For anyone with the Nest Thermostat this seemed like an obvious household addition. If you’ve got an ordinary smoke alarm you’ll likely be familiar with the wafting tea towel dance under it thanks to making toast or over heating oil, the Nest Protect claims it’s smarter and so should trigger fewer false alarms.
Open the box and the Protect is about the same size as a lower cost alarm, but it’s much deeper. You get a backplate to fit it to a wall or ceiling and instructions to explain it all.
If you’ve already got a Nest account you’ll add the Nest Protect on to it by following the instructions. If you don’t have a Nest product you’ll need to create a new account.
Once installed the bit button allows you test run a test. The vocal feedback is nice and clear, you know exactly what’s going on during the test and when to expect the alarm to sound. It warns you it’s loud and it is.
After 3 months use there have been far fewer false alarms. Where the Protect detects smoke (usually due to poor cooking skills!) it’ll give you a heads up, vocally, that smoke has been detected and that the alarm might sound. At this point you can clear the smoke to prevent the alarm triggering, if it does go off you can silence it by pressing the button.
You’ll also get a notification via the app, very handy if you’re not at home.
As well as being a detector it also has the Pathlight feature, which basically gives you a low light if Nest detects movements. This is brilliant at night if you don’t want to turn on a main light, the Pathlight features provides enough light to see what you’re doing. However it triggers anytime our small cat walks under it, wasting battery. We’ve a pet friendly alarm that ignores the cat, Nest really need to incorporate such technology into the Protect.
Having an account also means you can log in to the Nest website to take a look at what’s been going on and there is a history section showing when the Pathlight has been triggered, when smoke was detected, and that the nightly check (the self check the Protect does) has been completed.
3 months in and the batteries are still going strong, there is a wired version available if you don’t want to change batteries.
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