Next for Nest: A Smoke Detector | Hacker News Reader

Next for Nest: A Smoke Detector

jessicalessin.com

37 pointscoloneltcb44 comments

Smoke detectors are literally invisible to the average house dweller 99.99% of the time, and the 0.01% of the time where they are "activated", they do their job just fine.

The thermostat was a brilliant entry point into a potential multibillion dollar home automation business for Nest, but I don't get why a smoke detector would be step 2.

Any ideas?

>Nest launched its $249 thermostat almost two years ago and has long brainstormed other things to build, including the smoke detector and potentially a door lock.

A door lock, on the other hand, would be great. A friend of mine has replaced his traditional apartment lock with a pinpad, and it's quite fantastic. He can set temporary passcodes for guests, never has to worry about his keys, etc.

I personally can't stand smoke detectors and would love for someone to improve on them.

My house has very high ceilings, so dealing with any issue with the detectors is a pain. I change the batteries yearly (even though all my detectors are connected to power) mostly for safety but also since I can never find which alarm is beeping. Mine beep once every 5 minutes if the battery is low, twice every 5 minutes for some other issue and blink a red LED is something else is up. They might blink green if everything is OK, or if it's tuesday I don't really know, I just know they are terrible and non-sensible. It's almost like they want me to turn them off. (Have I mentioned they make me angry) So if it ever gets to the point where one has a low battery I spend forever moving from room to room waiting for a beep. Also since the beep is so short it's hard to even tell if I'm in the correct room when I hear it.

Additionally one night an alarm went off in the middle of the night that we had never heard before. I had no idea if it was a smoke detector or not. A simple interface where I could get status would have been great then. Another night (why is it always the middle of the night?) we heard beeping from an alarm, so I went to the garage, got the ladder and climbed up to the alarm only to find out it was the CO2 detector near the floor that was beeping. I can't say it enough, an interface with words to describe the system as opposed to beeps is all I need to be very happy. I'd pay for that.

Give me smoke detectors that report status to a system so I can see which have low batteries and which alarm recently triggered (which they can do for reasons other than smoke). Heck even let me disable the kitchen detector for a set timeout when I'm frying something. Please do this.

I've never had a smoke detector that didn't eventually throw false alarms in the middle of the night, activating all of the detectors in the chain and making it impossible to find the one that triggered the alarm.

When you go to the local Lowes-Depot, your only choices are among a bunch of crummy discount options that are all as poor as the one you've got.

I'd pay 5x-10x more for a detector of a higher quality with a little built in intelligence. Like was it the ionization chamber or the photoelectric section that triggered the alarm? Which freakin unit triggered the alarm, and maybe a SMS battery warning a week before the damn thing commences to chirp like a mutant cricket all night because its battery is low.

They're invisible 99% of the time, but the 1% they're not, they're a damn nuisance. Fix that and I'm sold.

It's an intriguing, albeit risky move. Existing smoke detectors are pretty ugly with bad UI. There is little to no competition for the 'high end' retail market. With that said, current smoke detectors can be had for $10-20 bucks, and my guess is Nest will charge significantly more than that. Of course they can add a number of extra sensors/functionality to justify the costs. A CO sensor would be a good addition, maybe motion sensor (for security), temperature sensors (to provide more granular feedback to the thermostat), and maybe some other sensors to monitor indoor air quality (VOC's, radon). I am sure there are a few other things that can be thrown into the device to make it more useful (wifi repeater?).

All things considered, this is a pretty genius move. In the push to create 'smart homes' most of the attention has been on lighting, kitchen appliances, and entertainment systems. But one thing that has always bugged me was how do you get a refrigerator at the back of the house to communicate seamlessly with the wireless router in the front if the signal doesn't reach that far. I was thinking that mesh networking would play a big part, but even in an appliance saturated home, there could still be some dead spots. Well, smart smoke detectors might solve that, as they are in almost every room in the house! One issue I can forsee is that not all homes have hard-wired smoke detectors (which means power would be an issue, thus limiting what they can do with it).

EDIT: Seems like everyone is focusing on the UI comment. While I think that that is still an issue, I think the more exciting possibility is that a 'smart detector' could also provide nodes for a mesh network (or something similar), essentially providing a communication layer for appliances/devices in the home. If they go this route and they succeed, they could put themselves in a really good position competitively, as they would 'own' the networking layer.

