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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Read about deaths in dwelling fires here: http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i3.pdf

There's more here: http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/reports/residential_stru...

When owners of commercial buildings disable life safety features, it is not uncommon for the Fire Marshal to require a fire watch (trained personnel on site walking around 24 hours a day) until the system is operating correctly.

A residential smoke alarm system without a battery as backup power source is not operating correctly[1]. A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms[2].

In the time it takes to download and install a smartphone app, one can probably replace all their smoke detector batteries - NFPA recommends changing them twice a year when clocks get reset for daylight savings time.

These are first and foremost alarms not detectors because there is no other annunciator device. Using the device in the way the manufacturer is suggesting - i.e disabling portions of it's alarm system - is how people die in dwellings.

Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.

This isn't disruption, it's fucking stupidity.

[1]Outside of retrofit applications, smoke alarms are required by the National Electrical Code [NFPA 70] to be hardwired and when located in a room used for sleeping on an arc-fault protected circuit. The battery is for backup.

[2]Though the kitchen is the most common location for a fire in dwellings, kitchen fires are among the least likely to be fatal because cooking usually is attended and occurs during waking hours. Many building codes also require a fire extinguisher to be located in the kitchen for new construction.

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We all recognize the importance of fire safety, but there is no excuse for the design of smoke and CO detectors to be so painfully obnoxious. If it motivates homeowners to disable them, it is a bad design, isn't this obvious?

When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery.

I could go on, but all this is familiar. All they need is some thoughtful UI, and the Nest model looks excellent in this respect. It does not compromise safety - it will still go off if a human doesn't interact with it right away. It has other flaws (wifi required? no thanks; and probably expense) but this is an improvement over the "dumb" models.

> When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery.

Change all the batteries and go back to sleep.

Or, more likely, disable the device and forget about it. Which is what the OP says the fire department blames for deaths in home fires. The problem is real, and this device addresses it. It goes much further, and the wisdom of that is debatable, but some change is certainly needed.

Do you think "soft" reminders of battery age are enough to make people check or change their smoke detector batteries?

You've been reading this thread. Have you replaced the batteries because of this thread? or decided to check the batteries because of this thread?

I don't think this device or this thread will affect me after I stand up and leave the room.

Only if it connects to the internet and orders them off Amazon for me.

What if I have no batteries and its 11PM? Will the user 1.) Drive to the nearest 24/7 convenience store or 2.) disable the device and forget about it?

Ambulances don't play cello sonatas. Minefields aren't marked with rainbows and kittens. The user interface for current smoke detectors is very thoughtful. It is based upon experience.

When alarms don't alarm, people often die.

When alarms are ignored, people often die.

Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug. The inconvenience of being kept awake by a smoke alarm battery tends to pale in comparison to the inconvenience of being kept dead.

If my smoke detector makes an obnoxious sound during a controlled fire (like cooking) the product is defective.

You are ignoring the real problem here. The problem is "people who are inconvenienced by their smoke detectors such as an alarm going off when toast is burnt, tend to disable them - leading to death. How do we solve this?" Its quite obvious the solution isn't "Don't disable them" because if it was I'm sure nest's product wouldn't exist.

As a product designer, its very hard to change human behavior. If humans are disabling smoke detectors because they are inconvenienced, either the product is wrong, or user education is wrong. I'm hard pressed to believe you are going to educate people to not disable their smoke detectors while cooking, when people still by and large drive without seatbelts.

I think you missed the "A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms" part of the original statement.

Often placing it sufficiently far away from the kitchen isn't possible. I have a fairly large—by NYC standards—apartment. Our smoke alarm is around 3 corners and 20 feet down the hallway, but it goes off LIKE CRAZY. Basically if the stove gets hot, it's going to go off. We have 11' ceilings, and nothing I can stand on in the apartment is tall enough for me to reach it. After waving towels at it and poking at the silence button with a broom handle ad nauseam, I borrowed a ladder and took it down before cooking a big dinner for guests. I know I should reinstall it, but the silence has been fantastic.

So yes, I think the Nest smoke alarm does have a major upside: people in my situation would actually use it.

Not to sound too snarky, but I would look at your cooking technique. Also, as others have mentioned, a better smoke alarm may also alleviate the problem.

> a better smoke alarm may also alleviate the problem

Like the nest?

I was thinking of something like http://www.amazon.com/First-Alert-SA320CN-Double-Battery-Pow... for $20.

Have you seasoned a cast iron pan lately?

Yup. Our smoke alarm in the kitchen didn't go off when I did.

How do you know it works then?

Totally—when I moved in I figured I must have been burning everything so I started cooking more carefully and at lower temperatures, which didn't help. I searched the model number when I took it down to see if other people were having similar problems, and if I recall it's a new, high end FirstAlert model that goes for around $100, which puts the Nest at a pretty competitive price point, too.

Cooking properly frequently requires lots of heat and creates smoke. Peek into a commercial kitchen sometime. I suffered a childhood of sad, grey, rubbery steaks until I grew up and learned you're supposed to sear them. Same with many other types of food.

