Comment by brendanr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brendanr | Hacker News Reader

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Nest did a great job with their thermostat, but the Protect leaves a lot to be desired. I was vacuuming which triggered the sensor. The alarm went off, and it was really loud.

I looked at how to hush it, and couldn't figure out how. My alarm was too high up to safely climb up and press the button -- I had paid for somebody to install it safely before.

So I called their support, and they told me they couldn't legally add a feature to turn it off. Which is a bit bewildering, considering that wave-to-hush had been a launch feature (albeit removed for apparent reliability issues). So I had to dangerously climb up high and remove the alarm and take out the battery.

But the worst thing? It never alerted my phone.

I have my own theories about why this happened. I had recovered my iPhone and not logged back into the Nest app, which I think is required for notifications to start flowing again.

But the support guy thought Nest engineering would be back in touch with me to discuss this crucial flaw within two weeks. Months later, I've not heard back.

Nest had a ton of options after the thermostat. It feels like they put a smaller B team on the smoke detector, despite it being a critically important safety device. It's really bewildering how the Protect turned out this way.

More generally, the lesson is that the Internet of Things is going to be fraught with complications.

Apparently "dirty" power is a major trigger for the wired Nest Protect's false alarms. It's not surprising that your vacuum cleaner was enough to trigger this.

CloudFlare's CEO was ranting about his ~daily false alarms about 6 months ago: "dirty power common on PG&E SF causes small blips in light emitter. Nest interprets as smoke."

More detail here: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40eastdakota%20nest&src=typd

Actually mine just runs on batteries. I think they have an optical sensor which can be triggered by dust. I was told by support that they used to recommend blowing the debris out, but it wasn't good for customer confidence.

When your troubleshooting procedures remind your customers of their (erroneous but widely practiced) methods of making NES cartridges work, you might have a problem.

I don't know about NES, but at least with the N64, I swear by blowing into the cartridge. Works at least 75% of the time, and the other 25% by wiggling the cartridge a bit in the hopes of getting it to reseat better.

It works -- but what you're really doing is fixing an intermittent electrical connection by introducing moisture. Over the long term that's a recipe for corrosion.

We used q-tips with alcohol in my house to avoid this very issue. Cleans the contacts really good with no corrosion issues.

Do they not have an internal power supply to smooth out voltage spikes?

What I don't understand is "dumb" smoke detectors, whether on mains or 9v battery, have been reliable forever. Yet a device that should be not much more than putting a little compute power/wireless connectivity/etc in the same enclosure as a sensor setup with decades of proven reliability somehow fails on the sensor's reliability.

Is there a patent in this space or something that forced them to reinvent the sensor or should this be a poster child for NIH syndrome?

I don't think it's true that regular smoke detectors are inherently reliable. In newer apartment buildings that I've lived in, all of the units are hooked into a central fire alarm system. If a smoke detector goes off in one unit, the alarm goes off in all of them.

In practice it's often been a nightmare. Some places that I've lived, the fire alarm went off multiple times a day, almost every day. Presumably a lot of this is from people cooking or something, but given the frequency I don't think that could explain all of it.

I think in non-networked smoke alarm situations, people are just less aware of the false positives they generate.

And the power supply issue is well solved, too -- see just about any modern phone charger. I just...don't understand.

Conventional smoke detectors use radioactive isotopes (americium). I imagine Nest wanted to avoid putting radioactive materials in their shiny consumer products.

Some do. Many others also use the photoelectric smoke sensor that Protect does, and some use both. The photoelectric type is better at detecting smoldering fires. The ionization (radioactive) type is better for detecting flames. Perhaps with a temperature sensor in the Protect, they thought they were covering their bases.

That's a shame, since the only place a Nest Protect apparently belongs is a nuclear waste storage facility if that's what it takes to get them to shut up after a false alarm.

I might add that never alerting my phone was the worst thing simply because it was the only reason to buy a Protect. A regular smoke detector continues to detect smoke just fine.

This has been a problem with I think literally every IoE type device I've tried. I'm in Australia so I assume the reason is that everyone buys some AWS service in America, and 500ms of latency hits and server load means stuff times out in the end.

Which seems to suggest some bad things about the ability of the designers of these things to build a robust product and forsee obvious problems.

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