Flying Back To “The Nest Protect” Smoke & CO Detector

All of the research I did last week on the Nest Protect Smoke detector led me to discover that these devices should be replaced with new ones after 10 years. Some, in fact, only have a 7 year lifespan. We have more than 6 smoke detectors scattered about our home and I’m sure some of them must be over 10 yrs. old. So, we decided on a plan to upgrade all of our alarms prior to the end of this year and to keep track of the dates of each install. I already new what my first buy was going to be!

It was the Nest Protect which is  a smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector. It’s also Wi-Fi enabled and has a lot of other unique features that I detailed in my post about this device on July 10th. All of this techie magic comes at a pretty hefty price for a smoke detector – $109. That means we won’t be installing these Nest’s everywhere in our home, instead we’ll probably spread 3 about the house to give us wide coverage and supplement them with regular models.

  Wireless Interconnect is a feature that allows multiple Nest Protects to talk to each other during an alert or emergency alarm. If a smoke or carbon monoxide (CO) event is detected at one Nest Protect, all Nest Protects will sound an alert. For example, if there’s an emergency in the bedroom, all the Nest Protects in your home will tell you that there’s smoke or carbon monoxide in the bedroom. You will now be alerted to an alarm in your kids’ room upstairs even if you’re in the kitchen downstairs.

One of the great things about the Nest Protect is that when more than 1 is installed they will actually “talk to one another”.  If an emergency is detected by one Nest Protect that triggers the loud alarm it will send an immediate message to all other Nest devices on the network to set their emergency alarms off as well. With 2, 3 or more of these alarms screeching in the middle of the night, it should be enough to wake up even the soundest sleeper.

The Nest Protect WiFi app monitors each detector and updates its status

Compared to the difficulties I encountered in setting up the Belkin WeMo Insight Switch (which I returned), the Nest was a breeze – simple, fast and reliable. All I had to do was download the free app from Nest and follow the excellent, detailed steps to connect the Nest Protect to our Wi-Fi network, test it to make sure it worked, then attach it to the ceiling in the location we’d chosen.  It couldn’t have been any easier.

Thanks for visiting!