So let's say the builder is a dumbass and placed it incorrectly. What homeowner is going to move it? I would guess the percentage is something along the lines of 1%.

I would. You would. But we're not the norm. Not all products are designed toward the DIY crowd.

In the UK most smoke alarms are not mains connected and run solely off a battery. As such they can be easily repositioned.

No I wouldn't. My detectors are wired, and moving them means rewiring, which means tearing apart the entire ceiling. Not gonna happen, not by me and not by anybody I need to pay to do it. Luckily my builder wasn't a dumbass.

Lets also not forget the people that rent. As a renter I cannot make changes to the house without approval from the landlord. I can, however, replace the smoke detector and leave the one that came with the house in a drawer until I move out.

The statement "A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms" may very well be true but it doesn't matter. People have and will continue to disable their smoke/CO detectors if they are annoying. The ability to simply wave at the detector to get it to shut off (Like after burning your toast) means that people will simply wave to shut off the alarm instead of disabling it.

Even with what I know about fire death statistics, best practices, and what not I have disabled fire detectors before for any/all of the following reasons:

* Low battery alarm

* Going off at just a whiff of smoke

* Randomly making noises even after replacing the battery

Now you can say that it was incredibly stupid of me to disable them, and it probably was, but that doesn't change the fact that people's first instinct is just to disable it.

Those things only matter if people use them. The page is claiming that many people would rather their smoke detectors just be off than to have to deal with their annoyances.

I'm not being sarcastic, but I wonder what the intersection of the sets of people who leave smoke detectors disabled for convenience and people who are willing to pay $120 for a smoke detector looks like.

As an aside, I genuinely have no idea what the fuss is about. In my entire life, I have never been bothered by a low battery smoke detector alert. I take 5 minutes and change the batteries in my detectors twice a year and they never ever beep.

> I genuinely have no idea what the fuss is about. In my entire life, I have never been bothered by a low battery smoke detector alert. I take 5 minutes and change the batteries in my detectors twice a year

This requires being very organized. If you are that organized, hats off to you. Many people (myself included, I admit) aren't.

No it doesn't. It simply requires a reminder. On Jan 1, change the batteries. On June 1, change the batteries.

Of if you live in a majority of the US, when you change the clocks, change the batteries.

Neither of these schedules will sneak up on you. If you don't change them and it wakes you, it's your own fault.

Sorry to sound snarky, but it's not _that_ complicated.

I don't have any clocks that need manual changing. Haven't for years. And I rarely know what the date is unless some external stimuli makes me check. It's just not relevant to my daily life.

Your experience is not mine, and mine is not yours. Why is it so offensive that someone has tried to make my life better? Is it just jealousy that they didn't work on one of your problems?

Never said anything was offensive, I was merely pointing out examples of ways that one could remind themselves to change the batteries.

However if you insist on focusing one a singular viewpoint then I will remove myself from the conversation.

Is your microwave networked or something? That is not typical.

I'm not even really conscious of microwave clocks still being a thing. I guess my microwave probably has a clock, dunno why I'd ever set or use it, though.

I just checked, apparently my stove has a clock, too. It's not set to anything resembling the current time.

Neither of these appliances are things I would ever look at when I want to know what time it is, so I just file them under things that are not clocks.

My clocks no longer require manual changing, and those that do I end up replacing... I haven't been sure when daylights saving time starts/stops for a while now and have been caught off guard when I end up being early at work because my body naturally woke me up at a certain time.

Why waste so many batteries? Ultralife last a lot longer ($4.50 bulk price / 8 years) per cost than alkaline ($1.50 bulk price / 1 year) and are less work.

From an expected value perspective, being kept awake by a smoke alarm has robbed me of more of my life than [chance of fire]×[chance of death]×[crappiness of dying]

If you asked the neighbors who might die in the fire stared in your place or the fire brigade who would have to run into your burning domicile to save you, the equation might change.

On the anniversary of the Chicago Fire, it might help to keep in mind that your smoke detector isn't just to keep you from dying a horrible death, but others as well.

Ambulance sirens don't rarely have false positives, because there's a human operating them. If ambulances frequently drove around with their sirens on while not actually in a hurry, people would find it obnoxious, and they would quickly learn to not actually trust the sirens as a signal of a real emergency.

> Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug.

Making them only once every thirty minutes is a bug not a feature.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by one of my smoke detectors beeping once because its batteries were low. But it stopped beeping, and did not flash or give any other noticeable indication that its batteries were low. There was no way to determine which smoke detector it was. (Or at least, none that I could figure out at 2:00 am.)

Any possible action was useless (I had no batteries handy), so I went to bed.

Thirty minutes later, same thing again. Awakened, couldn't tell by which smoke detector. I could think of nothing to do other than to remove all the batteries in all of my smoke detectors.

Bad UI.

The fire alarms in all of my dwellings to date are wired into the mains.

Pulling the battery completely will simply cause them to beep incessantly.

---

The BRINKS home security system I recently battled with (see my post elsewhere in this thread) had a lead acid battery that was used much like a UPS.

