As Nest continues to impress customers with its design and ease of use, the Nest engineers have been looking at the enormous amount of data gathered since the initial release of Nest Protect and have identified many opportunities for improvement, in addition of the normal updates that is bound to arrive on all software. That’s what Nest 2.0 is and there are basically four big changes: Steam Check, Protect Safety History, What to do 2.0 and CO Level Notification.
Steam Check
We’ve all seen this at least once: opening the door of the bathroom after a hot shower can trigger a false fire alarm, thanks to low-tech smoke detectors. Nest has been able to tackle this because its hardware can tell the difference between steam and smoke, simply because it has a humidity sensor – steam is humid, smoke is dry. By using its existing sensors, Nest estimates that this will cut down the steam-induced alarms by half.
Protect Safety History
This gives Nest customers access to the last 10 days of safety data. This is handy if you want to see potential safety issues, or just make sure that everything was fine. The interface is very easy to read, and the explanations are clear. This could be interesting to find potential spots in the house where things like carbon monoxide tend to build up more often etc.… it’s important to realize that there may be low levels of carbon monoxide and that you don’t need to “pass out” to be affected.
What to do 2.0
This is educational material to help families prepare to react to safety issues that may be the subject of an alert from Nest Protect. The idea is that when this happens in the middle of the night, there can be a good dose of confusion, so it’s nice to have a plan, and possibly train the kids.
CO Level Notification
As I mentioned earlier, carbon monoxide can linger at low enough levels to avoid triggering an alarm. This feature gives you a much more nuanced picture of CO levels than an alarm going on and off. It is now possible to see how the CO level evolve before and after an alarm, which can be useful to detect issues.
Conclusion
In addition to those new features, Nest is getting even more of them such as Pathlight controls, which uses the Nest Protect to light a room at night. Now, the light can stay on in an “always-on” mode if you want to use Nest as a nightlight for the kids or for some parts of the home. Nest can also connect to hidden WiFi networks now, which is handy for network-security conscious customers.
Maybe the best feature is that Nest users don’t have to do anything. the upgrade will happen in the background without a user intervention in the next couple of weeks.