Nest Protect (230v)

Its been a while since we fitted our first NEST device, I’ve never been a fan of anything Google does, in my opinion they never finish products and then seem to pull all the ones i’ve ever liked the look of!

Anyway our existing smoke alarm started to have some problems, if it went off the only way to turn it off was to flick the breaker to cut the power. I’m always a little a little wary of touching 230v and the old smoke alarm was connected to the mains.

My first confusion was the wires the old unit were red and blue, with an earth and a black cable, after checking google it became apparent that my house still had some older standard wiring, the black cable is apparently there to send a signal from the downstairs unit. The Nest manual said to cap off the earth and black cable, so the old faithful Wago blocks made their first appearance.

I connected up the other cables with another couple of Wago connectors, it all looked very neat, I was pretty pleased with myself at this point, then of course I needed to put the new Nest on the ceiling, lined up the mounting, screwed in and realised that the hole in the ceiling where the cables came down was a little small, pushing 4 wago blocks up inside was difficult, but eventually i got them up in the ceiling. seriously that was the longest part of the job.

So we now have a battery powered unit and a mains powered one, whats the difference apart from the obvious? well as far as I can ascertain, just that the mains one reports back to the app a lot more frequently than the battery powered one, they are both the same size, and they both have the same night light functionality which is pretty useful.

The app for the iphone looks clean and runs well, you can test from the app, and obviously get a log of whats happened.

The one thing I really like about the Nest is it actutally tells you whats going on in the house, instead of just beeping away, it calmly tells you there’s smoke and there may be loud noise, then proceeds to scream away at you if necessary. 

Smoke alarms need very little maintenance. A few minutes of your time during the year will ensure that your alarm is working and could help save your life and the lives of your family. You should:

• Test your smoke alarm when the clocks are changed and vacuum it gently using the soft brush attachment to remove dust from the sensors
• Once a year change the battery (unless it’s a ten-year alarm)
• After 10 years it’s best to get a whole new alarm.