
Next for Nest: A Smoke Detector - coloneltcb
http://jessicalessin.com/2013/09/24/exclusive-next-for-nest-a-smoke-detector/
======
GuiA
Smoke detectors are literally invisible to the average house dweller 99.99% of
the time, and the 0.01% of the time where they are "activated", they do their
job just fine.

The thermostat was a brilliant entry point into a potential multibillion
dollar home automation business for Nest, but I don't get why a smoke detector
would be step 2.

Any ideas?

>Nest launched its $249 thermostat almost two years ago and has long
brainstormed other things to build, including the smoke detector and
potentially a door lock.

A door lock, on the other hand, would be great. A friend of mine has replaced
his traditional apartment lock with a pinpad, and it's quite fantastic. He can
set temporary passcodes for guests, never has to worry about his keys, etc.

~~~
pyoung
It's an intriguing, albeit risky move. Existing smoke detectors are pretty
ugly with bad UI. There is little to no competition for the 'high end' retail
market. With that said, current smoke detectors can be had for $10-20 bucks,
and my guess is Nest will charge significantly more than that. Of course they
can add a number of extra sensors/functionality to justify the costs. A CO
sensor would be a good addition, maybe motion sensor (for security),
temperature sensors (to provide more granular feedback to the thermostat), and
maybe some other sensors to monitor indoor air quality (VOC's, radon). I am
sure there are a few other things that can be thrown into the device to make
it more useful (wifi repeater?).

All things considered, this is a pretty genius move. In the push to create
'smart homes' most of the attention has been on lighting, kitchen appliances,
and entertainment systems. But one thing that has always bugged me was how do
you get a refrigerator at the back of the house to communicate seamlessly with
the wireless router in the front if the signal doesn't reach that far. I was
thinking that mesh networking would play a big part, but even in an appliance
saturated home, there could still be some dead spots. Well, smart smoke
detectors might solve that, as they are in almost every room in the house! One
issue I can forsee is that not all homes have hard-wired smoke detectors
(which means power would be an issue, thus limiting what they can do with it).

EDIT: Seems like everyone is focusing on the UI comment. While I think that
that is still an issue, I think the more exciting possibility is that a 'smart
detector' could also provide nodes for a mesh network (or something similar),
essentially providing a communication layer for appliances/devices in the
home. If they go this route and they succeed, they could put themselves in a
really good position competitively, as they would 'own' the networking layer.

~~~
tptacek
What UI? You plug them in and, you hope, never think about them again except
to change the batteries once every couple years. Why would I want a better
relationship with my smoke detector? It's there to detect something that
virtually never happens.

~~~
cstejerean
That's if things go well. But when they don't, smoke detectors are incredibly
frustrating. They'll beep randomly and you won't know which one is doing it.
They'll start blinking red and you won't know why. Or they'll go off in the
middle of the night for no good reason. Maybe I just need higher quality smoke
detectors.

I have 2 features that I'd love to see in a smoke detector:

1) notify me when the battery level is low so I don't have to think about it
2) allow me to snooze the smoke detector for 15 / 30 minutes if I end up
smoking up the kitchen

------
kposehn
There's one reason to have a Nest smoke detector: it would have a thermostat.

The reason I haven't bought a Nest is because the device only takes
temperatures from one place in my house, which just happens to be a place that
has a +/\- 5 degree temperature change from either end of the house on a good
day.

If the device also gets the temp, a Nest would be far more effective at
keeping a house comfortable and saving energy. I'd also worry less about my
toddler daughter being alone in a bedroom on an cool night that is usually
much cooler than my own (first world parent problems).

~~~
jcastro
Yeah but does it really help the average home? If you have one thermostat in
your house more temperature data doesn't really help, it can only set one
temperature for the whole house.

If you have a multi-zone house then yeah, your bottom floor and top floor
could be set to multiple temperatures, but those houses typically have 2
thermostats already and if you're using 2 Nests for that they already talk to
each other to make that efficient.

