In light of this weekend's terrible tragedy in Brooklyn, where seven (!?!) of eight children perished in a fire, because of no smoke alarm, (except for one in the basement which wasn't working) I thought I'd post about my recent breakthrough with this and to remind everybody to CHECK YOUR FIRE ALARM BATTERIES!
In a prior post, I talked about the Philips Hue and the Nest Protect. Previously, I had to connect the Hue and the Nest Protect via IFTTT, and then set a recipe for each individual Nest Protect (we have five) and then set it to change my lights to red whenever we got an alert for smoke or carbon monoxide. It was very tedious, and we found that the lights would take up to 10-15 minutes to change, and it wasn't in a very obvious way. Just a slow change. You wouldn't notice it unless you were directly looking at it.
Then about two months ago, Nest announced an integration at CES with Philips Hue, and I was overjoyed! You have to go to the Nest website for "Works with Nest", here, and sign into your Nest account and then sign into your Philips Hue account (if you don't have a log in for it, create one). They have a feature where you can "test" it and when I did, it worked beautifully. I've had several kitchen "accidents" since and each time it has worked wonderfully. The lights blink red.
One other reason why I love the Nest Protect is because they all connect together. If one goes off, all the others will as well. You can "name" each one, i.e. "Kitchen", "Basement", "Top Floor hallway," etc. And if one of them go off, then the others will also and it'll say which one is going off so a hearing person will be able to listen and detect where the fire is coming from. I also get a notification on my phone, as well as on my Pebble watch.
Fire safety is a very important issue for me as a deaf person because I can't always hear the fire alarm going off. There are some models with strobe lights, but not everybody can wake up to that. I know I can't so I have to resort to different measures - i.e. a VISUAL way and a notification via my phone so that I don't miss it. Minutes matter in a fire, and waiting 10 minutes for a slow notification on IFTTT does not cut it.
Also, the Nest Protect will notify you via the app if the battery is low or a hardwired version has lost power. I don't have to climb up on a ladder and fiddle to find a battery anymore. There's an app for that!
As a deaf person, I believe this is the best solution you can find for fire safety, using a Nest Protect and the Philips Hue light system to create a VISUAL notification system. Nothing else comes close, and I've looked.