Luckily ours was a deactivated installation. Had it been an active installation there would've been NO WAY to disable the low battery alert aside from replacing the battery. (As disabling the panel entirely is the only option; which would've triggered a call to the police.)

Good luck replacing a 12V lead acid battery at 1 AM ... I have trouble finding them during my waking hours. At least there's a chance you'll have a decently charged 9V cell tucked away in a desk drawer.

>I could think of nothing to do other than to remove all the batteries in all of my smoke detectors.

The whole point is if you are kept awake all night by beeping THE VERY NEXT DAY you should go out and get new batteries so you aren't kept awake the next night. It is an urgent warning requiring an urgent response.

By being able to disable it or by removing the batteries you are apt to forget to install new ones, defeating the purpose of the warning on a life saving device.

You're not only saving your own life, the lives of your family, but the lives of the firefighters who don't have to enter the building to search for you because you woke up and got out in time and were able to tell them that everyone was out of the house safely.

Good UI.

You seem to be disturbed about this. Have you had close friends suffer this fate?

If not, you should cool your jets. Because this product aims to:

  1. Make it less likely for people get annoyed at their smoke alarm and turn it off
  2. Add a CO sensor which when paired with a Nest thermostat will turn off 
  your gas furnace
  3. Save more lives than are currently being saved.

I think you're missing the point people are trying to make: what matters is how people actually behave, not how they should behave. If the current design of smoke alarms causes people to disable them - irrespective of whether or not they should - then the design can be improved.

I'm not missing your point at all. People's behavior is reflected in the statistics regarding fire deaths and injuries as collated by the US Fire Administration.

It is collected solely for the purpose of saving lives by the very people who go into burning buildings and find the bodies. Claims on a website hawking smoke detectors as objects of desire are made for other purposes.

The statistics don't support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms. And the Nest website doesn't back up their claims with data.

The statistics don't support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms.

Is that because the statistics show otherwise, or just that we don't collect statistics on it?

I don't see any statistics in the document you cited that are directly relevant to "the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms", in one way or another.

Indirectly (on p. 8 of the first document), it looks like 8% of fatal residential fires had smoke alarms that definitively "failed to operate". A much higher percentage are ambiguous, with it being unclear if the alarm operated or if there even was one in the first place. That is certainly compatible with the notion that people disable their smoke detectors because of the nuisance.

You assert that it's a binary choice between obnoxious false positives and life-saving potential, but this is because current smoke detector design is at a local maximum which optimizes for life-saving potential. There's absolutely no reason to think that a fundamental redesign of the smoke detector interface (rather than incremental improvements) can both be less obnoxious and equally life-saving.

As a concrete example, I've been trying to get a friend's parents to install (!) a smoke detector for /years/. They cook incredibly smoky food (lots of yogurt-marinated meats on a dry cast-iron pan) and both they and most of the other members of their immigrant community have removed any smoke detectors near their kitchen because the false positives are so onerous. If it were possible to provide them with a device which they could easily disable during cooking, they would be more protected for the rest of the time.

Additionally, the specific statistics you cite are not designed to determine whether people are disabling their smoke detectors due to false positives, and so have no bearing on that component of the discussion.

If it were possible to provide them with a device which they could easily disable during cooking

Yeah this stuff isn't really that tough. A single button that disables for 30 minutes would work perfectly. Maybe this device has that?

Wave at it ...

My $30 detectors purchased last year have this feature. Not the magic hand-waving part, but if you press the button, it becomes less sensitive for 30 minutes.

May be they can try different approach — install fume hood.

Someone else posted this elsewhere, but it's also relevant here. Statistics from the National Fire Protection Association support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors over nuisance alarms:

Smoke alarm failures usually result from missing, disconnected, or dead batteries. When smoke alarms should have operated but did not do so, it was usually because batteries are missing, disconnected or dead. People are most likely to remove or disconnect batteries because of nuisance activations. Sometimes the chirping to warn of a low battery is interpreted as a nuisance alarm.

http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/fire-protec...

> The statistics don't support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms.

So when people die, it's rarely ever the case that the alarms had been disabled for some reason?

> The user interface for current smoke detectors is very thoughtful. It is based upon experience.

Is that so? It's not because it's a commodity device built with "lowest bidder" mentality out of the cheapest possible materials?

There are a lot of things that we are stuck with that are just plain stupid -- like emergency exits that are illuminated RED, the universal color of "stop", and only written in english. But the function of a smoke alarm doesn't have to be one of them.

I think you're spinning straw men here man. Reading the documentation it's clear this device sounds an audible alarm at the same concentration as old fashioned devices. It just has an add'l feature of an early-warning spoken alarm. And the wave to dismiss is no less safe than the push-button-to-dismiss that is commonly used.

>There are a lot of things that we are stuck with that are just plain stupid -- like emergency exits that are illuminated RED, the universal color of "stop", and only written in english.

Only in the US and Canada, most of the rest of the world uses the ISO standard universal green "running man" without letters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_sign

Exactly my point!!

