Fire alarms are designed to do one thing and one thing only, which is to inform people in a building that a fire might be in progress, and that they should evacuate. However when companies get too fancy with their fire alarms and smoke detectors, that’s when it starts opening the door to more problems.
Unfortunately this is something that company Honeywell is experiencing right now with its SWIFT wireless gateway. It seems that when smoke detectors are connected to its gateway, there are occasions in which it won’t work which clearly is pretty dangerous, so much so that the company is now recalling the devices.
According to the CPSC’s website, “The smoke detectors connected to the gateway can fail to activate properly when significant environmental contaminants are present, posing a risk that consumers will not be alerted to a fire.” Honeywell is also offering a firmware update that should fix the problem.
Thankfully there does not appear to be any accidents or injuries that occurred as a result of this issue, and it also seems that only 900 units are affected so it doesn’t seem to be particularly widespread, but either way this is a safety issue that should probably be looked at ASAP.
Filed in . Read more about Connected Objects and IoT (Internet of Things).