I have Nest Protects, all hardwired and with the interconnect.
I already bought one of these and installed, but not sure if the nest sends signal over the wire in addition to any wireless communication between the devices.
@jtp10181 any ideas Jeff?
The Hardwired nest protects connect to each other wirelessly. They don't use the interconnect wire. I keep an ecolink on the one in the kitchen and when one goes off they all go off. So the ecolink picks it up.
When you do a test do they all go off? If so, and they use the interconnect wire then this should also set off the ZEN55 as an alarm. If they are only using the wireless interconnect then the ZEN55 would not be set off. I would trigger the test from the unit the ZEN55 is directly connect to as well.
I replaced all my First Alert smoke detectors with Smoke and CO last night. I only had two that were Smoke and CO out of the 6. Costco has an really good sale on them right now. Two hardwired smoke and Co for $44.xx. $15 off their normal price. Plus these come with a 10 year battery back up. So, no more 9 volts every year.
I tested the last one after the swap and I got notifications for both smoke and CO. Plus my rule turned on all the lights.
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The problem is you need to place one near every alarm. One of these covers the whole system. I never got those damn Nest Protects to log-on to the WiFi. The ONLY device I have never gotten to work with my WiFi unlike the Kasa switches and Dimmers which work perfect and are half as much as a Zigbee one.
My system is hardwired, Costco models are useless to me, they do not even have interconnect and would be illegal in many jurisdictions like Boston, for example.
Nests are wired and have no wireless interconnect. The use WiFi to have a network but I could never get any to connect to my WiFi. I took it down and put in a talking First Alert Smoke and CO unit. It works. The other one like it is in the bedrooms hallway, as recommended. The first is in a room with the fireplace.
They use your WiFi to talk to each other.
These statements seem contradictory.
In case you’re still confused how nest protects actually work, it’s a wireless interconnect.
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Nope. Only have one in the kitchen. As soon as one goes off, they all go off so the kitchen one pics it up.. I never had a problem getting them onto wifi, even on combined SSID's... Though I think they communicate through bluetooth for the interconnects/ I'm not sure what frequency they actually use. It's just a guess because I had all the wifi in the house down one day and kids were cooking and set them off. Was annoying because I had to go to at least 2 of them to shut everything down (obviously I couldn't use the app at the time)
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Apropos of nothing, I just noticed my microwave does 4 beeps when its ready. Does the Ecolink have to be close to the detector?
The Costco ones are by First Alert and ARE hardwired and interconnected. Plus they come with a 10 year battery.
Within 1 foot and your microwave beep will not set it off. US smoke and co detectors have a specific frequency sound not used by anything else.
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right but if you don't have the interconnect wire, trying to run one is a difficult and potentially expensive solution. Nests have the advantage there (and also come with a 10 year backup battery or a 7 year battery if no ac power is available)
Nest Protects were about the first to use a Thread network (but it was/is proprietary). The WiFi connection is not used for any smoke/CO2 communication between units.
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Nest products use Weave. There is OpenWeave https://openweave.io/ . OpenWeave can use OpenThread https://openthread.io/
They are just another Zigbee device and listen to the sound, CO and Smoke have different universal tones. The instructions say to place within 6 inches. You probably have wired interconnect so they all go off. I was going to place mine next to the CO / Smoke one in the hallway but since this does not require battery changes I installed it instead.
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Nest doesn't use wired interconnect, they use their own protocol. But yeah, if you don't have any sort of interconnect on your alarms, you would need one for each detector.
Hi Jeff, I had to re-pair my Z55 this morning (no issues, just a self-induced problem on my end) and I realized the "Refresh" option doesn't send anything to the logs ("Info" level logging option). Is that expected behavior?
Since this thing could go for a very long time (hopefully forever!) without actually doing its job, being able to do an occasional Refresh and getting an all-clear check-in would be a nice warm-fuzzy that it's still OK. Many thanks!
The Last Activity At only updates if the device responds, so if that is not stale it is still talking.
You could also enable debug logging and duplicated events get logged as debug logs.
Lastly, line 437 of the code, that could be forced as a state change by changing it to this:
sendEventLog(name: name, value: eventVal, isStateChange:true, ep)
That should make it get logged as an info log and it will show in the event history on the device. If you want to test it out and see how chatty it is let me know. I think it will only happen if you do a refresh, so may not be a bad idea to make that a permanent change to the driver for peace of mind.
I have also been thinking about adding the "healthStatus" to my drivers, this might be a good one to try it on. Could have it do a health check every X hours.
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