New smoke detectors in our future

This morning over a nice quiet cup of coffee. The remaining two smoke detectors in the house failed.

Oh but they didn’t fail in a nice way, they failed and told me about it by going off full blast and not shutting up. (Why don’t these things ever fail gracefully. How about a beep pattern that says the unit had failed? Humm?)

I really do hate these things! In general I hate depressingly stupid machines, Protect me? Sure I’m up for that, but why not do it in an intelligent way with some fault tolerance and helpful warnings?

Let me give you the full scenario. I’d gotten out of bed and the house had been open all night. A nice cool breeze was  blowing occasionally through the house There’s no smoke, even though there are fires burning more or less local to the house. There is no smell of smoke and there was nothing cooking, no toast in the toaster, the oven wasn’t on, in fact no heat sources at all, except the life forms in the house.

It was a nice quiet morning, birds twittering in the trees, and I was enjoying watching the hummingbirds engaging in their morning aerial battles over the feeders. In short it was peaceful, and beautiful.

Then the ear shattering BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP at –120db began.

There is no way I can jump 15 feet in the air to yank these offending pieces of shit off the ceiling and they’re connected in a way that if one goes off, they all go off. So in short order every one of them is screaming and causing me intense pain. (My ears are still ringing)

A quick check around the house to determine if there might really be a fire confirms what my nose was telling me, NO FIRE!

Grab the keys, tromp down to the basement get the ladder and then…

I yanked the fucking machines off the ceiling!

I was not gentle. I was not kind. (BTW The ADT monitored smoke detector was, and is still mounted on the ceiling quietly saying nothing is wrong.)

Even after I yanked the fool machines off the ceiling disconnecting them from their external power source, they still screamed. I yanked the batteries out of them, and one had the audacity to scream even then.

It shut up with a satisfying BEEEoooow sound when it went crashing to the floor.

I am victorious! I killed the offending beast! GRRRRRR, I eyed the ADT unit daring it to make a sound. It was wise and remained absolutely silent.

Scared the poor dogs so bad they wet themselves.

After cleaning up the mess. I returned to my coffee.

So installation of NEST Protect units is on the agenda for today.

I’m hoping that they are built as smart as the advertisements say they are. In other words, I hope they can be shut up if they’re falsely alarming. It would be a pity for them to meet the same fate as their predecessors.

---

Well, that was more or less easy.

The NEST setup is interesting. You set the units up on your kitchen counter. In our case there is one for each bedroom and one in the hallway.

I set the hallway up first because it is the only one low enough for me to access the center button. (The Hall unit had failed many months ago and I’d already killed it. Which is why I only ripped two off the ceiling this morning.) 

The Hallway unit then linked the other two units, Named MasterBedroom and Bedroom to each other and presumably to the NEST Thermostat. 

About 1/2 hour of setting the units up, and 1/2 hour of unfucking the “Professional” electrician’s work and bingo, bango, bongo, I’m pressing the button on the hallway unit to tell it I want a full test.

“This is a test, please stand away from the Nest Protect, the siren is loud. Testing in 10, 9, 8,7,6…”

About  minute later, smoke and CO sensors each with their own sirens sounded, followed by a nice happy “All Clear” signal.

The thing says, “Finishing up… Everything is fine.”

That’s the way to do things!

Intelligent, efficient and polite.

I think I may actually like these machines.