I was hoping that Nest would come out with a 3rd generation of the product with more features but there seems to be no rumors of anything coming soon. I was on Facebook market place the other day and came across someone local selling a new, still in the box nest protect for $65. At that price I could try one out and see if the is worth the investment to purchase more. I was able to negotiate the price down to $60, not a bad deal.
Installation was pretty straight forward as expected. I did have one issue after installing that the app was reporting that the Protect had no power. I thought one of the wire nuts may have come off when I shoved the wires into the ceiling but after checking everything was fine. The small green light was on so that confirmed that the unit was getting power. I started to get nervous that I got burned buying the protect off Facebook but before I contacted the seller I decide to contact Nest. So off I went to chat with Nest tech support online chat. What should have been a simple chat took close to an hour. I gave support my serial number, they checked in their system. He wanted me to check that it was getting power with a multi-meter. He wanted to see what kind of batteries were in the teh system. I think the issue was that the batteries were not properly seated. When I took them out and put them back in the "no power" message disappeared. The may have just jogged loose in transit. Really this should have been the first thing that support asked. There was really nothing on the website about reseating batteries if this message occurs.
I decided to replace our upstairs smoke detector with the nest as it is between my kids rooms and the bathroom and I figured the pathlight feature would be good for them. So I have had the protect installed for a couple days now and I would describe the product as underwhelming. It does look good, I was able to replace an ugly smoke detector and a separate carbon monoxide detector installed a few feet away. So my ceiling looks a bit cleaner. The pathlight feature is nice but other than that it doesn't do much. I feel like for the price it should do more.
I think there is so much room to pack more features into this product. Speakers, Digital Assistants, Air quality monitor are just a few examples. If I can get another one for $60 I will but I don't think I will be paying full price given the current feature set.
