Next for Nest: A Smoke Detector

http://jessicalessin.com/2013/09/24/exclusive-next-for-nest-a-smoke-detector/

by coloneltcb • 13 years ago

37 44 13 years ago

GuiA2• 13 years ago

Smoke detectors are literally invisible to the average house dweller 99.99% of the time, and the 0.01% of the time where they are "activated", they do their job just fine.

The thermostat was a brilliant entry point into a potential multibillion dollar home automation business for Nest, but I don't get why a smoke detector would be step 2.

Any ideas?

Nest launched its $249 thermostat almost two years ago and has long brainstormed other things to build, including the smoke detector and potentially a door lock.

A door lock, on the other hand, would be great. A friend of mine has replaced his traditional apartment lock with a pinpad, and it's quite fantastic. He can set temporary passcodes for guests, never has to worry about his keys, etc.

wmeredith4• 13 years ago

It's an eyesore that has to be visible in my house to be effective. See my other comment in this thread.

GuiA2• 13 years ago

has to be visible in my house to be effective.

Why does it have to be visible to be effective? I notice my smoke detectors roughly once every few years: when it's time to change the batteries (oh and that one time where my cooking went wrong and it activated the alarm).

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Your chief concern in your smoke alarm is whether it looks pretty?

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

You'd think Nest would've bought Lockitron by now.

tomphoolery2• 13 years ago

Nest could be waiting to see how Lockitron fails. Then, they would have the chance to compete and innovate on a better product. Given their current mainstream success and apparent financial comfort, I would imagine Nest having more resources to tackle the problem than Lockitron can hope to raise with a crowdfunding campaign at this point, in addition to more years of industry experience. So that might explain why, even though Nest could make a door lock right now, they are waiting for the right time to develop and unveil one.

AHconsidered• 13 years ago

and what exactly does lockitron have to offer Nest?

brudgers• 13 years ago

On the hardware side because smoke detectors typically have a fixed replacement date. In addition, homes tend to have significantly more smoke detectors than thermostats. Throw in the potential of selling security services to the upscale market segment likely to want branded thermostats and it could be a very lucrative.

rtkwe• 13 years ago

I agree heartily. Also the combination doesn't even make that much sense paired with the Nest, especially without any real cooperation between the two mentioned in this article. At least use the new devices to gather more temperature points and maybe even to see if anyone is present, which would pair nicely with the Nest's away feature.

larubbio• 13 years ago

I personally can't stand smoke detectors and would love for someone to improve on them.

My house has very high ceilings, so dealing with any issue with the detectors is a pain. I change the batteries yearly (even though all my detectors are connected to power) mostly for safety but also since I can never find which alarm is beeping. Mine beep once every 5 minutes if the battery is low, twice every 5 minutes for some other issue and blink a red LED is something else is up. They might blink green if everything is OK, or if it's tuesday I don't really know, I just know they are terrible and non-sensible. It's almost like they want me to turn them off. (Have I mentioned they make me angry) So if it ever gets to the point where one has a low battery I spend forever moving from room to room waiting for a beep. Also since the beep is so short it's hard to even tell if I'm in the correct room when I hear it.

Additionally one night an alarm went off in the middle of the night that we had never heard before. I had no idea if it was a smoke detector or not. A simple interface where I could get status would have been great then. Another night (why is it always the middle of the night?) we heard beeping from an alarm, so I went to the garage, got the ladder and climbed up to the alarm only to find out it was the CO2 detector near the floor that was beeping. I can't say it enough, an interface with words to describe the system as opposed to beeps is all I need to be very happy. I'd pay for that.

Give me smoke detectors that report status to a system so I can see which have low batteries and which alarm recently triggered (which they can do for reasons other than smoke). Heck even let me disable the kitchen detector for a set timeout when I'm frying something. Please do this.

tripngroove• 13 years ago

the 0.01% of the time where they are "activated", they do their job just fine.

Several homes I've lived in had smoke detectors that would false positive on a somewhat regular basis from (what I deduct were) sudden changes in humidity. This tends to happen in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the only fix at times was to unplug the smoke detector and go back to bed. A "silence for 15 min" option, sensitivity adjustment, or any kind of interactive control would be amazing.

Also, who wouldn't want to get an alert if their house is burning down?

If Nest released this tomorrow I would replace every smoke detector in my house with one.

tomphoolery2• 13 years ago

A door lock, on the other hand, would be great.

https://lockitron.com/preorder

Mine is on its way!

pyoung2• 13 years ago

It's an intriguing, albeit risky move. Existing smoke detectors are pretty ugly with bad UI. There is little to no competition for the 'high end' retail market. With that said, current smoke detectors can be had for $10-20 bucks, and my guess is Nest will charge significantly more than that. Of course they can add a number of extra sensors/functionality to justify the costs. A CO sensor would be a good addition, maybe motion sensor (for security), temperature sensors (to provide more granular feedback to the thermostat), and maybe some other sensors to monitor indoor air quality (VOC's, radon). I am sure there are a few other things that can be thrown into the device to make it more useful (wifi repeater?).

