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Comment by WillyF | Hacker News Reader

I was going to agree with you, and then I remembered the night that the smoke detector in my rental started chirping every few minutes. It was around 3 AM. We had really high ceilings, so if I stood on a chair, I could almost reach the smoke detector to disable it. It took a solid 15 minutes of my standing on my tippy toes trying to figure out what would make the chirping stop. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I was mere minutes away from using a baseball bat.

It turns out it was the smoke detector's "self-destruct" chirp. A new battery wouldn't even do the job. Had to buy a new smoke detector because the old one had reached its age limit.

That night if you had asked me to pay $100 so that I could go back to sleep and not have to worry about THAT CHIRP, I would have whipped out my wallet so fast.

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We just moved into a condo which had a very old [Nov 1999] BRINK's home security installation that we didn't intend to use.

When we first moved in all the keypads said: "CALL 1-800-<WHATEVER> FOR SERVICE. NOT READY." We were not interested in a home-alarm service, so we simply left them alone and went about our move.

Fast forward 3 months: these alarm pads would start beeping in the middle of the night. We had a friend watching our house during the day: they'd _never_ beep during the day, not once. Around 1AM though they'd go off and starting chirping in 15 second intervals.

The first night: we were able to silence it by hitting "CANCEL" on the keypad. On subsequent nights we could silence it for [what seemed like] a random period of time between 15 minutes and several hours.

Perhaps it was just the sleep deprivation, but I swear by the fourth night you couldn't shut it up for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Fed up with the alarm: I headed downstairs, pajama-clad, with my multi-tool and a flash light.

---

Turns out: this is the "low battery alarm" -- we cut open the strongbox and disconnected a sealed lead acid battery and shut off the breaker. (Which coincidentally takes out our CO alarms, but it was worth it for the peaceful slumber.)

The battery did test bad so I disposed of it. (Shame: I wanted to repurpose it.)

It seems that these sorts of "self-destruct" alarms are DESIGNED to (A) go off when you're likely to be home (night-time hours) and (B) they are hard to ignore (e.g: exhibit some kind of non-deterministic pattern.)

Because the alarms are so annoying, people often end up disabling the alarms and never replacing them. That's dangerous in the long run. In the short run it's dangerous to try to disable an alarm in the middle of the night. I wonder if anyone has ever died from a fall while attempting to stop the chirping in a sleep-deprived state.

That's the thing: we still haven't replaced our CO alarm.

Given how integrated it is into the BRINKs panel: it's doubtful the CO alarms would've even worked while the BRINKs panel was powered but unactivated.

Now we are left with keypads [we don't want] and deactivated CO alarms bolted in to our freshly painted walls. sigh

I'm not particularly annoyed by the behavior itself: false alarms don't bother me, and a low battery alert is definitely a useful "error code."

What bugs me is that it should be easy to dismiss the "low battery warning" for _at least_ 8 to 12 hour windows. Long enough that you can actually get some rest and deal with it in the morning / after your shift.

If the walls are freshly painted, you can remove the alarms, patch the holes, and paint over. The new paint will match the paint around it.

It costs maybe $20 for enough materials (not counting paint).

It's likely because late night/early morning is cooler temperature, and this drops the battery voltage enough to trigger the sensor.

Might make sense for fire alarms: but this home alarm system had a battery that was in a sealed strong-box in a midwestern US basement.

tl;dr: the battery, in this case, was in a room that is continuously controlled for humidity, temperature, and in this case: light.

The system usage should also be pretty static: as our house guest was home and presumably tripping the motion sensors all day. (Yes: even though the system was unarmed _and unactivated_, our motion sensors still appeared to be _sensing._ -- It's purely coincidence, but this ordeal started right around when the Internet was in an uproar over PRISM & the NSA.)

Retiring to our unprotected bedroom dwellings for the evening would've only _decreased_ the system's draw, if it had any impact at all.

That night if you had asked me to pay $100 so that I could go back to sleep and not have to worry about THAT CHIRP, I would have whipped out my wallet so fast.

See, you say that, but it isn't just one smoke detector. It's ALL of them. My small house alone has no fewer than 4 plus a CO detector. That's $500, real money to save me from an occasional hour of lost sleep or, at worst, an extremely rare night? The value proposition just isn't there.

The Nest Protect adds several hardware components that a traditional smoke detector doesn't have, including an ambient light sensor, a distance/motion sensor, a multicolor LED, and WiFi. If your only problem with the current smoke detectors out there is the chirp, then it can be solved by adding just the light sensor and LED, which is not a large cost addition. The additional cost of adding networking hardware, creating a protocol for these to talk to each other as well as the thermostat, and creating a mobile app just to configure the nightlight is what really drives the price so high here.

