Smartthings Compatible Smoke/CO Detectors

[JDRoberts]

@Pacman45

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 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:

https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/products/ecolink-z-wave-plus-firefighter-ff-zwave5-smoke-and-co-audio-detector

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.