I’m looking for a good Smartthings Compatible smoke/CO Detector. I see First Alert has a ZCOMBO 2-in-1 detector, but will it respond to automation commands? I’d like to set up the detectors so that if one detector fires and sends its status to Smartthings, I can have an automation that commands the other detectors in the house to alarm as well. It’s a big house and sounding the alarm throughout is important. I’ve tried OneLink’s wifi detectors which supposedly have this capability, but it was spotty at best and didn’t play with Smartthings. I want to do other things as well like unlock the front door and turn Hue lights in RED mode. Any recommendations?
I would look at the Halos.
I use the halos. Hope something else comes out between now and the time they die.
I recommend buying more than you need, one of mine died due to a hardware fault and I had to replace with another from my stash.
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When I googled Halo, it says it is a Vape detector. I’m looking for a smoke (as in fire) detector.
First alerts ZSmokes only notify, they do not accept commands so no you cannot use the ZWave network to propagate the alert. You CAN trigger automations such as turning on lights and opening doors.
The Halo units mentioned above were wonderful units when the company was in business but theyve not been manufacturered for a couple years now and the sensor material in smoke detectors does have a lifetime (10 years, BTW) and besides the fact that they would be completely unsupported now, you probably have less than half the useful life remaining for any unit you could manage to find even if it was manufactured in the last few months they were in business.
Nest Protect makes a good unit but Google is currently busy mismanaging them, they’re the odd other kid of the Nest family at the moment. they dont connect into SmartThings with the official integration at the moment.
Another solution is using a standard interconnected smoke and use a ZWave relay wired into the alarm loop. (this is probably how im doing my own setup next time…)
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I’m thinking of buying new OneLinks for their ability to trigger each other to alarm, and a zwave Smoke/CO Listener that will send signal to Smartthings and trigger ZWAVE alarms throughout the house. It might be overkill, but the unreliability of the OneLink cascading relay to the other OneLink units prompts me to develop a backstop plan.
They’re out of business, you won’t find a website even if you Google them. But they can be had on eBay.
I don’t know of any residential smoke detectors for the US that allow you to force the alarm to sound, I’m not even sure that’s to code. These are highly regulated devices, and they don’t want people to stop paying attention to them because they’re being used for other things like the mail arrived. So in general you cannot automate the UL listed smoke detector sound.
That said, there is a good option for the use cases you describe.
First Buy any smoke detectors that you like and then use an acoustic sensor that can recognize the UL listed smoke detector pattern as a trigger, and put whatever automation you want as the event.
There is an Z wave acoustic listener on the official smartthings compatibility list which works well for this purpose:
You can also buy interlinked smoke detectors, dumb or smart, which cause multiple announcements among their own units and then also use an acoustic listener to do things like turn on lights or whatever else you want to have happen when a smoke alarm goes off.
In any case, I certainly wouldn’t rely on smartthings as my primary smoke alert system. But if you want to add an additional acoustic sensor, that can be useful. 
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^^ THIS ^^
My smoke detectors are hardwired and interconnected. When I went to replace them (which you must do every 10 years) I looked around and realized I don’t want to buy 5 Zigbee/Z-Wave smoke detectors, and depend upon piles of other infrastructure (Z-wave mesh, hub, WiFi, Internet SmartThings Cloud) to operate to make them work together.
Instead I bought Kidde smoke detectors and replaced them all. Then I bought the Ecolink Firefighter to let me also send the alert into my hub. As I noted here, separation of vital infrastructure (smoke detectors) and (potentially unreliable) automation infrastructure is important.
The Ecolink Firefighter works well - we had an unintentional test of it:
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How does the Ecolink join? What dth?
Their Zigbee version joins as a Zigbee Sound Sensor using the stock handler:
and their Zwave version joins as a Zwave Sound Sensor using the stock handler:
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The handler is already built-in; while @johnconstantelo links to the source, you don’t need to add it in order to use these devices.
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Just looked at the ecolink sound sensors on Amazon. No useful reviews for the zigbee version.
Several reviewers of the Z-wave version have issues with it triggering when their smoke alarms go off
I have the Ecolink Z-Wave Plus Firefighter. It works really well. I’ve had tested it manually and accidentally (see link above). I’ve not had issues with it detecting when my smoke alarms (Kidde 2070-VASR) were triggered. But you can tell by my link that I’m not using it with a SmartThings hub anymore.
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I’m also using the Firefighter with ST. No issues whatsoever with it going off unexpectedly. It triggers STHM everytime one of my smoke alarms goes off.
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Have you “Wattle” smoke detector , they works fine for me👍
According to instructions for Ecolink Firefighter, it must be installed a maximum of 6" from your smoke detector. This implies you need approximately one Firefighter sensor for each smoke detector, depending on how far they are apart (each bedroom).
How many Firefighters do you have for your 5 smoke detectors?
If your detectors are hardwired, when one sounds, all of them do, so you only need one.
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For Ecolink z-wave Fire Fighter, the native DTH doesn’t distinguish between smoke and CO alarms. It’s just a generic “alarm”. The custom DTH can trigger each type separately. One problem I have is that it doesn’t clear the error in the DTH once the detector stops sounding. It becomes a real pain to reset the DTH so the data is cleared.
My smoke detectors are hardwired and interconnected. If one goes off, they all go off. Thus, I only need 1 Ecolink FireFighter.
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