It would be cool to be able to wire up individual ceiling fans or something to
the Nest and then use the fire detectors to figure out which rooms are running
too hot/cold and fire off fans individually to normalize the temperature.

~~~
cstejerean
There's one example where I think targeting a specific room would help even
without multi-zone. At night I only really care about the temperature in the
bedroom, which is a lot smaller and in my experience cools faster than the
living room (which is where my Nest is currently). If it could figure out that
my bedroom is already at a comfortable temperature at night and not bother
with the temperature in the living room, that might be interesting.

------
davidmr
I remember listening to an episode of This American Life many years ago on the
subject of the saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path
to your door". The long and the short of it was that that particular saying
was untrue because there is no market for a better mousetrap. The $1.00
mousetraps work just fine, and though they're not perfect, anything better
won't be better enough to justify the additional expense.

I feel precisely this way about smoke detectors. I recently bought a house,
and the first two things I did were: a) purchase a nest (which I love) and
install it, and b) go to Home Depot, pay $50 for 4 new well-rated smoke
detectors, and install them. Are they ugly? Sure, although the fact that every
interior space in every developed nation on the planet has them tends to take
the edge off. Do they occasionally false alarm when We're cooking something?
Sure, it has happened once or twice.

Neither of the above are justification for me to spend more than $10-15 on a
smoke detector. It would have to do something truly marvelous to be worth even
$30 a unit for me. The thermostat was worth the extra money to me because it's
cool and saves me a bit of money and I wanted to give my money to a company
that was doing right by the energy consumer. I will withhold judgement on the
smoke alarm until I see one, but the exuberance around here for it seems
premature to me.

Also, if my house burns down, I will already get a smartphone alert in the
form of a phone call from my neighbors.

------
justin66
My feeling is that manufacturing a set of relays that interface with today's
existing wired smoke detectors and CO detectors would make a lot more sense.
Added complexity will almost always make these devices harder to use and less
reliable.

Keep the existing devices and make a gadget that uses wifi (optionally
ethernet or a mesh network? a cell modem?) and relies on the signal old school
3-wire or 4-wire smoke detectors already put out. With a three-wire system,
for example, you could put one relay in and get a cell warning for the entire
system or put a relay on each alarm and get zone-specific alarms.

The trouble is that the sorts of people thinking about these things want to
rope the customer into a proprietary system instead of just sending them an
email or SMS with the cheapest possible equipment.

------
danudey
The idea of a smoke detector which also detects carbon monoxide seems
brilliant, except that smoke rises and carbon monoxide sinks, so either you
place the device in the middle of the wall (and lose out on early warning) or
it becomes useful for one and useless for the other.

~~~
warfangle
One would think that CO produced by combustion would rise before it fell.

~~~
davidmr
You are both right, in a way, in that neither particularly matters:
[http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem03/chem03364.htm](http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem03/chem03364.htm)

"As would have been predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, CO infused
anywhere within the chamber diffused until it was of equal concentration
throughout. Mixing would be even faster in the home environment, with drafts
due to motion or temperature. It would be reasonable to place a residential CO
alarm at any height within the room."

------
tlrobinson
Maybe it will finally make use of Nest's unused Zigbee radio
([https://community.nest.com/ideas/1115](https://community.nest.com/ideas/1115))

------
Tichy
A cartoon comes to mind of somebody staring at a chart of the increasing smoke
in their house while the fire starts to eat away their computer screen.

I'd like to have that on a dashboard, too - smoke levels in the building. Very
comforting most of the time.

(Sorry for the humor - I am sure they have thought of some worthwhile use
cases).

------
wmeredith
Good. The Nest is hands-down my favorite piece of infrastructure I've
purchased. It's easy to use, looks great, and saved me money over what I had
before. Hopefully I can buy lots of new products from Nest Labs to replace the
ugly outdated crap around my house over the next decade.

------
tsumnia
I think the smoke detector is a safe bet for the Nest. Like the page says, the
"connected home" is starting to be something we see emerging; the issue is,
what needs to be 'connected'?

There aren't really a lot of areas that benefit from home automation, but a
smoke detector is at least in the right ballpark. It will still be a few years
before anyone tries to come out with a 'smart refrigerator/pantry' (the
logistics are a nightmare alone).

Aside from lighting/smoke/AC, where else is there to go in home automation.
The least touched market is home irrigation, but even has already started to
be explored.

Like I said, the smoke detector is a good step in the right direction. Not a
bold and wild innovation; a more simplistic approach as they tread forward.

------
astangl
Well, their non-failsafe thermostat could let your house freeze and pipes
burst, if it happens to fail when you are away. So now they're going to take
another reliable basic home item and make it complicated and unreliable?

------
RK
Is this a satire piece?