I still don't understand your objection. What feature are you specifically objecting to?

Maybe everyone here is just dancing around the point. A fire alarm that saves your life isn't annoying, it's awesome. A fire alarm that goes off cus you suck at making grilled cheese is annoying and has to be ignored and have it's batteries pulled until you can clear out the crappy cooking.

So the point is that smoke detectors today aren't "annoying," they're inaccurate. Their inaccuracy is a liability.

Nest's alarm doesn't seem to solve that dangerous inaccuracy.

Seems a little myopic. The issue I believe is that enough of us in our home have experienced enough false alarms that basically give us a 'boy who cried wolf' mentality when it comes down to it. Few of us will risk staying in a building when the alarm goes off, even if it is a drill, because false alarms in those systems seem seldom.

Thus, the ability to handle a false alarm gracefully is much better than having to disable the alarm in a permanent fashion for a temporary situation or struggle with containing a smoking meal until the irritation is over.

As far as analogies goes, If ambulance sirens were used by their operators to beat traffic for say...a sandwich and we all knew, it, we probably would ignore it much like China, for example, does. But because the belief is that the siren is turned on only for explicit emergencies, we pay attention to it.

Minefields is also a poor analogy. A more accurate one would be a mine detector. If a mine detector would give off a false alarm every time it came across a stick, people would fail to heed its warning in a real situation. They in effect would learn to ignore it and then that one time they did go in a minefield they'd be blown to bits.

Furthermore, The vast majority of ambulance sirens heard are for emergencies, and the vast majority of people who've ignored a minefield or it's detectors have probably died stepping on an ignored mine. I'm guessing the many smoke alarms going off have been for false positives, if they weren't, we wouldn't be having this discussion which it seems everyone hear has experienced or knows someone who has.

How many false positives smoke alarm positives equal a single false negative?

Considering the extreme relative rarity of false negatives, this question isn't as rhetorical as you think.

130

> The issue I believe is that enough of us in our home have experienced enough false alarms that basically give us a 'boy who cried wolf' mentality when it comes down to it.

I'm a bit confused.

What the hell kind of shoddy product are you people buying that triggers on something that isn't smoke? Or are people talking about situations where there is smoke, from something burning, but that burn is small and contained and safe?

EG Burning the toast - you don't need an alarm because you know it's the toast. Except it's possible for toasters to stick and for the bread to catch fire and for that to spread to the kitchen cupboard which is over the toaster, and etc. Some people don't stay in the room when the toast is cooking.

Better placement of the alarms - not in bathrooms or just outside bathroom doors, and not in kitchens or just outside kitchen doors - helps.

> a mine detector would give off a false alarm every time it came across a stick, people would fail to heed its warning in a real situation. They in effect would learn to ignore it and then that one time they did go in a minefield they'd be blown to bits.

Smoke detectors are detecting smoke. They're not detecting cups of coffee or Bic biros or other unrelated things.

What exactly are you confused about? Scenario A 1) Toast burns, no fire but lots of smoke 2) Alarm goes off, it's annoying so you wave your hand and turn it off. Problem solved.

Scenario B 1) Toast burns, catches fire and your whole kitchen is burning down. 2) You run like hell

Why would being able to disable a false alarm easier make it any less safer?

Edit: I'll also point out that EVERY single time we cook a steak in a cast iron pan in our apartment the smoke alarm will go off. It's really annoying I have to be the one trying to figure out how to silence the damn thing.

But it's not a false alarm. Smoke detectors detect smoke; toast burns; smoke detector triggers. That's a real alarm.

There are two solutions: 1) make it easier to temporarily dismiss the alarm. 2) read the instructions and place the device properly

You're right, a smoke detector is detecting smoke... but some smoke is expected (like cooking) and some smoke isn't. The product addresses the problem of context. When we expect the smoke, it is a false positive, when we don't...it's positive. Many of us have made the mistake of ripping out the battery in frustration and leaving the smoke detector disabled despite the risk of living without a smoke detector.

As for your proposed solution. Drilling holes in the walls and ceilings, re-patching the the old installation point and doing this over and over to try and find a balance point of safe and convenient seems to fail the cost-benefit analysis compared to this product for me. I'd much rather buy the damn thing, leave it installed where it is as opposed to shifting it around.

My analogy of the mine detector was more about false positives in general usage, I guess if I were to correct it further, it would be a mine detector that couldn't detect an inactive/benign mine vs a malicious one.

So, people put smoke detectors in bad places. Why do they do this? The boxes in the UK clearly tell you where to put them.

Other people move into that property, and remove the batteries. Leaving the cover open? Leaving a flashing LED? Leaving a "no battery chirp"?

> Drilling holes in the walls and ceilings, re-patching the the old installation point and doing this over and over to try and find a balance point of safe and convenient

Measure twice, cut once and all that. :-p

I realise that I made many posts about this, but I do agree with you. Many people do it, and it is a problem, and it's good that companies are thinking about getting working detectors into homes, and I look forward to hearing about Nest saving lives because people have working detectors and not detectors without batteries or somesuch.

> Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug. The inconvenience of being kept awake by a smoke alarm battery tends to pale in comparison to the inconvenience of being kept dead.

So there are only two choices? Dead or obnoxious sounds in the middle of the night?

>"We all recognize the importance of fire safety, but there is no excuse for the design of smoke and CO detectors to be so painfully obnoxious. If it motivates homeowners to disable them, it is a bad design, isn't this obvious?"

If you're being woken up by low batteries or disabling your smoke alarms - no, you don't recognize the important of fire safety.

>"When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery."

The battery backup in a typical residential fire alarm can last several years. Spend a few minutes and few bucks replacing the batteries once a year and it's unlikely you will ever have this problem.

I certainly expect a $130 alarm to offer something over the typical $20-30 counterparts and it appears this one does, but I certainly don't consider support for handwaving or delayed alarms to be among the benefits.

If you have an alarm that warns you only every 30 minutes, spend a little and get new alarms

A 30 minute interval is bad design, mine are like 30 seconds to 1 minute (been a while) plus they have a yellow LED when battery is low, red when dead or removed, and green when all systems go

> Over-riding their primary purpose for the sake of occupant convenience violates the basic principles of life safety.

For me, anecdotally, this isn't the case at all.

I had a fire alarm near our kitchen that was so sensitive it would go off at the drop of a hat. We kept removing the batteries because it wouldn't shut up. Occasionally after eating we'd forget to re-enable the alarm.

So, for me, the override is very much a welcome feature that improves safety. In fact, I think I'll be buying one.

*>So, for me, the override is very much a welcome feature that improves safety. In fact, I think I'll be buying one.

You had an improperly installed fire alarm, so the safety-improving feature for you isn't to properly install a fire alarm, but to simplify the overriding of the alarm so you can continue to ignore an improperly installed alarm?

...

I'm saying this in a friendly way: you're being ridiculous. :)

I bet greater than 95% of residential fire alarms are false alarms. Now, perhaps all of those people should call a contractor and get their house rewired. (Even then, false alarms would not be reduced to zero.)

Or, perhaps, the fire alarms should be improved so that people can dismiss false alarms without pulling out the batteries.

If you're getting enough false alarms that removing the battery is a common occurrence, yes, you should get one fire alarm moved probably a couple feet. Which is not saying to get your house rewired in the slightest.

A good use of an override is for when something goes wrong. For instance, when you burn something in the oven and smoke comes through to the living room. You find the source of the problem, you turn off the alarm, and you deal with airing out your house. Something went wrong, you told the smoke alarm to be quiet because you're dealing with it, and you dealt with it.

The problem with your situation is that the smoke alarm is placed in a manner that makes your normal way of life be detectable as something going wrong. That isn't what overriding is meant for.

Moving a smoke alarm in my house would require re-wiring. Their primary power is wired, and they are all interconnected (one triggered detector will sound all the alarms).

I think the point is you probably don't have to move it very far. I doubt most would call it rewiring a home to move the alarm 2-5 feet.

In my apartment complex where I had this issue, it would have have required re-wiring, AND the apartment complex wasn't at all interested in making sure the fire alarm didn't go off if I was making toast...

One little crumb burns and all of the fire alarms in the apartment would go off, not pleasant at all.

Then check your fire codes and report them to the Fire Marshall?

I'm just throwing that out there.

At the easiest level, the "rewiring" is the least of the problems. When you move it, you now have to make a new hole in the ceiling to mount the unit and pass the wires through AND you have now left an old hole in the ceiling that will need to be patched, textured (to match) and painted (to match). However, depending on the direction your ceiling joists run compared to the direction the wires run in the ceiling AND the direction you need to move the unit, you might have to create a new hole in the ceiling big enough to get a drill in there to drill a hole through the ceiling joist to pass the wire into a new area of the ceiling. That is more to patch, texture and paint. While not something very difficult for a skilled tradesman [tradeswoman, tradesperson(?)], it is not something the average person is going to do satisfactorily themselves and would likely want to hire a skilled person to do it. Moving a wired smoke alarm isn't really much easier than moving a wired ceiling light.

Not to mention, in many states of the US, you would have to have that wiring inspected and certified before you could sell the house.

You can buy a battery-only smoke-alarm. That's not ideal, but you wouldn't have to rewire anything.

Depending on code, this may be illegal.

My apartment is small so you'd have to either completely remodel the kitchen or redo the whole apartment. Please step out of your ivory tower.

What guarantees are there and how does one locate a fire-alarm installer that offers a perfect installation that is impervious to toast burning or strong ovens? Any evidence that safety is degraded between the ability to wave off an alarm versus the oft-used removal of batteries? As the saying goes, the lesser of two evils -- we're only human.

Remember, there are no stupid users.

This is common behavior. Yes, it's not "ideal" when considered along a single "safety" dimension. But when you're having a dinner party and you have a really annoying beep because you burned the main dish and you're already anxious, etc., it's a hell of a let easier to just disable the alarm.

Nest lets you "hush" the alarm without disabling. /Huge/ improvement.

