How to tell if hard-wired fire/smoke detectors are alerting?

🎬 Get Started
1

New to HE & HA, about to move into a new house that has hard-wired smoke/fire detectors throughout.

I do not currently have any smart microphones (ie., Alexa, Echo, etc), and do not want any that are cloud-connected.

Can anyone recommend a method for determining if the fire/smoke detectors have gone off, and sending an alert via HE?

Are there any LUX sensors that sample frequently enough to reliably pick up the strobe lights on the smoke detectors?

I've already got a bunch of RPIs that control whole-house audio, but just speakers (no microphones at present). Does anyone have experience with monitoring ambient noise locally (not sending input to the cloud for speech recognition) and triggering HE if a smoke detector siren is going off?

I suppose I can always set up a rule to send an alert if my thermostat says the house is over 451F. :slight_smile:

2

put in nest smoke detectors... :>

3

If they are hardwired are they connected to a security panel? If so you can look into integrating that.

If you don't have a security panel there are devices that can detect the sirens and send the alert to Hubitat. One of those is this Z-Wave unit:

1 Like
4

I haven't tried these myself, but this device seems to meet your requirements of a local processing only solution. Not sure if anyone has written a driver for it yet on Hubitat. If not, porting one from SmartThings should be fairly easy.

https://www.amazon.com/Ecolink-Wireless-Detector-existing-FF-ZWAVE5-ECO/dp/B071Z8NM8N

5

@5fe94872fdbd2dbd06a8 I have one and there is a driver for it and it works great. You sit it no farther than 6 in. away from your Smoke and/or Smoke/CO detector and it will alert on both Smoke and CO depending on which one is triggered. It uses the sound made by the detector to distinguish between Smoke and CO. If you don't have the CO part built in to the detector then it will just alert on smoke.

1 Like
6

+1 for the ecolink firefighter device.

If you want a local solution and aren’t interested in replacing the smoke detectors themselves, this is a good option.

7

They work great as long as the smoke detector uses the standard sound. I had some really old wired smoke detectors that made a really loud buzzing sound and it wasn't able to detect them...

8

The alarm tone patterns for smoke and CO are part of current UL standards for both types of devices. Must’ve been some pretty old detectors :slightly_smiling_face:.

9

Probably early 90s...

1 Like
10

you could get the zcombo by firstalert, on sale it's around 30 bucks and is z-wave smoke/co.
i also have a leeo that listens for smoke/co/water alarms, but requires the leeo app. I paid 30 bucks but looks like it's now 170.00 !

You could replace one of your hardwired detectors with a halo zigbee interconnected alarm, 35-55 bucks on ebay. I have 4 they work great w/ HE

11

Depending on the brand of smoke detectors, you can read about installing a relay on the communication wire here. Both Kidde and First Alert have relays.

I have had this setup for several years and even hooked up my smoke detectors to my hard wired alarm stayed as well via this relay.

2 Likes
12

Following up, I got one Ecolink Z-Wave Plus Firefighter FF-ZWAVE5, Smoke and CO Audio Detector.
Easy to pair, easy to install, recognized by HE, and it correctly triggered when I was cooking on Sunday.

Thanks to all for the recommendations.

13

What burned and where did you go for dinner after that?? :wink:

14

I know this is an older post but I did want to let everyone know following this post something that I just learned about a month ago. Smoke detectors only have a useful life of about 10 years:

@krlaframboise If yours are truly from the 90s, they are well past their useful lifespan. No one in my little office of 6 people knew that 10 year lifespan either so I have tried to share that knowledge when possible for everyone's safety.

1 Like