So! Are there any smart fire alarms that aren’t awful? Just had a false negative from my Nest.
A few months after we moved in we had a lint fire, so I put a Nest in the laundry room.
3ish years later, just had another lint fire, with enough smoke that my upstairs neighbor (shares an airwell) ran downstairs frantically; we didn’t smell it because the door was closed, concentrating the smell in the small laundry room with the silent Nest.
(And I guess I need a Dan Hon sticker for “don’t tell me I don’t want a smart device”. I do want to get fire alarm notices when I’m not home. I do want to silence the inevitable false positives from an app instead of a step-ladder. And Nest has a bunch of other nice-to-have UX touches, but if they are bad fire alarms then… yeah, that’s that.)
The linked slide deck here is fascinating, at least for a certain type of standards nerd. Covers the history of smoke detector standards, and the new standard coming into effect this summer—why it was developed, how it is implemented (hamburgers!), and the impact on deployment and design. https://social.coop/
@luis_in_brief one of the many small annoyances about moving to the US from Australia was that many smoke alarms here seem to be set to ‘someone thinks about smoke’ sensitivity. (Especially on a college campus.)
Someone toasts a bagel a little too long? Evacuate 14 floors of apartments! So I’m stunned to hear of one that’s not sensitive enough.
@luis_in_brief After frustration with the state of the few consumer-grade fire alarm systems that support a vibrating output (my partner is deaf), I ended up with a proper commercial building type fire alarm system. The fire panel has some relay input/outputs that I use with an ESP32 (running my own code, but you could use Tasmota or something) for basic smartness. Best of both worlds, and no 4am battery chirping, but not cheap or simple.
@luis_in_brief What kind of smoke detector is it? There's (to my understanding) two basic types of smoke detector: Ionization and Photoelectric. I know that one or the other is better at detecting some kinds of fire, perhaps the Nest uses the sensor type that isn't good for the type of fire you get with lint?
@mhkohne I knew this at one point (as a result of debugging previous false positives) but don’t recall right now. And that’s definitely possible: the smell of smoke was very strong but no smoke was visible because that had all been vented out or contained inside the washer itself.
@luis_in_brief Oh yea, probably photoelectric then - a good choice for a variety of reasons, but misses certain things that ionization detectors would get.
@amye@rstephensme yeah, not fun, though darkly it scared my neighbor even more than it scared us (probably because my immediate guess as to the cause was correct where all she knew was FIIIIIRE).
@pnorman I think the last time I looked at this, Kidde didn’t make anything along these lines yet. This seems pretty well-reviewed so, yeah, it’s my likely choice. Thanks!
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