A few years back, we purchased our first Nest Protect, a smart Smoke/Carbon Monoxide alarm, to mount on the ceiling above our chameleon’s vivarium. For good reason, I’m was and am still terrified that Morgan’s heat bulb will start a fire, so having this peace of mind for the last few years has been great.
Fast forward to this week, we picked up a second Nest Protect from Best Buy for our upstairs hallway to replace the old, hardwired smoke detector that was such an eyesore at the top of the stairs.
Some would ask: Why would you spend $120 on a smoke detector? Well, that’s a valid question, here are a couple of reasons we think this is a worthwhile investment:
- When there’s a threat in your home (smoke, carbon monoxide) the Nest App alerts your phone and not just in-person. This is invaluable to me, as we’re not always home so it’s nice that we’d be alerted if something were to happen while we’re out.
- In addition to the “beeping” alerts that all smoke detectors provide, the Nest Protect goes a bit further with voice alerts, even going so far as to tell you which room the smoke or carbon monoxide is detected in.
- It has a Carbon Monoxide sensor as well, but I’m pretty sure that’s standard for all smoke detectors these days.
- Pathway lighting, as you walk under the Nest Protect, it will light up. Of course, this feature can be disabled.
- It has great reviews from those who have tested with smoke, like it outperforms many other smoke detectors, smart or dumb.
- When compared with other smart smoke detectors, everyone says it’s the easiest to setup.
- We’ve already got a Nest Thermostat, so anytime we can get a home automation device that works with other devices we have, I’m down!
Although we had a wired connection ready from the last smoke detector, we still went with another Battery powered Nest Protect for a few reasons:
- Even the wired Nest Protects have batteries for backup, so we’d still have to replace those every so often.
- The batteries on our existing Nest Protect have lasted a very long time, and when they do run low the Nest App will alert us to change them.
- I’m no electrician! Although I’ve installed my fair share of light fixtures, I didn’t feel comfortable messing with the wiring that was in place.
Setup was very straightforward. I opened up the Nest App and let it know I wanted to setup a new device. It asked me to get close to the existing Nest Protect (I stood below it) and it took it from there! A few minutes later we were torturing the cat with the test sounds:
After that, I hopped up on the step stool and installed the mounting bracket – 4 screws on each “corner” (sorry I didn’t snap any photos of this step).
Once those screws were in place, we rotated the Nest Protect into place and voila!
Of course, we won’t stop here. We have one other ancient smoke detector in the house to replace at the bottom of the stairs, then after that we may add 1-2 more in other rooms such as the laundry room and lounge eventually.
PS I’m working on putting together posts regarding all of the many other home automation devices and services we use. It’s quite the task, but I’ll get there one day, so stay tuned!
As of April 2021, we added 3 more (Google) Nest Protects to our home! We now have a total of 5 and no more archaic smoke detectors anywhere in the house 🎉
Faxlandez Family Blog 
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[…] few days ago, I shared a bit about the Nest Protect smart smoke alarms that we have installed in our home, so I wanted to share a bit more about another product Nest […]
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