The Nest Protect is a new device put out by Nest that sounds like it should be in every home. Many people know of Nest because of their Learning Thermostat with automatic programming capabilities, or have heard of Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3 billion, but not everyone knows of Nest Protect which looks to be a promising device to protect your home and your family.
Nest Protect is simply a “smart” network connected smoke alarm and CO detector which eliminates some of the common problems of traditional smoke detectors (etc: false alarms, chirping battery notification) and will send you alerts on your smart phone device when you are home or away. The unit is $129, comes in white or black, and also has both a wired and battery operated option. The wired option does also have a battery backup for functionality during a power outage (although the benefits of units being networked would not work during a power outage since the network would be down, unless your network is also on a battery backup)
The greatest feature in these units comes as a result of them connecting to your WiFi network. Since each unit is connected to the network, they have the ability to “talk” to each other, allowing one unit to notify another unit of a potential alarm, or actual alarm. For example, if smoke is detected in the bedroom, while you are in the living room, your Nest unit’s will tell you “There is smoke detected in the bedroom”. This functionality is great especially in large homes where an alarm going off at one end of the home may not be heard at the other end.
The only downfall I see with this unit is that you can only configure the device with an Apple or Android device. Although smart-phones are popular, not everyone has them. Hopefully in the near future setup can be completed by using any web-browser as well.
Check out the Nest Protect promotional video below to see it’s functionality for yourself: