Nest Suspends Sales Of Nest Protect Alarm As It Fixes Potential Safety Issue

Nest Labs, which Google acquired last January for $3.2 billion, has elected to suspend sales of its Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm on account of a potential safety issue. In a letter to customers, Nest CEO Tony Fadell says:

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.

To that end, the errant feature in question has been disabled by Nest. If you have a Nest Protect connected to an account via Wi-Fi, the feature should be automatically disabled in the next 24 hours. In addition, Nest Mobile, the official iOS companion app of Nest, has been updated to disable the Nest Wave feature. And as mentioned, sales of Next Protect have been stopped for the time being. "While we fix Nest Wave," Fadell says, "we have also halted sales of all new Nest Protect alarms to ensure no one buys an alarm that needs an immediate update." Nest Protect was released by Nest last year as a follow-up to its flagship product, the Nest Learning Thermostat (which was recently launched in Britain). For more information on Nest Protect, check out our review of the product here on AppAdvice.

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