I'm amazed that everyone is claiming the alarms are installed improperly. Aren't most of you in big cities in small apartments like me? The alarm is going off if anything happens when you live < 800 sq ft.

I live in a smallish apt, maybe 350 ft^2, and my smoke alarms never go off, even when I burn something on the stove...

The fact that you're legitimately burning something and you smoke alarm doesn't go off is more of an indication that your smoke alarm is ineffectual than anything else.

That's not clear at all. The smoke from some toast burning and the smoke from your kitchen being on fire aren't necessarily the same in amount/duration/composition/distribution. Obviously an ideal detector would take such things into account and reject false positives.

I do not know the degree to which this is possible in practice, but certainly it's been true basically every place I've lived that the smoke detectors very rarely reacted to "typical food burning incidents."

I live in a tiny apartment. I have two detectors in my flat. I have another just outside the door. They're all tested twice yearly by contractors (and the fire extinguisher is checked).

I've never set them off by cooking, even with occasional accidents of food burning.

All of our alarms are connected so when one goes off they ALL go off. We have a particularly sensitive alarm just a few feet from our kitchen. It goes off nearly every time we cook bacon. It has a large button right in the middle that will shut it off for a few minutes. It makes a fairly loud chirp when it has reset itself. The pantry is near so it is not too difficult to grab the broom and push the button with the handle. It would be nice to just wave my hand instead grab the broom. Same functionality... just better implementation.

I agree with original comment about the hand wave to dismiss feature. It shouldn't be made easy to dismiss an alarm.

At first, it seems like an awesome feature when you know the source of fire. e.g your kitchen.

But consider CO alarm cases. Top 10 reviews in Amazon for a Smoke alarm + CO detector talk about how CO alarm saved their lives. Most of the reviewers at first thought it was a false alarm. If it was Nest they would have "easily" dismissed it and probably died.

But that said, other features like motion detector, night light, syncing with Nest thermostat to shutoff the heater, cool design, make it a good buy. As long as I don't dismiss all alarms by default.

Well, the nest detector apparently has a voice that can say "I've detected Carbon Monoxide"

One would hope that Nest would deal with dismissals differently depending on what is detected and at what concentrations.

Indeed. a lot of this thread seems to be assuming that the makers are morons who didn't consult anyone, and have obviously made a product that is unusable and dangerous.

Most detectors only have one sound.

It seems that the Nest will specifically tell you with words that it has detected CO, so you'll listen.

I wouldn't be surprised if the CO detection can'd be dismissed since you would never really want to dismiss it (unlike smoke).

Perhaps I'm in the minority, but all combined CO/smoke detectors I have ever owned have a distinctive alarm for CO. Usually a spoken alert warning of CO.

> if it was Nest they would have "easily" dismissed it and probably died.

Did you read the description at all? You can only dismiss warnings not alarms. You cannot dismiss life threatening situations.

I did. Maybe I missed the fine print. It seems like you can dismiss warning and alarms.

"You can wave your hand in front of Protect to dismiss the beeping — essentially, like pressing snooze on an alarm. As long as the situation doesn’t worsen, then your smoke alarms will never sound."

"For severe issues, Protect may opt to bypass the "heads up" warning and simply sound the alarm"

Still it doesn't say that this hand wave feature will stop working in these severe situations.

Ofcourse, I am sure they will iron things like this out before shipping.

http://support.nest.com/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-s...

I lived in an apartment where there was no fume hood on the stove top, the smoke detectors were in the living room half-way between the doors to the outside I was told by apartment management to open while cooking and the kitchen.

Basically whatever I was doing the damn alarms would go off. They were so sensitive that they would go off if I was boiling a pot of water, or if a single crumb in the oven "burned".

In the end the alarms ended up on my table, and every time when I would go cook I would remove the battery, and replace them when the time came.

My smoke alarm goes off semi-regularly when I cook, but I never remove the batteries when that happens. I just open up some windows, turn on the range fan, and start blowing air across the detector with a broom. The very principle of taking the batteries out bothers me, I wouldn't do it unless I had replacement batteries in my other hand.

How many people actually disable smoke detectors when they insult their cooking, and how many people just think that this is what other people commonly do? I suspect this is one of those "problems that everyone thinks that everyone else has, but few people actually do."

I would have loved to have a range fan or a kitchen fume hood. However in my case opening a window meant opening the sliding glass door.

You are standing in the middle of my apartment, to your left is the sliding glass door, right above you are two smoke alarms, and to your right is the stove top/kitchen.

No matter how much I would have loved to open a window and turn on a range fan to solve the problem the damn smoke has to travel underneath/past the smoke alarms to go outside. No, my kitchen did not have a window in it.

I know a LOT of people that were living in that apartment complex that while they lived there removed the smoke detectors from the living/kitchen area and replaced them for the once a year that maintenance would come by to replace the batteries...

The maintenance guy even recommended to me to just take them down.

It wasn't really a danger either, there was a smoke alarm/CO detector in every bed room (which was 3 ft from the other smoke detector, but you can close bed room doors while cooking), along with a full building alarm system.

