Nest CEO Tony Fadell penned an open letter regarding the Nest Protect, and a glitch in one of it’s popular features, the Wave.  It seems that this feature could cause legitimate alarms to be silenced, or even be ignored entirely.
At Nest, we conduct regular, rigorous tests to ensure that our products are the highest quality. During recent laboratory testing of the Nest Protect smoke alarm, we observed a unique combination of circumstances that caused us to question whether the Nest Wave (a feature that enables you to turn off your alarm with a wave of the hand) could be unintentionally activated. This could delay an alarm going off if there was a real fire. We identified this problem ourselves and are not aware of any customers who have experienced this, but the fact that it could even potentially happen is extremely important to me and I want to address it immediately.
Sales of the Nest Protect have been halted until a solution is found. Â Current owners have been asked to disable the Wave feature immediately, and Nest will soon start shutting the feature off remotely for any Protect systems connected via WiFi. Â
The letter continues to explain the steps that Nest is taking to resolve the issue.
Once we have a solution that ensures Nest Wave works as intended, we will update our software to turn this feature back on. This will only happen after extensive testing and once we have received approval from safety agencies in the US, Canada and UK. We expect this to take at least two or three months and we’ll continue to update you as we have more information.
It’s admirable for a company to take it upon themselves to effectively recall their own product based on internal testing.  As we’ve seen lately in the news, companies are often hesitant to recall products even after accidents or even deaths have occurred.  I’m happy to see that Nest values people not getting set on fire more than a little bit of profit.  Hopefully Nest can make the necessary adjustments and resume sales for the Protect soon.
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
