Consumers are not pleased with the Nest Protect: Smoke + Carbon Monoxide alarms, complaining that the devices are prone to annoying false alarms. Google is the parent company of Nest.
Many customers are warning others not to purchase the smoke detectors. Interestingly, a Google employee named Brad Fitzpatrick, took to his Google+ account to bash the product, which he says are prone to false alarms that cannot be turned off. He called the detectors “unhushable pieces of crap,” Consumerist reports.
Another reviewer described the devices as “a machine designed to place terror in the hearts of your children as it randomly triggers false alarms on different units at random times.”
One consumer noted that his babysitter had to take his kids out of the house and sit in her car for more than an hour because she couldn’t get the unit into “hush” mode.
An additional review pointed out that the alarm didn’t go off when a home actually did fill with smoke.
In April 2014, Nest halted sales on the Nest Protect: Smoke + Carbon Monoxide alarm after the company discovered a software flaw that caused the ‘Nest Wave’ deactivation feature to be unintentionally activated with a wave of the hand.
The following month, Nest recalled 440,000 smoke and carbon monoxide detectors because the “wave off” feature was keeping the devices from sounding a warning in an emergency.
The product was reintroduced to the market in June 2014.