> However in my case opening a window meant opening the sliding glass door.

I mean, that's what my window is too.. Bigger than actual windows.

Well, the NFPA seems to think it's a problem.

http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/fire-protec...

I also know most of the people I'm related to have pulled the batteries at one point or another. Unless you think it's some genetic defect to have struck both my mother's and father's lineages, that probably points to a wider problem, too.

At my mom's house growing up, we just did the wave the towel at it trick when it went off, which worked remarkable well. No windows open, nothing fancy. Just some vigorous towel waving for about 15 seconds. It would go off if you did so much as overboiled water.

Poor placement of the smoke detector, I believe.

I'm not sure if that disabled it for a few minutes or what.

> How many people actually disable smoke detectors when they insult their cooking, and how many people just think that this is what other people commonly do? I suspect this is one of those "problems that everyone thinks that everyone else has, but few people actually do."

Every single person with sleeping babies? The people that need a working smoke alarm the most and are most likely to have sleep deprivation and most likely to forget to replace the batteries.

Or people with dogs that wont stop barking when it goes off. Handy for house fires; annoying when cooking.

Guilty. I won't win the lottery, die in a plane crash, or burn up in a house fire.

All the time, man. All the time.

I just press the test button, that's worked on every smoke alarm I've used.

Get a heat detector for your kitchen. Detects fire, but not smoke.

It sounds like you know what you are talking about, but I'm confused as to which portion of this product you are unhappy with. Is it the "wave to disable" feature? If so, I tend to agree -- that seems like a bad idea (it simply is too easy to dismiss something that could be worse than you think). But I assume that other smoke alarms have this feature too in button form (I don't know, I haven't had a false alarm in years)?

If that's the issue OP has with the device, then I don't understand why. They made the statement that, "[t]hough the kitchen is the most common location for a fire in dwellings, kitchen fires are among the least likely to be fatal because cooking usually is attended and occurs during waking hours." This is in reference to their assertion that alarms which trigger from cooking are probably inappropriately placed and should (presumably) be further from the kitchen.

So if you're awake, in the kitchen, attending cooking, and you dismiss the alarm, how is this different from having no alarm in the kitchen? It seems like it would be an improvement, full stop.

My mains powered detector has a disable button. It is interconnected to the other alarms in the building so it is essential to have a way of not waking up my neighbors when I burn toast. It works perfectly for me, but for an older person or someone who couldn't reach it could be difficult. A child proof button lower down would be better.

I think it's up high, because the smoke would rise.

I think he means a linked button

Sanctimonious bullshit like yours gets people killed. You're going to have a hard time pleading honest ignorance on this one; it has been clearly and repeatedly explained how false positives and bad user interface design in safety-critical equipment cost lives, and this company is trying to do something about that. If you're not going to be part of the solution, stop being part of the problem.

Hmm this is the top-most comment and I have no idea what your issue is with the device.

I think it's just an excuse to say "fucking" a lot.

Will you explain what the issue you have with this device is again? I think I must be too dense to understand.

> Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.

The system does not allow you to wave away what it considers life-threatening alarms. Nor does it allow you to wave away a worsening situation.

http://support.nest.com/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-s...

Note that alarms can only be silenced in the room that triggered the alarm if the detector determines the alarm type to be a warning (and not as threatening).

Your angry comment makes it sound like the creators didn't consider safety at all — while in all likelihood they paid a great deal of attention to safety, also noticing there is a lot of room for convenience to be added in a modern smoke alarm.

> In the time it takes to download and install a smartphone app, one can probably replace all their smoke detector batteries

Are you suggesting that getting on a ladder in each room and then removing and replacing the batteries for each smoke alarm is faster than downloading a single app on a smartphone?

I'm confused. It looks like they're selling battery and wired versions of the device, and the wired version also contains a battery backup (according to the specs page - click "Show Detailed Specs" and it says it comes with "Three long-life backup batteries"):

https://store.nest.com/product/smoke-co-alarm/

I've never seen a residential smoke detector that wasn't primarily (and solely) powered by a 9-volt battery. Is hardwired power required for new construction?

Hardwired smoke alarms have been required on new construction in the US since the 1989 NEC. It usually takes a few years for cities and states to adopt the newest NEC revision. However, by now, all states have adopted at least 1989.

Hardwired alarms are also required for major renovations. However, you basically have to take it down to the studs before this requirement is triggered.

The requirement for renovations will vary based on locally adopted codes and their interpretation by building officials. In more affluent areas, the tendency will be to require upgrades along with relatively minor work. In less affluent or rural areas, the tendency will be more libertarian - i.e. building codes and their enforcement are subject to the political process.

I don't know about everywhere, but where I live (Oregon), many of the new homes have detectors that are not only wired for power (with battery backup), but also wired together such that an alarm at one will fire all of them. The devices seem to be mostly ordinary smoke detectors except for that connection.

> Is hardwired power required for new construction?

Yes [0], although this is obviously country specific.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Installation_and...

