Nest Protect: Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detecter

Nest Protect

Nest Labs, the creators of the Nest thermostat, unveiled today their latest home control device, Nest Protect, a $129 smoke and carbon monoxide detecter in black or white models.

What makes Nest Protect $100 more expensive than a traditional smoke detecter are the following features:

A human voice will inform you what’s wrong, where the problem is and what to do. It’ll say if it’s a fire or carbon monoxide leak, which room it’s in or if you’re in immediate danger. An example of the human voice include: “Heads up! There’s smoke in the kitchen” or “Emergency. There’s carbon monoxide in the basement. Move to fresh air.”
Should Nest Protect detect a carbon monoxide leak, it will communicate with your Nest Thermostat to shut off your gas furnace—a possible source of poisonous carbon monoxide leaks.
Each alarm will also send a notification to your smartphone or tablet. If it’s a nuisance alarm, like smoke from cooking, you can silence the alarm via the app or by waving your hand in front of it instead of swinging a towel or removing the battery.
If you have more than one Nest Protect, they connect so they can speak up at the same time even if Wi-Fi is down.
Nest Protect continuously monitors its sensors, software and battery level. And it shows you the results: every night Nest Protect glows green for a moment to tell you the self-monitoring checked out, or glows yellow if something’s wrong. You can also see the results on the Nest app at any time.
Nest Protect glows white as you pass under it at night, lighting your way in the dark.
People get so frustrated with low-battery chirps in the middle of the night, they take out the battery and don’t replace it. Nest Protect will notify you long before its batteries get that low so you can replace them. And then get a good night’s sleep.
Should you have a Nest Thermostat, each Nest Protect will collect data from the activity sensor to therefor actively detect when you’re away to better regulate the in house temperate.
The smoke sensor features a custom smoke chamber so it can detect a wider range of smoke than traditional products

Each Nest Protect includes the following sensors:

Photoelectric smoke sensor
Carbon monoxide sensor
Heat sensor
Three activity sensors
Ambient light sensor
Humidity sensor
Wi-fi
Speaker

iPod creator Tony Fadell’s company, Nest, had this to say about the future of Nest Protect, “Just like we did with the iPod, we started with just music and then we added all kinds of things over time. With the thermostat, we started with the thermostat we added all kinds of features over time. We started where we start and who knows what can be added over time.”

The overall feature I’m a fan of Nest Protect is knowing the safety of your house even if you’re away. However, it is a steep price to pay to replace all your smoke detecters in your house.

Meanwhile, here are some features I’ve come up with that if Nest Protect would offer as future firmware updates then you’ve really got me thinking of upgrading more. Lots of possibilities!

Lock down mode: When you’re away on vacation since there’s a motion detector built-in, why not give the home owner the ability to detect if there’s movement and have it send you a notification? I can see Nest building a home security system next should they enable this feature.
AirPlay: Give iPhone users the ability to play music through out the house since it has a speaker. Also, the model that has the wired in connectivity would be perfect for such a feature!
Intercom: Give the home owner the ability to use it as paging system to announce dinner is ready, etc.

Check out these videos below to learn more