Hopefully the innovative ideas that they are using for conveying that a battery is low or stopping the alarm from going off when cooking make it into other designs. Quite frankly I don't see the benefit added from networking my smoke detectors.

Exactly. I have no interest in adding any more computer networks or nodes to my home, nor do I wish to provide Internet services on public IPs, etc. I don't need the complexity in my life, nor do I need the attack surface (nor the trade of legacy annoyances for modern annoyances).

BUT, I do need a smoke detector that doesn't make me want to kill myself every time I interact with it - I already have printers for that. Here's hoping there's an easy way to completely disable all networking on these devices...

Don't set it up on Wifi ... the devices will talk to each other over ZigBee as far as I can tell.

Is there anyone out there trying to give printers the Nest treatment?

I understand that conventional smoke detectors can be irritating, but I still don't see how an experience like that is worth an extra $110. I suppose the calculus is different for people with far more money, but for most people, I don't think that smoke detectors pose a large enough annoyance to warrant buying the Nest.

How much did the loss of sleep last night cost the above poster in their job the next day? It isn't about how much money you have, it's about how valuable your time is.

My wife lost just as much sleep, and she makes more than I do.

Unless you're a freelancer/contractor, the loss of efficiency probably costs you nothing. It costs your employer, so maybe they should be funding your smoke detector?

Consider that it happens regularly every couple of years, especially when you have multiple smoke alarms.

Then if you have high-ceilings it makes it much more difficult (have to go get a ladder in the middle of the night).

It will freak kids out, they're not fun to get back to bed.

The elderly or disabled might not be able to remove the battery or remove the alarm.

I'd say it's definitely a step in the right direction and in-line with Nests other product (probably much of the same hardware).

What's next for Nest? Lighting? Door locks? Security system?

We're long past the point where you should be replacing smoke alarm batteries at all.

Put in a lithium battery. The lithium battery will last for the entire 10-year life of the smoke alarm. Thus, you should only replace smoke alarms -- not the battery.

In fact, these days, they're selling smoke alarms with sealed non-replaceable lithium batteries. This prevents people from attempting to use an alarm past end-of-life, and thus getting a false sense of security.

Oh whatever LOL. It'll be marketed as lasting a decade and value engineered to only last a year. You don't increase profits by making things last longer. By being sealed and making it chirp you'll force people to buy another instead of simply unpluging the battery.

The problem with a nanny state is eventually people rebel. The future of smoke detection is high profits for mfgrs and residents will spend an hour their first day in new premises disabling and disconnecting the devices. The overall effect on safety will be a profound net decrease, although theoretically on paper we'll never be safer.

I seem to recall seeing my first lithium battery smoke detector back in the 90s. I certainly haven't bought a non-hardwired detector that wasn't one of the 10-year lithium battery type in the past decade. (You'd have to ask my electrician what he just installed in my renovated house, I haven't looked too closely at them yet.)

Haven't given me any problems. Haven't heard about them giving anyone else any problems. You seem to be dismissing something that already has a proven track record. Why is that?

They last much longer than a year. My dad has them in his house and he's had them a while now - the fire department in the area fit them for free.

If you want to know, remotely, if your house is burning down, you can spend $450 a year for a monitoring service and who knows how much for a system that dials them in case of alerts, or you can buy Nest.

I see this as priced against monitoring services and systems that phone them.

Compared to those, this is cheap.

Well, if your house is burning down, and you're not in it, there's not anything you can do anyway, and you finding out before you get home doesn't change anything, so that's not that useful.

Not true, you can call the fire department.

The problem is Nest doesn't connect to a central monitoring center (as far as I can tell) and many insurance companies require central monitoring. I would love to have these, but I won't buy them if the insurance company won't sign off on them.

This reminds me of the HN post I saw a few days ago for a wake up call service - someone suggested "$20-$30 a year" for it. For an alarm. To wake you up.

While I don't doubt that people out there will pay for both, let's not kid ourselves that it will be a mass-market product. The value proposition is way off.

I would have used a baseball bat. 5 minutes and $20 to replace. (Which you had to do anyway).

Agreed. I actually did (well, a hammer)

Incidentally, if nothing else this announcement reminded my to order a replacement.

Earplugs are cheaper than $100.

Plus, you'll sleep right through the alarm!

It depends on your alarm (I can hear mine with earplugs in).

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