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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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."

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

All the time, man. All the time.

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

*>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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

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

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