What UI? You plug them in and, you hope, never think about them again except to change the batteries once every couple years. Why would I want a better relationship with my smoke detector? It's there to detect something that virtually never happens.

That's if things go well. But when they don't, smoke detectors are incredibly frustrating. They'll beep randomly and you won't know which one is doing it. They'll start blinking red and you won't know why. Or they'll go off in the middle of the night for no good reason. Maybe I just need higher quality smoke detectors.

I have 2 features that I'd love to see in a smoke detector:

1) notify me when the battery level is low so I don't have to think about it 2) allow me to snooze the smoke detector for 15 / 30 minutes if I end up smoking up the kitchen

I have a smoke detector that goes off every time I'm cooking anything that smokes slightly…or that produces a significant amount of steam. This means that I have to step away from the stove to silence the damned thing, and that increases the very real risk of a fire because I'm in the middle of actually cooking something that could burn if I'm not actively watching it.

I want a better relationship with my smoke detector because I can't trust it to tell me when something really has gone wrong.

Hmm... Can't tell if Poe's Law...?

Existing smoke detectors are pretty ugly with bad UI.

Existing smoke detectors are also exceedingly simple, which is a great thing for lifesaving safety devices. Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and reliability is the primary requirement of safety devices.

Well, as an anecdote to why simplicity (at least in it's current form) is bad... All but one of my smoke detectors in my apartment are unplugged because they kept going off when I was cooking (would happen at least once a week). I was more likely to die or get injured from climbing onto a wobbly stool to turn off the 4 overly sensitive smoke detectors than I ever was in a fire. I am getting the feeling that this thread is split into two types of people, those who get a lot of false positives from their detectors and those who don't.

I was a firefighter for seven years, many years ago.

One winter evening, we were dispatched to a chimney fire. After we extinguished it (with the homeowner's hose and a chimney nozzle) I did a walk through of the house and attic to check for extension.

I found his smoke detectors hanging open, with the batteries removed. When I asked the homeowner if he wanted some new batteries for them (we kept free batteries on the engine), he happily took them. When I asked him how long his smoke detectors had been without batteries, he quickly answered: "Since Christmas morning."

I have no doubt as to where the new batteries went...

>> "bad UI"

What bad UI? They usually have either 1 or 2 buttons. They always have a test button and sometimes have a secondary button to disable the alarm (e.g. if you accidentally trigger it). They're all basically identical and people have been used to them that way for a long time. I'm not saying there isn't a better way to do it (I'm no UI expert) but does this current UI really need improved?

The buttons are on the fucking ceiling and your 'stylus' is a broom.

> the 0.01% of the time where they are "activated", they do their job just fine.

Several homes I've lived in had smoke detectors that would false positive on a somewhat regular basis from (what I deduct were) sudden changes in humidity. This tends to happen in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the only fix at times was to unplug the smoke detector and go back to bed. A "silence for 15 min" option, sensitivity adjustment, or any kind of interactive control would be amazing.

Also, who wouldn't want to get an alert if their house is burning down?

If Nest released this tomorrow I would replace every smoke detector in my house with one.

I don't think they're targeting the smoke detector per se. Think about what you could do if you had a device on the ceiling in every room in the house.

They can monitor who's in the room making the nest even more accurate/energy efficient or Offer security system products. I'm sure they've thought for longer than the 3 seconds I did, and come up with many others profitable ideas.

> A door lock, on the other hand, would be great.

https://lockitron.com/preorder

Mine is on its way!

You'd think Nest would've bought Lockitron by now.

Nest could be waiting to see how Lockitron fails. Then, they would have the chance to compete and innovate on a better product. Given their current mainstream success and apparent financial comfort, I would imagine Nest having more resources to tackle the problem than Lockitron can hope to raise with a crowdfunding campaign at this point, in addition to more years of industry experience. So that might explain why, even though Nest could make a door lock right now, they are waiting for the right time to develop and unveil one.

and what exactly does lockitron have to offer Nest?

Turn-key addition to their core product offering.

I agree heartily. Also the combination doesn't even make that much sense paired with the Nest, especially without any real cooperation between the two mentioned in this article. At least use the new devices to gather more temperature points and maybe even to see if anyone is present, which would pair nicely with the Nest's away feature.

