
I No Longer Have Any Trust in the Nest Protect - protomyth
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nest-Protect-Fail&ut
======
cddotdotslash
Some things are fine just being "dumb" products. Smoke alarms have worked
(well, too!) for years long before Nest arrived, adding likely thousands of
lines of code to a device that literally only has to beep when it detects
smoke or CO.

I have a $20 hunk of plastic on my ceiling. It beeps when it detects smoke,
stops when I press the button, and requires battery changes once or twice a
year. It doesn't have a smart phone app, wake me up in the middle of the night
unnecessarily , cost $100, or add a ridiculous amount of complexity.

~~~
mkozlows
I have a $20 hunk of plastic on my ceiling too. It beeps whenever I cook a
bunch of things, won't stop until I get out the stepladder and literally press
a button on it, and when it needs a new battery it helpfully lets me know by
beeping just infrequently enough that I can't tell if I'm imagining the beep,
or tell which smoke detector it's coming from.

The Nest seems like overkill to me, but let's not pretend that old-fashioned
smoke detectors are some kind of awesomely perfected tech.

~~~
dandanisaur
I disagree, these 'dumb' smoke detectors are spot on.

Learning to cook, ceiling height regulations and hallucinating aren't problems
a smoke detector is trying to solve.

Also, if it beeps when there is smoke (from your cooking), it is doing it's
intended job.

Fires from cooking (2013) take up nearly 50%!! of residential building fires.

SEE:
[http://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/](http://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/)

------
rcoder
This happened to me a week or so ago. Unlike the OP, I searched for "Nest
Protect false alarm" and was sent directly to this helpful page:
[https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-sounds-
false-s...](https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-sounds-false-smoke-
alarms-or-my-Nest-app-says-The-smoke-sensor-has-failed)

After blowing the visibly-accumulated dust out of the interior everything was
back to normal.

I wonder if the OP uses similar debugging tactics on servers that send alerts?
"Hmm. 'CRITICAL: disk full' alert? Guess I'll hit it with a hammer until I
stop getting paged."

~~~
lambda
Yeah, the difference with the disk full alert and the alarm is that the alarm
is emitting a very obnoxious noise continuously while you're trying to debug
it; and in the meantime, not actually providing a useful service, like the
server is. Trying to debug a problem at 3 AM when you just want to go back to
sleep because there isn't anything actually wrong, just faulty alarm hardware,
is not nearly so useful as clearing out some space on a full disk when it is
in active operation.

~~~
kissickas
I've never seen a Nest product in person. A quick search [0] makes it look
easy to replace the batteries in all models. Can't you just remove the battery
plate and pop one out quickly before debugging?

[0] [https://nest.com/support/article/How-do-I-replace-my-Nest-
Pr...](https://nest.com/support/article/How-do-I-replace-my-Nest-Protect-s-
batteries)

------
lambda
Here's a good video demonstrating a similar experience:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY)

It is amazing how many of his attempts to silence them fail, until he finally
gives up and packs them away in multiple coolers in his garage to insulate
away the noise.

~~~
vruiz
With a little bit of editing Brad could have made a fantastic terror short
film out of that video.

~~~
agumonkey
I felt like
[https://www.google.com/search?q=I%27m+sorry+dave](https://www.google.com/search?q=I%27m+sorry+dave)
all along.

------
mkozlows
Back when I worked at Best Buy in high school, I heard this basic story -- "A
single unit of a particular product went bad, and therefore this product/brand
is untrustworthy and bad, and I will never buy it again." \-- from probably
half the people who walked in.

Sony/Toshiba/Panasonic/Dell/HP/Compaq/Apple/Canon/NEC... seriously, every
brand of anything, there was someone who was prepared to swear up and down
that it was all junk, because one thing broke on them one time.

There's something interesting about that, to be sure, but I don't think it has
much of anything to do with Nest.

~~~
forgottenpass
It's slightly different when a product is supposed to be significantly more
reliable than consumer entertainment. And even in that space, where there are
multiple similar options, it's not crazy to use the "I've had [good/bad] luck
with brand X" as one of many shopping evaluation metrics.

A single unexplained false positive is rightly enough to ruin an end user's
confidence in a smoke detector. And the rate I hear about Nest Protect
failures is enough to shake my confidence in the product even without
experiencing it first hand.

