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Comment by jaxbot | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried one of the newer revisions of the Protect and had any experiences, positive or negative, with it? I was initially excited when I heard about the product announcement. It seemed like everything I wanted in a smoke detector: remote monitoring, ability to silence, starting with voice before blaring and getting my adrenaline up, and, well, a smoke detector. But Amazon reviews and the infamous video later, I backed quickly away. I've been awoken by a false-positive smoke detector before and the experience is panic inducing on top of outright annoying.

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I have a few of them. I like them, and haven't encountered any issues with them. I also had a first gen and didn't have any problems with that. That's not to discount that other people did have problems, or the fact that it's critically important for a safety device to be reliable. But I think that the problems are vastly overblown, and calling it a "fiasco" is hyperbole.

I just bought a house that has two 2nd gen protects along with traditional style detectors, So far so good! No false positives so far. I reset both detectors and had them go through their self test when we moved in and they both report being fully operational.

Neither of the protects are near the kitchen or regular smoke producing spaces though. However They are near bathrooms. I hear steam can set these off pretty easily but I have not had that experience.

I might buy more protects to replace the other detectors but I want to wait a bit and see if nest comes out with any other products.

I would test them with smoke just to see how each behaved. Try with smoke from a candle just put out, a piece of paper just put out, and a plastic wire just put out.

I have a couple. The one by my kitchen has far fewer false alarm issues than my prior smoke detector there did (but does still warn me when I'm smoking up the place).

I don't really care that much about the IoT aspects. It just seems to work well and it self-tests.

This is my exact experience as well. I got so sick of the normal cheap smoke detector blaring every time the oven went above 350 that I purchased a Protect simply for the ability to silence it before it blares at me. The connected portion is ok too, but secondary.

I have four of them, purchased from Amazon. One Nest Protect was DOA (wouldn't connect to wifi) and Amazon had a replacement to me next day. They work flawlessly: they work when I test them, don't make noise when they're not supposed to, they do a quick sound check once in a while, the quick "flash green when you turn off the lights at night" to confirm things are ok is great, and the motion-detecting night light feature is handy in my hallway, too.

I'm a big skeptic of most things IoT, and I agree with most points in the posted article, but my honest experience is that my Nest Protects work great.

I have 2 first-gen and 2 second-gen Protects in my home. I've never had any false alarms. The newer model has 4.7 stars (out of 5) on Amazon with over 5000 reviews, so I think my positive experience is the norm.

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