On the hardware side because smoke detectors typically have a fixed replacement date. In addition, homes tend to have significantly more smoke detectors than thermostats. Throw in the potential of selling security services to the upscale market segment likely to want branded thermostats and it could be a very lucrative.

It's an eyesore that has to be visible in my house to be effective. See my other comment in this thread.

> has to be visible in my house to be effective.

Why does it have to be visible to be effective? I notice my smoke detectors roughly once every few years: when it's time to change the batteries (oh and that one time where my cooking went wrong and it activated the alarm).

Your chief concern in your smoke alarm is whether it looks pretty?

Obviously not. The Nest thermostat is functionally the best one I've owned. I'm assuming their fire alarm would also work.

I'm really having a hard time envisioning a functional improvement on the standard Kidde smoke detector. There are two states: "it's cool", and "hey guys. There might be a fire".

I really can't imagine much improvement on that. If the level of sensitivity that induces a couple false alarms a year gives me an extra 10s of notice in the event of an actual fire, I'll be fine without a configurable thermostat.

In my uninformed opinion (as, frankly, is everyone else's before there's actually an announcement), there would need to be some non fire-related benefit to make it worthwhile.

You're describing a binary fire/else system. I would consider that a minimum viable product, and this is a very mature market. I'm expecting more than that, and I'm willing to pay for it.

(You not being able to think of any improvements doesn't mean they don't exist.)

A better fire alarm could connect to my Nest via wifi and add a remote temperature sensor to my existing thermostat system, allowing it to increase overall accuracy/efficiency. It could talk to other detectors in the same manner allowing for a whole-house fire alarm system that's doesn't require running wires. It could text me when it's battery needs replacing instead of emitting a high-pitched chirp I have to hunt down at 2am. It could do the same thing via notification on my existing Nest app. It could detect humidity levels in my house and increase it's sensitivity if appropriate. It could notify me of alarm (once again via text or through the app) while I'm away from my property. It could snap picture with a low-res 360 pano camera and send them to my phone so I have a record of how the fire started; if the latency was low enough it could be used to help fight the fire.

I'm not an expert in this field. I'm an interaction designer. It took ten minutes to think of those improvements. (I'm just brainstorming, but surely one or two is feasible.) I'd bet a year's salary that the team at Nest labs is better at this than I am. They've got something up their sleeve or they wouldn't bring it to market.

Anyway, I have no affiliation with company, but I really like their thermostat and I'm expecting good things from them as they expand their product line. Particularly, the kinds of things that will get to me to pay a premium over the existing stuff at my nearest big box store. I paid similar premium for my Nest.

There's one reason to have a Nest smoke detector: it would have a thermostat.

The reason I haven't bought a Nest is because the device only takes temperatures from one place in my house, which just happens to be a place that has a +/- 5 degree temperature change from either end of the house on a good day.

If the device also gets the temp, a Nest would be far more effective at keeping a house comfortable and saving energy. I'd also worry less about my toddler daughter being alone in a bedroom on an cool night that is usually much cooler than my own (first world parent problems).

Yeah but does it really help the average home? If you have one thermostat in your house more temperature data doesn't really help, it can only set one temperature for the whole house.

If you have a multi-zone house then yeah, your bottom floor and top floor could be set to multiple temperatures, but those houses typically have 2 thermostats already and if you're using 2 Nests for that they already talk to each other to make that efficient.

It would be cool to be able to wire up individual ceiling fans or something to the Nest and then use the fire detectors to figure out which rooms are running too hot/cold and fire off fans individually to normalize the temperature.

There's one example where I think targeting a specific room would help even without multi-zone. At night I only really care about the temperature in the bedroom, which is a lot smaller and in my experience cools faster than the living room (which is where my Nest is currently). If it could figure out that my bedroom is already at a comfortable temperature at night and not bother with the temperature in the living room, that might be interesting.

This might be the killer feature I mentioned in a previous post on this article. I own a 120 year old house with odd nooks and crannies and strange airflow. My thermostat knows the temperature in my living room, but not upstairs by my bedroom, which can be 10°F warmer or cooler, and we have to set the downstairs thermostat to odd temperatures at night just to make it remotely comfortable, and it's rarely the same temperature from night to night. That hassle would be worth some amount of money to eliminate. $150? Hell no. $100? Probably not. $60? Sign me up!