~~~
DanBC
> single unexplained false positive is rightly enough to ruin an end user's
> confidence in a smoke detector.

Wait what? You want false positives. You definitely don't want false
negatives.

~~~
bionsuba
> You want false positives

Absolutely, 100%, no. This is terribly wrong. I work for a company that
manufactures smoke detectors, and false positives are almost as dangerous as
false negatives. False positives encourage people to disregard the alarm as
"just a false alarm", and ignore it, which can, and has, led to people die
needlessly.

Also, if one of our products woke people up in the middle of the night because
of a false alarm and they were unable to silence it, I would join them in
calling it crap.

------
brudgers
It's simple, designing a smoke detector for convenience is a really bad idea
because it adds unnecessary complexity to something that has just one purpose:
to save lives. The primary design pattern is failing safe. In the case of
warning devices, this means loudly and spectacularly so that ignoring the
problem is more unpleasant than fixing it. Convenience features are all
centered around preventing this.

On the other hand, what sounds like a feature, one unit triggering all the
others, doesn't add anything in a residential setting because smoke detectors
are required to be really loud and annoying and awaken people when their is a
danger of smoke [1]. If building wide notification matters, there's no
substitute for hard wiring.

[1]: Mortality from dwelling fires is largely from smoke inhalation not burns.
That's why smoke detectors rather than heat detectors are used.

~~~
cmsj
You are the most correct and relevant person to have commented so far. Adding
consumer-level smarts to safety-critical devices, is a very very bad idea.

I do like hard-wired one-triggers-all in residential settings, but my house
has three floors and if I'm soundly asleep in the top floor, an alarm going
off on the ground floor won't wake me up :)

------
Animats
Nest seems to have a big problem with false alarms. There's an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle.[1] It's so bad there's a class action lawsuit against
Nest.[2] There's no reason a photoelectric smoke detector should be so
troublesome. (Nest is photoelectric only - no ionization detector.)

Photoelectric detectors are supposed to automatically compensate for dust
accumulation. See UL standard 217, section 9, "Automatic Drift Compensation
for Smoke Sensing". Someone should take a Nest smoke detector apart and figure
out how they do their compensation. Here's a paper on drift compensation for
smoke detectors.[3] This is a solved problem.

Maybe Nest got too fancy and tried to handle it in the "cloud".

[1] [http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Nest-smart-smoke-
dete...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Nest-smart-smoke-detectors-
not-so-smart-6305235.php) [2] [http://www.girardgibbs.com/nest-smoke-
detector/](http://www.girardgibbs.com/nest-smoke-detector/) [3]
[http://www.systemsensor.ca/es/docs/guides/A05-0340.pdf](http://www.systemsensor.ca/es/docs/guides/A05-0340.pdf)

------
Karunamon
So, let me get this straight:

* One unit sounds a false alarm (because normal smoke detectors _never ever do that_ )

* The rest of them relay the alarm

* He then _takes a sledgehammer_ to the unit that generated the false alarm

* ..And because of this, he has "no trust" in the nest protect.

And this guy writes for Phoronix?!

Yknow, downvote me if you wish, but that post just comes off as remarkably
ignorant, with a side of "all that newfangled tech these days..." ludditism
subtext. And the fact that he _took a goddamned sledgehammer_ to the smoke
detector is just the icing on the cake. It was stupid behavior, as is the
suggestion that we take that post seriously.

Devices fail. Find a person, any person, and they'll tell you that they won't
use X brand of thing because they had one unit of said thing fail on them one
time. This is that fallacy, writ large, but less forgivable because this
person writes for a tech blog of some note.

------
spdustin
Just to counter his anecdote, I'll give mine. I have two hard wired Protects,
since they were launched. They've gone into their low threshold alarm modes
twice from cooking, and both times I've had my kids silence them. They know
how to "go wave at the alarm" because they're around when I test it (monthly)
and I tell them about it. I've never had any unusual behavior, I look out for
the green "everything's okay" response every night when I turn off the lights,
and I've been very happy with the Nest Protect.

~~~
jread
The Nest Wave feature has been disabled since April 2014
[https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-
Safety](https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-Safety)

~~~
spdustin
Guess that goes to show you how long it's been since I've had a false alarm.
Makes me feel even better about it.

