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Comment by ds9 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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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?

> 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?

>"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

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