TAKE MORE CONTROL OF YOUR HOME SAFETY WITH A SMART ALARM

If you only ever buy one piece of smart home tech, make it this

If there’s one consistent thing about smart home products that really hit the mark, it’s flexibility. When something does more than its ‘dumb’ equivalent could, in a way that quickly convinces you to never go back, it’s a true essential – and that goes double when we’re talking about safety, as with the Nest Protect.

Nest’s smoke and carbon dioxide alarm screws onto the wall or ceiling like any other smoke alarm, but it does a lot to help you with general peace of mind, as well as kicking up a din when it detects smoke.

For a start, it connects to your Wi-Fi network, so you can check its status from anywhere at any time, and it doesn’t just warn you of smoke with a noise: it sends your phone a notification too, wherever you are. Most usefully for novice or forgetful chefs, it gives you a gentle warning about lower-level smoke build-up before it gets to the stage where it fully kicks off, so you can silence it with a press of its central button (or through the app), save your ears, and open a window to clear the haze. And, if you have more than one, they all know their location, and alert you together, so a Nest Protect on the top floor will announce that smoke has been detected in the kitchen, or wherever.

There’s even more great stuff in the details. You don’t have to test it: you can set it to test itself, and while you’re out, it uses its own microphones to check its speakers work. It also does its own battery monitoring. It has a dim green light around its central button, and when you turn the lights off for bed, this flashes once to indicate that everything is working correctly, so you know you’re covered overnight. It uses light-based sensors to detect smoke, which means it can differentiate smoke from steam, so your shower won’t accidentally set it off – but the sensors can also detect motion. This means that if the lights are off and you walk past it in the middle of the night, it gives off a gentle glow, so you can find the bathroom. And it works with other smart home stuff – see the next page.

The Nest Protect costs $189 for both the battery-powered and wired versions. You can read more about the models at nest.com/au.