------
jread
I can attest to similar feelings during multiple middle of the night false
alarms with dog barking and kids crying. I've followed online support articles
including regular dusting and all units are hard wired. I've spoken with
support on multiple occasions and exchanged 3 of 5 units with Nest. The units
have improved over time with software updates, but continue to be problematic.
During one recent false alarm we were not home and the neighbors called the
fire department who had to break in to verify there was no fire and disable
the alarm. I contacted Nest support after that incident and they were unable
to determine the cause of the alarm. We never had a false alarm with the
previous dumb detectors.

------
ThePhysicist
To be fair, getting some "false positives" is quite common even with normal,
dumb smoke detectors. The real question here is how frequent such behavior
occurs. Personally, I'd happily tolerate some false positives if in exchange I
can be sure that the alarm will always go off in case of real danger.

Also, when working with an imperfect measurement device the engineer designing
the system will always be forced to choose an operating point that fulfills
the desired characteristics of the device best. In case of a smoke detector
the most desirable characteristic is probably that it ALWAYS goes off when
there is some smoke in the room, so choosing a working point that might incur
some false alarms but that will never (or only under very unlikely
circumstances) create a false negative is still the best choice. Of course
there are other strategies for dealing with failures in a given component
(e.g. by using several, distinct and uncorrelated sensors), but those tend to
increase complexity and cost as well (after all, no one wants to spend a
fortune on a fire detector).

~~~
cmsj
Lots of people are throwing around the words "false positive" in relation to
dumb smoke detectors, and I suspect a lot of you mean "the alarm sounded, but
I wasn't about to die". If it detected smoke, it told you there was smoke.
That's a true positive :)

------
xenadu02
While visiting my parents this summer I realized they had no working smoke or
CO detectors. I ordered some 10 year lithium units on Amazon (not Nest
Protect). Two weeks after we left one of the smoke detectors went bananas and
wouldn't stop beeping. My father had to pull the "permanently disable" tab to
get it to shut off.

My point is no technology is perfect; not even normal "dumb" smoke detectors.

~~~
patcheudor
We've had interconnected smoke alarms for years in our houses and it has been
my experience that what's describe with the Nest happens with every brand of
interconnected smoke detector I've ever had. In the last 20 years or so we've
had at least a dozen alarm events, many at night and during the winter where
all of them will go off. It turns out that there are two sensor types, optical
and ionizing radiation. Both are susceptible to interference by bugs,
specifically small spiders as well as their waste products and webs. Moths
also can cause a problem if they get inside a unit and cause dust to be kicked
up. I suspect false alarms happen more in the winter because spiders and other
critters might seek out the additional warmth at night that the units provide.
Typically when our alarms go off, I trace it back to the originating unit,
pull it down, disconnect it from the mains and take the battery out. If it
happens in the middle of the night I'll wait till morning to take it out to
the shop to blow it out with an air-compressor. I won't buy any unit that
doesn't allow me air-gap the power - that's why I walk right past the Nest
units at the local hardware store. To mitigate this problem with my existing
detectors, I've started lining the inside of the units with double-sided
sticky tape when they have a false alarm event. My hope is that it will trap
insects. It seems to work, but your mileage may vary.

~~~
DanBC
Doesn't poking a vacuum cleaner nozzle at them once a month / week work?

------
lrem
Reading the title, I expected to read about some deep technical design flaw or
a bad direction decision or something...

------
jimbobimbo
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1sJ0j7O...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1sJ0j7OhH_IJ:www.phoronix.com/scan.php%3Fpage%3Dnews_item%26px%3DNest-
Protect-Fail&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
Nexxxeh
A false positive is better than a false negative. And OP's actions have
presumably precluded any further diagnostics.

I think once it'd had the heck smashed out of it with a sledgehammer, it's out
of warranty and Nest/Google/whatever won't be in a hurry to RMA it.

Which is not to say I'd have necessarily done anything different, or that it
was OP's responsibility. I'm just saying it's not very helpful.

It could have just been something daft and it just needed to be blasted clean.
Or it could be something serious and systemic, in which case getting the
manufacturer to take a look would have been wise.

Still, if my whole house was turned into some sort of chamber of loud alarms
in the middle of the night, I don't think logic would have been my primary
response either.

