2 Messages
Smoke/CO Alarm Interconnectability
The Problem: When a smoke or CO alarm head goes into the alarm state, it will sound its internal alarm, and alert the base station. This sets the base station off, and starts the process with SimpliSafe Monitoring. However, it does not alert any other heads in the home. This creates major problems when you have a multi-story home, and are sleeping with your door closed (yes, you should be doing this). I have had alarm activations previously, and was awoken by the phone call from SimpliSafe Monitoring, because the alarm that was activated and the base station were downstairs.
Proposed Solution: I am asking Simply safe to rewrite some code so that when the Base Station receives a Smoke or CO alarm activation, it forces all other Smoke/CO heads in the home to activate and alert. This will improve life safety/property conservation efforts, as the occupants will be notified faster. This will mean that no matter where you are, or sleep, where your base station is, and most importantly, where the activated head is, you will know immediately if one is going off.
Who Am I/Relevance: I have Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering, and work as a Professional FireFighter / Paramedic. I use SimpliSafe to protect me and my home. The relevance is that this is both a faster alert for nuisance alarms, and for life safety. Modern homes have 2-3 minutes before "Flashover", patients who do not escape a home before this point, usually become victims. The first notification in a home with Smoke/CO alarms located throughout should not be from the monitoring center phone call. The NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) recommends that homes have connected Smoke/CO alarms as I am asking here. "Smoke alarms should be interconnected. When one sounds, they all sound. " -NFPA.org
This ultimately seems like a simple code update, and has a potentially large life saving factor driving this.
Thank you for your time, I hope this can be implemented.
Thank you,
Austin
metzjustin
2 Messages
1 year ago
I'm also in the middle of a renovation and have been told that if my SimpliSafe smoke detectors do not all sound in the event of an alarm, then I will need to replace the system to pass inspection. @emily_s - any updates here?
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tdsedney
20 Messages
1 year ago
In larger and multistory homes, SIMPLISAFE customers should NEVER depend on their security system to alert everyone in the home that may be sleeping that there is a fire or smoke..... Our home is only 2100 sq.ft and we have 10 smoke/CO alarms throughout the home. The SIMPLISAFE base station is in the living room against an exterior wall. We found that with the bedroom doors closed, people asleep in bed did not hear the base station alarm.....
The ONLY way to make this work safely is to purchase 2 or more so-called SIRENS from SIMPLE-SAFE. The sirens are loud and they can be independently positioned to broadcast loud siren noises when they are triggered by the base station... The smoke/CO alarms are actually more for notifying the fire department that your house is on fire (while you sleep (and die??) because your base station itself is not loud enough).
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gibsons3
2 Messages
1 year ago
Davey D and simplisafe, you simply don't get it or unfortunately you do, but deflect, that your smoke detectors do not meet code in the majority of regions of residential housing. They do not interconnect and therefore deemed not safe in these regions for good reasons. Everything else Simplisafe has put together is terrific but when your basic smoke detector functionality does not meet the current standards then using simplisafe doesn't make sense for smoke detection.
I posted about this problem 11 months ago. This would be a good CBS 60 minutes topic.
Hugh Gibson
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merriams2
1 Message
5 months ago
This is really a big miss on Simplisafe's part. Simplisafe is headquartered in Boston. The NFPA is located nearby in Quincy. How they could not understand interconnected smoke/fire alarms is beyond me. I recently sold a house and swapped out a wired interconnected unit with one of the Kidde wireless interconnect units to my existing hardwired units in order to cover a room that needed to be interconnected, but the wiring was not there to do it. I extended the system with a second wireless interconnect unit. Worked great and fire department was happy with the inspection. This seems like the most direct way for Simplisafe to solve this. Make an alarm like the Kidde Hardwired Combination Carbon Monoxide & Smoke Detector which has a 10 year battery, is A/C powered, plus A/C and wireless interconnect and meets all recent NFPA codes. Have it communicate with the Simplisafe Basestation so central monitoring is notified and it meets NFPA requirements as far as interconnection goes.
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peneri
3 Messages
14 days ago
Still waiting (echoing disbelief of all previous posts in this thread), I am a loyal SimpliSafe customer since 2018, impressive system BUT the lack of this feature (interconnect of smoke / CO detectors and no voice message in them) means that to sell my home I have to have duplicate wireless interconnected sensors in the important rooms (9 in my case) so that the SimpliSafe system is reporting to the monitoring service and connected devices a detection event of smoke / CO, while the second system acts as the in-house safety system to alert all occupants of the very same event. What a waste, and incomprehensible shortcoming for SimpliSafe.
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burtonrw
5 Messages
14 days ago
Does anyone from SS keep up with these chats? Maybe a complaint to the Consumer Product Safeth Commission would get their attention. At the very least, the marketing for these units is deceptive and misleading. I just don’t get why they won’t upgrade the software. As noted above, with a system already designed for two-way communication, how hard could it possibly be??
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