I remember listening to an episode of This American Life many years ago on the subject of the saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door". The long and the short of it was that that particular saying was untrue because there is no market for a better mousetrap. The $1.00 mousetraps work just fine, and though they're not perfect, anything better won't be better enough to justify the additional expense.

I feel precisely this way about smoke detectors. I recently bought a house, and the first two things I did were: a) purchase a nest (which I love) and install it, and b) go to Home Depot, pay $50 for 4 new well-rated smoke detectors, and install them. Are they ugly? Sure, although the fact that every interior space in every developed nation on the planet has them tends to take the edge off. Do they occasionally false alarm when We're cooking something? Sure, it has happened once or twice.

Neither of the above are justification for me to spend more than $10-15 on a smoke detector. It would have to do something truly marvelous to be worth even $30 a unit for me. The thermostat was worth the extra money to me because it's cool and saves me a bit of money and I wanted to give my money to a company that was doing right by the energy consumer. I will withhold judgement on the smoke alarm until I see one, but the exuberance around here for it seems premature to me.

Also, if my house burns down, I will already get a smartphone alert in the form of a phone call from my neighbors.

My feeling is that manufacturing a set of relays that interface with today's existing wired smoke detectors and CO detectors would make a lot more sense. Added complexity will almost always make these devices harder to use and less reliable.

Keep the existing devices and make a gadget that uses wifi (optionally ethernet or a mesh network? a cell modem?) and relies on the signal old school 3-wire or 4-wire smoke detectors already put out. With a three-wire system, for example, you could put one relay in and get a cell warning for the entire system or put a relay on each alarm and get zone-specific alarms.

The trouble is that the sorts of people thinking about these things want to rope the customer into a proprietary system instead of just sending them an email or SMS with the cheapest possible equipment.

The idea of a smoke detector which also detects carbon monoxide seems brilliant, except that smoke rises and carbon monoxide sinks, so either you place the device in the middle of the wall (and lose out on early warning) or it becomes useful for one and useless for the other.

They're fairly common these days, especially considering all dwellings in California are now required to have CO detectors.

Carbon monoxide is lighter than oxygen and carbon dioxide, about the same as nitrogen. All things being equal it will slowly rise in a room.

The reason carbon monoxide is a threat in the lower levels of your house is not because it sinks but because that's where your furnace and hot water heater are.

Combined smoke and CO detectors are fine (and there are many on the market today).

One would think that CO produced by combustion would rise before it fell.

You are both right, in a way, in that neither particularly matters: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem03/chem03364.htm

"As would have been predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, CO infused anywhere within the chamber diffused until it was of equal concentration throughout. Mixing would be even faster in the home environment, with drafts due to motion or temperature. It would be reasonable to place a residential CO alarm at any height within the room."

Maybe it will finally make use of Nest's unused Zigbee radio (https://community.nest.com/ideas/1115)

A cartoon comes to mind of somebody staring at a chart of the increasing smoke in their house while the fire starts to eat away their computer screen.

I'd like to have that on a dashboard, too - smoke levels in the building. Very comforting most of the time.

(Sorry for the humor - I am sure they have thought of some worthwhile use cases).

Good. The Nest is hands-down my favorite piece of infrastructure I've purchased. It's easy to use, looks great, and saved me money over what I had before. Hopefully I can buy lots of new products from Nest Labs to replace the ugly outdated crap around my house over the next decade.

I think the smoke detector is a safe bet for the Nest. Like the page says, the "connected home" is starting to be something we see emerging; the issue is, what needs to be 'connected'?

There aren't really a lot of areas that benefit from home automation, but a smoke detector is at least in the right ballpark. It will still be a few years before anyone tries to come out with a 'smart refrigerator/pantry' (the logistics are a nightmare alone).

Aside from lighting/smoke/AC, where else is there to go in home automation. The least touched market is home irrigation, but even has already started to be explored.

Like I said, the smoke detector is a good step in the right direction. Not a bold and wild innovation; a more simplistic approach as they tread forward.

Well, their non-failsafe thermostat could let your house freeze and pipes burst, if it happens to fail when you are away. So now they're going to take another reliable basic home item and make it complicated and unreliable?

Is this a satire piece?

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