Smoke filled my house, Google Nest alerted me it heard a smoke alarm 24 minutes later
I’m going to preface this with everyone is fine, the damage is a pancake. RIP Flap McJackerson. A series of events involving slicing my thumb, grabbing a Band-Aid (or generic brand equiv, not sure,) and really having to spend way too much time working on opening said Band-Aid (perhaps store brand, as noted) lead to a small pancake… not fire, but turning it into smoking goo and tripping three out of four smoke detectors that it could have.
Smoke alarms went off, I’ve got a few because I do not trust the wiring here… no reason not to, I just don’t. Plus I’ve had some Pocketables tech start melting down in the past and two kids who don’t understand electricity yet. I trust nothing. I’ve got dumb smoke detectors, security system smoke detectors, and I *thought* I had some smart backups with the Nest / Google Home listening for things like glass breaking and smoke detectors.
Turns out I didn’t.
At 10:21 my house erupted in a cacophony of dumb smoke detectors, and one alarm system connected one. This is while I was attempting to open a bandage because I was bleeding all over everything profusely from a wound so small I couldn’t believe that amount of blood was shooting out.
Ran and took the burning pancake away, hit silence on two of the smoke detectors, neither of them would silence so escorted them to the back yard for a few minutes until they shut off on their own. Cleaned up bloody pancake mess. Reinstalled smoke detectors, and got a notification on my phone as I was serving seconds of the non-burned pancakes to my kiddos that a smoke alarm had been heard.
That was about 24 minutes later. Two Google devices (Nest Hub, Google Home Classic,) heard, two Google devices sent notifications, two connected Samsung devices running Google software received the push notification 24 minutes later and both alerted me.
That is so comforting… let me tell you… I’ve become accustomed to my Nest Doorbell being next to useless due to 20+ second delays across two phones and a tablet, and Google Messages not bothering to notify me for minutes that a text is there (this is a known issue with non-priority notifications,) but yeah…
It’s become a feature that should be very much promoted as “get alerts to what’s happened” as opposed to “get alerts to what’s happening.”
Am I mad? No. Just disappointed in yet another Google thing that really needs to 1) work, 2) be configurable so it’s not playing default Google Home sounds, I want a freaking fire alarm, not a dink dink.