All things considered, this is a pretty genius move. In the push to create 'smart homes' most of the attention has been on lighting, kitchen appliances, and entertainment systems. But one thing that has always bugged me was how do you get a refrigerator at the back of the house to communicate seamlessly with the wireless router in the front if the signal doesn't reach that far. I was thinking that mesh networking would play a big part, but even in an appliance saturated home, there could still be some dead spots. Well, smart smoke detectors might solve that, as they are in almost every room in the house! One issue I can forsee is that not all homes have hard-wired smoke detectors (which means power would be an issue, thus limiting what they can do with it).

EDIT: Seems like everyone is focusing on the UI comment. While I think that that is still an issue, I think the more exciting possibility is that a 'smart detector' could also provide nodes for a mesh network (or something similar), essentially providing a communication layer for appliances/devices in the home. If they go this route and they succeed, they could put themselves in a really good position competitively, as they would 'own' the networking layer.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

> "bad UI"

What bad UI? They usually have either 1 or 2 buttons. They always have a test button and sometimes have a secondary button to disable the alarm (e.g. if you accidentally trigger it). They're all basically identical and people have been used to them that way for a long time. I'm not saying there isn't a better way to do it (I'm no UI expert) but does this current UI really need improved?

tptacek• 13 years ago

What UI? You plug them in and, you hope, never think about them again except to change the batteries once every couple years. Why would I want a better relationship with my smoke detector? It's there to detect something that virtually never happens.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Hmm... Can't tell if Poe's Law...?

Existing smoke detectors are pretty ugly with bad UI.

Existing smoke detectors are also exceedingly simple, which is a great thing for lifesaving safety devices. Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and reliability is the primary requirement of safety devices.

spitfire• 13 years ago

I don't think they're targeting the smoke detector per se. Think about what you could do if you had a device on the ceiling in every room in the house.

They can monitor who's in the room making the nest even more accurate/energy efficient or Offer security system products. I'm sure they've thought for longer than the 3 seconds I did, and come up with many others profitable ideas.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

I've never had a smoke detector that didn't eventually throw false alarms in the middle of the night, activating all of the detectors in the chain and making it impossible to find the one that triggered the alarm.

When you go to the local Lowes-Depot, your only choices are among a bunch of crummy discount options that are all as poor as the one you've got.

I'd pay 5x-10x more for a detector of a higher quality with a little built in intelligence. Like was it the ionization chamber or the photoelectric section that triggered the alarm? Which freakin unit triggered the alarm, and maybe a SMS battery warning a week before the damn thing commences to chirp like a mutant cricket all night because its battery is low.

They're invisible 99% of the time, but the 1% they're not, they're a damn nuisance. Fix that and I'm sold.

wmeredith4• 13 years ago

Good. The Nest is hands-down my favorite piece of infrastructure I've purchased. It's easy to use, looks great, and saved me money over what I had before. Hopefully I can buy lots of new products from Nest Labs to replace the ugly outdated crap around my house over the next decade.

Tichy• 13 years ago

A cartoon comes to mind of somebody staring at a chart of the increasing smoke in their house while the fire starts to eat away their computer screen.

I'd like to have that on a dashboard, too - smoke levels in the building. Very comforting most of the time.

(Sorry for the humor - I am sure they have thought of some worthwhile use cases).

danudey• 13 years ago

The idea of a smoke detector which also detects carbon monoxide seems brilliant, except that smoke rises and carbon monoxide sinks, so either you place the device in the middle of the wall (and lose out on early warning) or it becomes useful for one and useless for the other.

btgeekboy• 13 years ago

They're fairly common these days, especially considering all dwellings in California are now required to have CO detectors.

warfangle• 13 years ago

One would think that CO produced by combustion would rise before it fell.

davidmr4• 13 years ago

You are both right, in a way, in that neither particularly matters: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem03/chem03364.htm

"As would have been predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, CO infused anywhere within the chamber diffused until it was of equal concentration throughout. Mixing would be even faster in the home environment, with drafts due to motion or temperature. It would be reasonable to place a residential CO alarm at any height within the room."

jellicle• 13 years ago

Carbon monoxide is lighter than oxygen and carbon dioxide, about the same as nitrogen. All things being equal it will slowly rise in a room.

The reason carbon monoxide is a threat in the lower levels of your house is not because it sinks but because that's where your furnace and hot water heater are.

