‎Heat Sensors or Temperature Sensors | SimpliSafe Support Home
 
J

Friday, May 28th, 2021 8:58 PM

Heat Sensors or Temperature Sensors

My new insurance company, Chubb, requires that my home is installed with heat sensors.  I ordered these from SimpliSafe.  The certificate that they gave me however does not say heat sensor but rather Water/freeze sensor.  Here is what I got from my agent who contacted Chubb Insurance:

"I received back confirmation from Chubb who specifically confirmed the following: "The alarm certificate is sufficient as it is being monitored. The heat sensors we need verification of what they will install and if they will be monitored. We were told that Simplisafe does NOT do heat sensors.'

If you can obtain some sort of work order from SimpliSafe before signing up for any installation of the additional items - I can submit this to Chubb for prior approval."

This is a major problem for me! Unless I have documentation that the proper heat sensors are installed in my home, I will have to cancel Simplisafe.
I have spent hours on the phone now with no less than 6 reps and all reassure me that the sensors are used by all for heat and cold but verbal assurance is not enough.  Beware of this if you have a top insurance provider!  Has anyone had that problem?

Captain

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6.2K Messages

3 years ago

@ jpe367 my brother worked for Chubb for over 40 years and had told me in the past that the bulk of your insurance discount will be predicated not on burglary or fire monitoring, but in fact, water sensors. Majority of claims are for water damage.

Now for your semantics issue. SS has smoke sensors,...check.  They have a sensor that can measure/monitor and notify for below x (so your pipes don't freeze, burst and cause that water damage) and above y (that is going to do the exact same thing for hot conditions.  I would suggest , as my brother recommends, get another insurance company if the dollars at stake are that significant  (he doubts it).  As for me, Liberty Mutual is just fine with my SS certificate as is.  Good luck with your ongoing negotiations.

19 Messages

2 years ago

There should be an additional question in the sensor setup when setting the high temperature, a checkbox should ask is this for fire detection, and if check Yes it should be treated as a monitor alarm zone not just local annunciation.   The sensor is very flexible in that one sensor can be used for hot or cold or both but only as a temperature monitor device not as a security device. This is a mistake! Add the option to make the heat detection reportable as fire alarm.

Secondly, I have six temperature sensors on my system and to use the app to get a reading of temperatures in different places like my garage my green house is my attic under my crawl space etc the number of key strokes I have to go through to get an updated reading is ridiculous! SimpliSafe should reevaluate how they display a temperature sensor group and it should be open and look not all these additional steps you got to go through to refresh the sensors readings and to get all the sensors on the screen it's just ridiculous.

Community Admin

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5.7K Messages

@BillAggie​ the major problem with that is the the Temperature Sensors update only once per hour. So unfortunately it wouldn't be fast enough to alert for fire. It really is just for monitoring room temperature, e.g. for frozen pipes or overheating pets.

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19 Messages

Okay understood! However you guys need to revisit the logic on this even as a monitoring system only. I use the free sensors to monitor my crawl space and my greenhouses.  If I set the temperature at a 36 degree freeze warning, the system does alert me but then it keeps alerting every hour all night long.  There's no way to pause it!   I don't think you guys thought this through as nobody wants a repeated alarm every hour... All night long it makes the feature worthless.  My wife complains constantly about the alerts because once they start they don't stop until you either remove the sensor physically or delete it. You should use the logic that once a temp threshold alarm has raced alarm status, you don't continually trigger that device but instead warn with a status light or a keypad message that is in triggered condition.  Try sleeping with a freezer warning, it's impossible.

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37 Messages

@davey_d​ 

Why can't your engineering group design such a device?  Heck, just replace the smoke sensor on your smoke detector with a heat sensor external to the case that would trigger an alarm if it melted.  That's how system heat sensors work.  It can't be that complicated since other alarm systems have them.  Then use the smoke detector logic to essentially provide communications to the base station like you already do.  My fire department hates the idea of having a smoke detector in the garage for what likely will produce false alarms.  My basement has a workshop that generates much dust and will trigger you smoke detectors.  That's unacceptable.  Why just tonight an alarm was triggered when I was cleaning up the floor of the workshop and the detector is in the next room.  So please do something about this.  It can't be that hard.   Look,  I once many years ago integrated an off-the-shelf smoke detector with a mass produced clock radio that would detect smoke and trigger the radio's alarm.  The company I worked for wanted the device to put in hotel rooms where there were no central alarm systems at the time.  If I could do this, Simplisafe can adapt it's smoke detector to a heat sensor configuration.    

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19 Messages

2 years ago

If connected to my own Wi-Fi opening the app should automatically imply get the latest data from the control box nobody's going to open the app to want to look at the old data! When they're going there it's to know what's going on now not last time I was here. This is an excellent product but there's some really amateurish loose ends. There's a lot of former security executives using SimpliSafe and you should pool from these people to get some really good development ideas that you're missing.

1 Message

10 months ago

Any update on this from SS? I too have Chubb, and they require a "heat" sensor and disqualified the temperature monitor. I'm going to have to go back to ADT (Uuuugh!!!!) if there isn't a solution. 

37 Messages

They said that the idea was submitted to development, but they've said that before.  I have tried to get them to manufacture one, but every time I feel like I'm talking to a stone wall.  Keep  prodding them as I will as well.  Sooner or later they're bound to get the message and our problems will go away.  I'm actually thinking about opening one up one and integrating a Bosch solid state button sensor into it in place of their smoke sensor.  Will let everybody know if I'm successful.   

Community Admin

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3.4K Messages

@dcane​ Unfortunately at this time I do not have an update on this product request. As Aswierz mentioned, we do have an open ticket for a Heat Sensor with our dev team, but I do not have any word from them on whether it will be brought into development or not. I'll bubble this back up to them, but when we have news we'll let everyone know in this thread

37 Messages

8 months later and still no word about the requests for a heat detector that would trigger an alarm.  Does SS development group understand English?  Has SS simply decided to do development off shore and wherever it's located just doesn't speak our language and ignore the requests?  

7 months ago

I'm not an expert but it's my understanding that "Heat Sensors" are much better for Kitchens and Garages.   It's more obvious to me that Heat sensors would be great for kitchens opposed to Smoke sensors for the obvious reasons of cooking and burnt toast etc.   I currently have the simplisafe smoke detector close to the kitchen and during cooking activities I have set off the smoke sensor by accident twice.   It sure would be nice to have "heat" detectors opposed to "smoke" detectors for this application.    Thank you Simplisafe for a great system but would your product development team please consider heat detectors as an additional product.  

Also, it would be great to consider adding a radio amplifier as I am right on the fringe of losing signal for my external garage due to brick house and block garage.    A radio signal amplifier would work for this application opposed to having to purchase a second system ($$) for garage.    Thanks for your consideration.

37 Messages

Thanks for your consideration?  That's a wasted sentiment for a company that has ignored many requests for a heat detector that would trigger a fire alarm.  Whenever anyone requests such a device SS appears to deep six it out of hand.  They've ignored many requests and haven't said a word about developing such a detector that was first requested many months ago.  This company DOESN'T LISTEN.  If they think that their arrogance will keep them in business they should think about companies like DEC and Wang and what happened to these two billion dollar "premadonnas" who, thanks to arrogant management/workforce, went belly up.    

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