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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

I recommend the $30 smoke detector puck from the hardware store. It will work for its designed 10-year lifetime, after which you can buy another one to replace it. No drama.

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Are those the shitty ones that indicate an empty battery by beeping a single beep once every five minutes? I think I took a baseball bat to the last one I had.

Those things drive me nuts. It's always a single beep, which isn't enough to locate which one it is. And for some fucked up reason they always start doing that shit right when you're about to fall a sleep.

I happily spent hundreds of euros on Nest Protects just because of the sensible early warning of an empty battery. My sanity is easily worth that.

You mean the ones that have existed for literal decades and still work to this day? Cry me a river because a single beep ruins your mood for 5 minutes, it's probably better than your house burning down.

Yes, I mean those ones! The ones that end up in a closet somewhere because nobody replaces batteries in the middle of the night and the next morning you can't find the right batteries anyway.

Those ones.

Bad UI kills.

Do you prefer one with an over complicated microservices to send notification on your phones?

I trust with my life simple design with a battery over not receiving a notification on my phone.

That's actually not how Nest Protects work.

Well, it's how they ALSO work.

They trigger independently and full-force at the same smoke level as the other types. That's a standardized and regulated level. It also sends notifications to your phone, but the primary alert is a god awful amount of noise. As it should be.

But before that standardized amd regulated level, there's a lower early warning level. If it detects a small amount of smoke, it gives an early warning. That warning is just a voice (still pretty loud!) and a phone notification that tells you about it.

The same goes for the batteries. It starts with a message to your phone and the led color. It will get louder after a while, but there's plenty of pre-warning to order new batteries and replace them before that. And all while you're awake anyway.

They do it when you're falling asleep for a reason, though not designed deliberately that way. The reason is that the voltage drops when it's colder, so you're much more likely to get those low battery smoke alarms at night in the winter.

That’s a bit hysterical. I mean are you living in a mansion that has hundreds of these things? I think there were three or two in my 5 bedroom house growing up.

The modern requirements vary based on locale, and will crop up at sale time:

https://www.homelight.com/blog/are-smoke-detectors-required-...

So yeah, I don't remember having many as a kid either, but fast forward 30 years and I had to buy a bunch to sell my house.

It takes about two or three replacement cycles before you recognize it as the tell-tale signs of smoke detector.

I had only one the first time I had to deal with it. But since these bullshit things beep once and then go silent, it takes forever to figure that out.

Me: sfalling asleep, enjoying the slow decline into unconsciousness

Smoke detector: beep

Me: What was that? Listens intently.

SM: silence

Me: Maybe be my imagination.

SM: silence

Me: Guess it's my imagination. Let's go to sleep again.

SM: beep

Me: No, that was real. What is that?

SM: silence

Me: Where did it come from?

SM: silence

Me: Oh, I guess it stopped. Weird.

SM: beep

Me: Or not. Still not sure where that came from.

This might repeat a few times, depending on how comfortable the bed is and how cold the house is.

SM: beep

Me: Fucking hell, this doesn't stop. Goddamnit. Guess I have to get up.

SM: silence

Me: Thoroughly annoyed and groggy from interrupted sleep.

SM: silence

Me: ...

SM: beep

Me: other side of the house

SM: silence

Me: boiling

SM: silence

Me: stopped?

SM: silence

Me: stopped.

SM: beep

Me: Goddamnit.

SM: silence

Me: Thoroughly ready to go to bed.

SM: silence

Me: ...

SM: beep

Me: starting to have a theory of where it comes from.

SM: silence

Me: beep, you motherfucker, I need to know it was you

SM: silence

Me: Is it taking longer to beep? It didn't stop now, did it?

SM: silence

Me: Come ON!

SM: beep

Me: Got it. Where's the ladder...?

Me: Gets the thing removed from the ceiling.

Me: Removes the battery, and throws the damn thing somewhere I may or may not see it in the morning.

Me: Sleep now.

SM: forgotten for weeks

Fuck those badly designed things. Bad UI kills.

two is enough to cause a problem in the middle of the night, which is the only time the stupid things start beeping.

Yes, the very same! The trick is to just replace them all when one starts to go. No need to run around locating the beeping one, just take them all down (you can stop and go to bed when you do find the right one) and replace them all next time you swing by the hardware store.

Why not just replace the battery?

In the UK you just unscrew and replace the battery. Not a hard task.

Modern smoke detectors have a service lifetime of about ten years, and won't work as well after that. So an expired one will keep beeping even after you change the battery. As a result, some don't even come with replaceable batteries.

CO alarms are more prone to this, I think.

I went all in with Nest Protect. Then a few months later they killed Nest Guard. Now I look at my Protects with trepidation. They wouldn't kill smoke detectors, right? They have to support those for years, right? We shall see.

I went all in on $30 pucks. They sit on the walls doing whatever it is that they do, and I never think about them. I'll replace them when they start doing the low-battery-chirp thing in 8-10 years.

Your thing sounds cool too, though.

Most of the time no-tech solutions are the most appropriate ones.

Imagine if your cloud smoke detector went offline and it didn't trigger because it needed a specialized non-local AI to reliably determine there's a fire.

> Imagine if your cloud smoke detector went offline and it didn't trigger because it needed a specialized non-local AI to reliably determine there's a fire.

That would be a dumb product decision to make.

Nest Protect complains about the smallest things, from connectivity (which does not affect detection, by the way), to battery, to positioning, and so far I have been reliably notified in the app.

On the other hand, I did have plain smoke detectors before my Nest ones, and at least one was completely dead for a year without no one knowing.

It's true it'd be a dumb product decision, but you might be overestimating hardnosed Product Managers of shady companies.

These are the kind of devices that are probably regulated in your country, but not necessarily elsewhere.

“The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004…”

— <https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L>

Those are terrible IMO. I've been through several that were tripping false alarms. You can't take the battery out and deal with it later, you have to throw the "break irreparably" switch.

I prefer the cheap ones that take a 9V battery. You can take them apart and actually dust them.

I do think that Nest Protect adds some value over plain smoke detectors, e.g. I don't need to worry about them going nuts in the middle of the night, and I can tell if there is smoke in the house while I'm away.

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