A few weeks back I posted a diary about smoke alarms that got a lot of discussion going. It covered smoke alarm basics and comments from people about what kind they have and how well they do or do not work.
One that was mentioned has a feature that turns off the alarm if you wave at it - so false alarms don't require yanking the battery out of the thing to silence it. Well, if you have the Nest Wave smoke and CO2 alarm, there's a safety announcement you need to see. Via the BBC,
Google-owned Nest has halted sales of its Nest Protect fire alarm after the firm found out that users could accidentally disable the device by waving their arms.
The company said the feature, Nest Wave, which allows users to wave their arms to deactivate the alarm, could be activated unintentionally.
In a blog post, the company said current users should disable Wave.
The details are at the link in the BBC quote above. If you have a Nest Wave, you should follow this up ASAP.
And if you don't have a Nest Wave, you should still make a practice of checking your alarms on a regular basis, making sure the batteries are good, and replace the alarms when they become too old to work properly.