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Nest Stops Selling 'Protect' Smoke Detectors Over Safety Concerns

Jetfire said:
My guess is that if it was recessed in the ceiling it might not work properly since the smoke could roll below it.

For those saying that the wave to turn off was a dumb idea. Think about why they did it. I wonder how many smoke alarms are diabled because of false alarms. They may have disabled them because it was to much of a hassle/hard to turn off.
Click to expand...

The wave to turn off was/is a great idea. With traditional alarms you have to pull it down and remove the battery to shut it up. The wave override doesn't work if there is "too much smoke" Not sure how that is defined.

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jaw04005 said:
I bought one because I was generally happy with my Nest thermostat however between the disabling of the wave feature, their decision to artificially limit the motion detector in the battery version and the dullness of the night light, it's been a compete waste of money.

They should offer refunds. What's the selling point now? You can check the battery status via an app? Big deal.
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As another person with this and a Nest thermostat. Once of the nicer safety features is if CO is detected it turns the furnace off, the probably source of CO in most instances. The second feature is all the alarms go off if an issue is detected and they announce what device detected the alarm situation. Doing this without having to wire all the alarms together.
 
anthonylambert said:
If you are sticking these boxes in your home the box might as well do a few things (thanks pubwvj) ...

Smoke
Fire
CO
CO2
Humidity
Temperature
Air Pressure
Motion Sensor (earthquake)

and what about PA system (speaker),
Microphone,
360' camera,
WIFI extender.

All accessible from my iPhone....

Anyone got any VC money?
Click to expand...

Ooo! Yes, I hadn't thought of PA/mic, camera and extender. There is so much potential here. And if they are manufactured in sufficient quantity it will drive the unit cost down which will lower the price which will increase market penetration so we have nests in everyone's nests.

Right now I have too many different devices all serving these functions. I would rather have several nests around. Then, sure, one will fail but I'll just move a less vital one to it's location while I get a replacement (2 days on Amazon Prime). Hmm... Stick them to the ceiling or wall plate with a magnet. I use magnets for things like this all over the place - works great.
 
My wife, who is hard of hearing cannot hear a fire or CO2 alarm. This technology could cause her phone to vibrate, make an audible alarm and flash the led. So for the deaf and hard of hearing community this isn't a frivolous want. It could be a life saving necessity. I hope they smooth out the issues. I want to purchase this and would gladly disable the "wave off" feature.
 
anthonylambert said:
If you are sticking these boxes in your home the box might as well do a few things (thanks pubwvj) ...

Smoke
Fire
CO
CO2
Humidity
Temperature
Air Pressure
Motion Sensor (earthquake)

and what about PA system (speaker),
Microphone,
360' camera,
WIFI extender.

All accessible from my iPhone....

Anyone got any VC money?
Click to expand...


Cool idea! Google could also use the data from the camera and microphone for marketing. If you are walking by your thermostat when you say, "Lets order a pizza", you get tons of pizza ads the next day. If you walk by it in your underwear, they can put your picture in an ad for that brand.
 
Ralf The Dog said:
Cool idea! Google could also use the data from the camera and microphone for marketing. If you are walking by your thermostat when you say, "Lets order a pizza", you get tons of pizza ads the next day. If you walk by it in your underwear, they can put your picture in an ad for that brand.
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*yawn* "Look, everyone. Another ad joke..."
 
xizdun said:
Pre-ordered 3 Nest Protects on day of announcement, canceled couple weeks before shipping—don't regret that decision at all now!

I was immediately skeptical of the "wave" feature; do you really want to have the ability to silence the smoke alarm during a life-threatening event? Maybe the Nest Protect picks up a whiff of smoke coming from the next room, you disregard it as a false alarm and wave at the Nest Protect to make it shut up and have yet to realize/notice the danger brewing in the next room.

Now why the hell Nest requires "laboratory testing" and "unique combination of circumstances" to realize this flaw is beyond me—unless this is a major cover-up for another irreparable serious flaw—why else would you take the drastic step of withdrawing the product from sale?

Smells fishy. :p
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It's clear many people here don't understand how the Nest Protect works. You can't wave off the detector during a dangerous event ... the wave feature is only supposed to work when smoke levels below the safety threshold are detected to be rising (usually from burnt food or the like). Obviously they must have found an obscure bug in this feature somewhere, but waving off the smoke detector during a fire was never a "feature" and is basically illegal anyway.
 
JoeG4 said:
Anyway, the ones I had would flash a red light when the battery was low. Thing is, it's kinda hard to see that.
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And the red light flashes once every 60 seconds.

So at 2:00 in the morning, you are randomly wandering around the house, and standing under each alarm for 60 seconds (which feels like an eternity), waiting for the flashing red light and chirp....

Still would rather do that than shell out the $250*7 it would cost to outfit my house with nest. $1540 pays for my time once every year replacing 9v batteries...
 
"Nest Wave, a feature that enables the device's alarm to be turned off with a gesture…" Are you @#$%ing kidding me?
 
Ralf The Dog said:
Cool idea! Google could also use the data from the camera and microphone for marketing. If you are walking by your thermostat when you say, "Lets order a pizza", you get tons of pizza ads the next day. If you walk by it in your underwear, they can put your picture in an ad for that brand.
Click to expand...

