Hi,
Smoke detectors need to serve two masters:
- Meet national building regulations for safety and reliability.
- Integrate with your chosen home automation system.
Sadly, I have two Fibaro FGSD-002 still in their boxes as they do not meet UK building regulations - these specify smoke detectors must be interlinked so that a fire downstairs triggers the upstairs alarm and gets you out of the house. FGSD-002 sense and signal fine, but one can not set off the alarm of the other.
It’s great that a fire can send a SMS or flash the lights, via a Z-Wave controller but that’s not much use if an electrical fire has tripped the RCD / GFCO and battery smoke detectors can’t talk to each other. Yes, I have a UPS on my OpenHAB controller, but it seems very silly that expensive Z-Wave devices can’t do what the cheapest mass-market dumb device MUST do by law!
Nest seems to have the best mix of compliance with national regulations (battery, local RF interlink), and features (fire and CO), and cost but I really don’t want my data leaving my local network to an external server.
I’m starting to think a set of cheap, simple, standard, legal detectors plus a safe interface that does not interfere with their operation may be better. Some proprietary relay units seen to exist, and there are audio interfaces sensing the high-pitched alarm beep:
UK mains wired detectors use an extra common interlink wire - adding an opto-isolator might work, but proving to the insurance company that a custom circuit didn’t impact the systems could be tricky.