Combined smoke and CO detectors are fine (and there are many on the market today).

kposehn• 13 years ago

There's one reason to have a Nest smoke detector: it would have a thermostat.

The reason I haven't bought a Nest is because the device only takes temperatures from one place in my house, which just happens to be a place that has a +/- 5 degree temperature change from either end of the house on a good day.

If the device also gets the temp, a Nest would be far more effective at keeping a house comfortable and saving energy. I'd also worry less about my toddler daughter being alone in a bedroom on an cool night that is usually much cooler than my own (first world parent problems).

jcastro• 13 years ago

Yeah but does it really help the average home? If you have one thermostat in your house more temperature data doesn't really help, it can only set one temperature for the whole house.

If you have a multi-zone house then yeah, your bottom floor and top floor could be set to multiple temperatures, but those houses typically have 2 thermostats already and if you're using 2 Nests for that they already talk to each other to make that efficient.

It would be cool to be able to wire up individual ceiling fans or something to the Nest and then use the fire detectors to figure out which rooms are running too hot/cold and fire off fans individually to normalize the temperature.

cstejerean2• 13 years ago

There's one example where I think targeting a specific room would help even without multi-zone. At night I only really care about the temperature in the bedroom, which is a lot smaller and in my experience cools faster than the living room (which is where my Nest is currently). If it could figure out that my bedroom is already at a comfortable temperature at night and not bother with the temperature in the living room, that might be interesting.

davidmr4• 13 years ago

This might be the killer feature I mentioned in a previous post on this article. I own a 120 year old house with odd nooks and crannies and strange airflow. My thermostat knows the temperature in my living room, but not upstairs by my bedroom, which can be 10°F warmer or cooler, and we have to set the downstairs thermostat to odd temperatures at night just to make it remotely comfortable, and it's rarely the same temperature from night to night. That hassle would be worth some amount of money to eliminate. $150? Hell no. $100? Probably not. $60? Sign me up!

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

Maybe it will finally make use of Nest's unused Zigbee radio (https://community.nest.com/ideas/1115)

justin66• 13 years ago

My feeling is that manufacturing a set of relays that interface with today's existing wired smoke detectors and CO detectors would make a lot more sense. Added complexity will almost always make these devices harder to use and less reliable.

Keep the existing devices and make a gadget that uses wifi (optionally ethernet or a mesh network? a cell modem?) and relies on the signal old school 3-wire or 4-wire smoke detectors already put out. With a three-wire system, for example, you could put one relay in and get a cell warning for the entire system or put a relay on each alarm and get zone-specific alarms.

The trouble is that the sorts of people thinking about these things want to rope the customer into a proprietary system instead of just sending them an email or SMS with the cheapest possible equipment.

astangl• 13 years ago

Well, their non-failsafe thermostat could let your house freeze and pipes burst, if it happens to fail when you are away. So now they're going to take another reliable basic home item and make it complicated and unreliable?

davidmr4• 13 years ago

I remember listening to an episode of This American Life many years ago on the subject of the saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door". The long and the short of it was that that particular saying was untrue because there is no market for a better mousetrap. The $1.00 mousetraps work just fine, and though they're not perfect, anything better won't be better enough to justify the additional expense.

I feel precisely this way about smoke detectors. I recently bought a house, and the first two things I did were: a) purchase a nest (which I love) and install it, and b) go to Home Depot, pay $50 for 4 new well-rated smoke detectors, and install them. Are they ugly? Sure, although the fact that every interior space in every developed nation on the planet has them tends to take the edge off. Do they occasionally false alarm when We're cooking something? Sure, it has happened once or twice.

Neither of the above are justification for me to spend more than $10-15 on a smoke detector. It would have to do something truly marvelous to be worth even $30 a unit for me. The thermostat was worth the extra money to me because it's cool and saves me a bit of money and I wanted to give my money to a company that was doing right by the energy consumer. I will withhold judgement on the smoke alarm until I see one, but the exuberance around here for it seems premature to me.

Also, if my house burns down, I will already get a smartphone alert in the form of a phone call from my neighbors.

tsumnia• 13 years ago

I think the smoke detector is a safe bet for the Nest. Like the page says, the "connected home" is starting to be something we see emerging; the issue is, what needs to be 'connected'?

There aren't really a lot of areas that benefit from home automation, but a smoke detector is at least in the right ballpark. It will still be a few years before anyone tries to come out with a 'smart refrigerator/pantry' (the logistics are a nightmare alone).

Aside from lighting/smoke/AC, where else is there to go in home automation. The least touched market is home irrigation, but even has already started to be explored.

Like I said, the smoke detector is a good step in the right direction. Not a bold and wild innovation; a more simplistic approach as they tread forward.

RK• 13 years ago

Is this a satire piece?

Next for Nest: A Smoke Detector

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