Seriously speaking, Google is not to be trusted with personal info anymore. I didn't think they'd do anything unethical until about two weeks ago, when I got my first spam email on my iCloud account. It was a sketchy ad for a 24-hour watch. I had been Googling "24-hour watch" and had clicked on a few results, but I hadn't entered any email addresses anywhere, and third-party cookies were disabled.

So Google gave my Gmail contacts to a spammer, either by accident or on purpose. Not using their email service anymore, and now that YouTube isn't fun anymore, I'm staying logged out all the time now. Way to ruin a great thing :(
 
bzero said:
"Nest Wave, a feature that enables the device's alarm to be turned off with a gesture…" Are you @#$%ing kidding me?
Click to expand...
What about it?

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bzero said:
Seriously speaking, Google is not to be trusted with personal info anymore. I didn't think they'd do anything unethical until about two weeks ago, when I got my first spam email on my iCloud account. It was a sketchy ad for a 24-hour watch. I had been Googling "24-hour watch" and had clicked on a few results, but I hadn't entered any email addresses anywhere, and third-party cookies were disabled.

So Google gave my Gmail contacts to a spammer, either by accident or on purpose. Not using their email service anymore, and now that YouTube isn't fun anymore, I'm staying logged out all the time now. Way to ruin a great thing :(
Click to expand...
Ruin what and how?
 
tmarks11 said:
And the red light flashes once every 60 seconds.

So at 2:00 in the morning, you are randomly wandering around the house, and standing under each alarm for 60 seconds ....
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Or you could do what I recently did, and what most fire departments recommend. Just change the batteries annually on the same day you change your clocks for daylight savings time. Why would you wait for an essential part of a safety device designed to save your life to stop working before changing it?
 
C DM said:
What about it?

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Ruin what and how?
Click to expand...

Why would you need, let alone want a hand motion to turn off an alarm that could be a serious one? Obviously something could go wrong. Why not use the iPhone to do it instead?

Google ruined their Gmail by failing their commitment to security and the YouTube experience for a video poster by… well a lot of things, shoving in Google+ for one. And their account service in general somehow got glitchy all of a sudden when they started signing everyone up for Google+.
 
Love my Nest Thermostat, ver 2 works perfectly with our 3-stage Trane HVAC. Don't know what all the "alarm" is with "Protect". ;)
 
New patch notes for the next Nest software update:

Waving hands in front of smoke detector changed to "fire dance". Jiggle hips, do the macarena to turn alarm off.
 
bzero said:
Why would you need, let alone want a hand motion to turn off an alarm that could be a serious one? Obviously something could go wrong. Why not use the iPhone to do it instead?

Google ruined their Gmail by failing their commitment to security and the YouTube experience for a video poster by… well a lot of things, shoving in Google+ for one. And their account service in general somehow got glitchy all of a sudden when they started signing everyone up for Google+.
Click to expand...
Probably because the whole wave thing isn't really what that's for now how it is used.

As for Google, certainly people have their own experiences, but the vast majority don't have any issues.
 
bzero said:
Why would you need, let alone want a hand motion to turn off an alarm that could be a serious one? Obviously something could go wrong. Why not use the iPhone to do it instead?
Click to expand...
Wave is not supposed to work on some alarms. Perhaps that is the glitch they have discovered, perhaps not. But you are making assumptions that aren't warranted.

See post 57. Or the Nest website.
 
The arbitrary way in which products are made "intelligent" for the sake of it, really kinda annoys me as a design-minded person. It's A SMOKE ALARM - who cares what it can do APART from detecting smoke? Who is going to care how "smart" the designer thought it was, when all they want is to have peace of mind, not another excuse for spending money on something over-designed for the sake of being "cool".

Moronic, arbitrary products; Dieter Rams is right.
 
redcupr said:
Like these?
http://silhouette.kidde.com/

Just replaced all of mine with these, because as everyone knows you need to replace you detectors every ten years.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that's great! As an architect, it's such a shame to see a beautiful house design ruined because there is no innovation in this area.

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Jetfire said:
My guess is that if it was recessed in the ceiling it might not work properly since the smoke could roll below it.

For those saying that the wave to turn off was a dumb idea. Think about why they did it. I wonder how many smoke alarms are diabled because of false alarms. They may have disabled them because it was to much of a hassle/hard to turn off.
Click to expand...

Two good points.
 
C DM said:
As for Google, certainly people have their own experiences, but the vast majority don't have any issues.
Click to expand...

You can't really back that statement up with data, though. There's no way to know how many people are having their information leaked, but I know that it can happen now, so I can't take any chances.
 
bzero said:
You can't really back that statement up with data, though. There's no way to know how many people are having their information leaked, but I know that it can happen now, so I can't take any chances.
Click to expand...
Sure, everyone has their own experiences and makes their own decisions. Sometimes many people share similar decisions and/or experiences, other times they don't.
 
Another blunder

Another huge blunder. When working on smoke detectors and thermostat the reliability needs to be rock solid over the wifi gimmicks. You can buy devices for $20 that don't fail for the core function.
 
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