~~~
HarryHirsch
I think the Nest smoke detectors are overengineered pieces of shit. The dumb
whitebox kind you buy from Walmart are well understood, you know where you
are. If any one goes off at random at night you push the silencer button,
throw the thing out and replace it for very cheap. But they won't turn the
whole house into Pandaemonium and tempt you to fetch the sledgehammer for an
exorcism. It's another instance of Chesterton's Fence.

------
dmritard96
This space is just bizarre in general. The fact that a smoke alarm was Nest's
#2 product was strange given the advantages over standard ones are marginal.
Then they did a poor job executing (remember accidental wave off...). In the
same space, all these VCs pumped butt loads into this mysterious company, Leo,
who was making an audio/internet bridge for smoke alarms (I am sure they had
more eventual value planned but that was the pitch to the consumer). I think
they laid off over half the team when reality set in.

------
graupel
I had the same thing happen to one of mine recently - I put it in the
microwave (not on) to silence it. No smoke, no fire, nothing - and it went
absolutely bananas.

------
Houshalter
>Once smoke reaches emergency levels, Nest Protect can't be silenced- by
regulation in the US and Canada. Address the source of the problem, and Nest
Protect will quiet down when the smoke level gets lower.

[https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-
Safety](https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-Safety)

------
idlewords
Due to their nature smoke alarms have to fail in the most annoying way
possible, and be difficult to disable. I decided a couple of years ago to
sleep by a window and take my chances. Now I can eat steak without that cold
bead of anxiety sweat as I wait for the cooking detector to go off.

~~~
bpicolo
"and be difficult to disable"

Difficulty to disable doesn't really benefit you in a fire.

~~~
nulltype
Having a disabled fire alarm doesn't really benefit you either in that case.

------
macleanjr
My unit had its path light on all night and wore out the battery's on a
nightly basis. It went from full battery to chirping in less than a night.

Support wasn't very helpful, so I just disabled that feature and haven't had
an issue since.

------
dhimes
Some detectors respond well to blowing fresh air into them when they misfire-
holding them in your hand and swinging swiftly back and forth in fresh air. I
don't know about these devices specifically.

~~~
ars
That only helps when there is a cause to the false alarm, steam from a shower
or cooking smoke typically.

~~~
dhimes
They can also trip with things like dust and some other ways of fouling the
detector or circuitry that I haven't yet discerned. Again- different system,
but I've had success.

------
robotjosh
I got to stay in a house that had a nest thermometer. The AC compressor
happened to be broken and the nest perpetually said 1 hour until cool. Nest
isn't smart enough to detect a broken AC.

------
justwannasing
Some guy had a problem with his Nest Protect. Why did someone rush to put this
on HN? Will we need to hear about his car problems, too?

~~~
thrownaway2424
Google Derangement Syndrome guarantees that all such articles reach the top of
HN.

------
kordless
I've never had any trust in the Nest Protect, because I've never used it.

------
jamiesonbecker
I wonder what Nest Protect is using to detect smoke that it false alarms, in a
pot with a lid on it, without any smoke anywhere in the vicinity.

Unsmart smoke detectors use minute amounts of radioactive materials (such as
Americium-241[1]) and almost never false, although they can be annoying if the
source of smoke is otherwise legitimate.

My chemistry professor in college pointed out that a big stack of smoke
detectors in a hardware store was not regulated and yet would collectively
emit radiation that would probably exceed legal limits for people walking by.
I thought about that the last time I was in Home Depot and there was a huge
stack of $10 smoke detectors. (Yep. I bought three.)

1\. [http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Non-Power-Nuclear-
Applicat...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Non-Power-Nuclear-
Applications/Radioisotopes/Smoke-Detectors-and-Americium/)

