The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Wednesday that Nest Labs has recalled as many as 440,000 Nest Protect Smoke + CO alarms.
Last month, the smart appliance maker alerted users to a bug in the device’s “wave to dismiss” feature and, for safety reasons, advised them to update the product’s software. Nest pushed out a software patch to deactivate the function pending a fix.
At that time, the company stopped short of officially putting out a product recall, but now, it has apparently changed its mind. Although the classification of the advisory has changed, the recommended steps for customers haven’t.
“The CPSC press release issued today refers to the same corrective action referenced in our April Safety Notice from the CEO, and in fact, we’ll be bringing Nest Protect back on the market soon,” a Nest spokesperson told me via email. “We have been working with CPSC and they have approved our corrective action as previously announced. Nothing else has changed since our initial announcement last month.”
To date, Nest Labs has not received any incident, injury or damage reports related to this issue. However, if you have a Nest Protect, the company urges you to contact it at (800) 249-4280 or to visit Nest online and consult the Nest Protect Safety Notice for information on how to shut off the feature.
“Current customers who have already followed these instructions can continue to use their Nest Protects once the Nest Wave feature has been disabled,” said the spokesperson. “Even with the Wave feature disabled, the Nest Protect Alarm will continue to perform its essential safety functions, monitoring for increased levels of smoke and CO, and alerting users via local alarms and Nest app alerts (if set up).”
Consumer Reports, in covering the product recall, noted that the device didn’t make its recommended list “because it was slow to detect fast-flaming fires in our tests.”