I No Longer Have Any Trust In The Nest Protect

[Doodzor]

Where is the battery compartment/slot? This is news to me, as far as I knew, they aren't replaceable, etc.

It's on the back underneath a plastic plate. Pretty sure you can see them through a slot without even taking it off. I recall having to put them in first after unpacking it originally but I don't recall that well so maybe not. They are definitely there on the back, definitely pretty easy to get to and definitely, definitely intended to be replaced. Would be pretty shitty to have to throw out a perfectly good smoke detector because the AA backup batteries ran out of charge.

[Delgarde]

There is such a thing as "unnecessarily high tech". Safety devices ideally should use springs and gravity wherever possible.

I'm inclined to agree. As usual, complexity offers more ways for things to go wrong - not something you want with a device where reliability is the absolute highest priority.

[Michael]

BEWARE: lots of smoke detectors contain radioactive material even today.
These are extremely safe, unless you break their seal e.g. by sledgehammering it and inhale the dust containing its radioactive isotope.
So please properly make sure you properly get rid of your smoke detector, but never ever break it with a hammer.

I've been to Chernobyl...

[Deavir]

I'm inclined to agree. As usual, complexity offers more ways for things to go wrong - not something you want with a device where reliability is the absolute highest priority.

When you work on complex machines failure is fine as long as the machine is designed for it. I worked on very complex industrial code running on windows of all things controlling scary powerful machines. If the computer crashed (very rare) the digital/analog I/O would lock which is a bad thing. The machine would fail safely if you just turned off the power to it. So coded a waveform that would lock to one voltage tripping a relay to cut the power if the computer failed. I didn't have to try to fix every version of the computer running the software to reduce the crashes, I just had to know it was safe when it crashed.

The problem with this system is it didn't know the difference between fail and smoke. My dumb ones can't tell the difference between smoke and shower humidity.

[duby229]

More radioactive than a banana or three?

Yeah, there is a manmade element called Americium that is a byproduct of nuclear reactor waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium

[FireBurn]

Just to check, they're not picking up carbon monoxide or anything like that? Or heat from your server room for that matter

[rice_nine]

I hope SkyNet notices that CeilingNet was subdued by a small, extremely low-tech equipped resistance effort... and thinks twice

[Deavir]

Just to check, they're not picking up carbon monoxide or anything like that? Or heat from your server room for that matter

Check the warnings, they say smoke. Nest has different warnings for CO.

[dungeon]

Seems like hardware bug, is it first gen or second?

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/17/87...ect-thermostat

It seems if second gen you can silence with a phone, of course if battery in the phone is not empty

It also lets you silence the smoke alarm from the app on your phone. That makes sense, as the "wave to silence" feature on the first gen version ran into problems.

[duby229]

Seems like hardware bug, is it first gen or second?

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/17/87...ect-thermostat

It seems if second gen you can silence with a phone, of course if battery in the phone is not empty

I bet that's what happened. The wave to silence feature must have been disabled so that there is no way at all to silence it... I was watching some youtube videos today about the smoke detector unit being impossible to silence, and being so sensitive that even humidity can set it off with no way to silence it.

EDIT: The way smoke detectors work is they irradiate the air and then measure the radiation. That radiation gets absorbed by particles in the air, o the more particles the less radiation that gets measured. Which usually means smoke, but can also be humidity or dust. If the sensor is too sensitive then it can read false alarms. It seems this product is too sensitive and had a bug in the wave to silence feature, so that feature got disabled in shipping models, which in turn means no way to silence it.