they get sued.
I prefer KISS when it comes to my life and smoke alarms are not something I am going to fool with. With regards to their thermostats, I rarely am in the rooms my house has thermostats but programmables were cheap and easy to setup.
It says no such thing. You're just putting your own biases on it. Luxury means: "the state of great comfort and extravagant living."
Nest products are premium products. They cost more and you're meant to get a better quality of product out the other end.
Nobody thinks they're "smarter" because they buy luxury, although they might try to justify their purchase on the grounds of its USP.
The issue I have with the Nest smoke detector is that it is sold as a luxury consumer product. That puts it in the class of "the customer is always right" sales. The Venn diagram of that and things that are designed to save people's lives regardless of their tendency to statistically evaluate the risks and rewards of rare but deadly events inaccurately is disjoint.
If Nest did not comply with the regulations, they could not market their product as a smoke alarm.