It varies by state, but in Maryland, new construction requires it, and older houses are required to install detectors with sealed-in, long-life batteries or AC detectors by 2018:

http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2013RS/fnotes/bil_0009/sb0969.pdf

Have you ever taken them completely off the ceiling or just opened the battery cover? My house has 120v/9v detectors and when I was installing fire alarms in new construction, all residential multifamily and hotels had 120v smoke detectors in the units which are interconnected. They also have 9v batteries for backup. Marriott hotels actually specify 24v system smoke detectors tied into the main alarm system. I know Home Depot sells battery only detectors but those are generally for retrofit applications. A contractor will likely have to install 120v in anything new being built.

Here's a very common battery-only smoke detector: http://www.homedepot.com/p/First-Alert-Battery-Operated-Phot...

The middle part of my house was built in 1920 and didn't have electricity at the time, then it had uninsulated wires on insulators, then it had wiring with crumbly insulation (the natural rubber gets hard).

When we added onto the house, we put in smoke detectors (in every bedroom and hall) that are powered by the AC mains, have backup batteries and if one goes off, they all go into alarm.

If my house is ever destroyed, it will probably be an electrical fire, but my family will know about it early.

Not enough thought has gone into some of these features. Take this:

"If Nest Protect’s carbon monoxide alarm goes off, your Nest Thermostat automatically turns off your gas furnace"

In a winter vacation scenario this could be disastrous. Nest decides to turn off the furnace, but the homeowner is away and unreachable. It doesn't take long for the temperature to plummet, causing water to freeze and burst pipes.

You could probably use the Nest app to remotely turn it back on.

I think you'd want to know right away that you have a CO leak. You can call in an emergency utilities guy to drain the pipes - the internal insulated ones won't burst within a couple hours. And as the other commenter says, you can almost certainly restart the furnace or cancel this action.

That's assuming the homeowner has decent internet connectivity wherever they are on vacation.

In every single apparent I have rented I have turned of the fire alarm. Usually after the second or third time it goes off thanks to me cooking.

The same is true for my friends. Once they found a hidden old alarm where they wanted to bury their alarm. Apparently the previous renter also hated fire alarms.

One time the alarm kept beeping even after I pulled it off the wall and pulled out the battery. Holding it under water is a great way to stop that beeping.

No, I don't care what the statistics say, I don't smoke and I am not worried about dying in a fire. And this is AFTER I got caught in a real fire when crackheads started one a few floors down from me in a very old building I used to rent in.

Strangely I am usually a risk minimizer in the rest of life. I never speed for example.

This is a long very long way of saying this fire alarm will in my opinion save lives. I for one would NOT rip this out of my wall and drown it, specifically because of how it works.

> I for one would NOT rip this out of my wall and drown it, specifically because of how it works.

Specially after tearing out a Benjamin for this gold-plated gizmod and showing it off to friends

UL 217 requires that silenced alarms can only be done so for a maximum of 15 minutes. If someone's home and burned their dinner or forgot to open the flue, is 15 minutes so bad?

Here is a clip from a radio talk show where a caller happens to have TWO smoke detectors chirping in the background because of low battery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phKAYe9T08A

Google 'Loveline Smoke Detector' and you will get about 40 to 60 unique calls of just these two radio hosts getting calls where the caller happens to have a low battery chirping in the background.

> Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.

It's a good thing that overriding their primary purpose isn't what's happening here, then.

It's sad to see this kind of negative, angry, straw-man stuff as the top comment.

In what way, exactly, does this product reduce safety? The fact that you can silence it more easily than a regular alarm? Do you think that "ease of silencing the alarm" is a large factor in whether or not an alarm is taken seriously? Did you not read the description, and not realize that silencing an "emergency-level" alarm is impossible?[0]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't understand what the problem is. Making a safety device less safe for convenience might be stupid, but making a safety device more convenient without reducing safety is not.

[0] http://support.nest.com/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-s...

sorry, but you are ranting fucking nonsense. The fact that you think everyone should just do as they are told, does not make them do so. No one in their right mind would leave an alarm enabled that is destroying their quality of life due to pets or a child sleeping. They will disable it and forget/procrastinate on fixing it.

The truth is, products like this will save lives. Screaming like a neanderthal in favor of Jurassic tech that people disable because it doesn't do its job right is not going to decrease mortality due to fires.

>NFPA recommends changing them twice a year when clocks get reset for daylight savings time.

Who manually resets their clocks anymore? All of my clocks auto-set for DST. And what about people in Arizona?!

/tongue-firmly-in-cheek

Ah, the inevitable "they are idiots" comment liberally seasoned with a pinch of fucks. Old predictable HN.

Will people who are woken by an alarm learn to wave their arms in the air until it stops, then go back to sleep?

No, because the situations where you do want to shut the alarm up (usually when you've burned something in the kitchen), you are basically saying "yes yes, I know, leave me alone"

But if you were asleep and were woken up by an alarm, you obviously don't know what it is.

Plus, the added benefit of the smoke alarm saying "Smoke in <some room>" is much more useful.

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