Safety Risk Prompts Recall of 440K Nest Smoke Alarms

Government regulators on Wednesday said that they have approved Nest Labs’ plans to fix a feature in its smoke alarms that could prevent them from sounding immediately.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Wednesday that the company will recall 440,000 of its Nest Protect Smoke + CO alarms, which have a feature that allows users to temporarily silence some alerts by waving their arm near the unit.

The company announced last month that it would offer an electronic update to disable this feature. It has not received any related reports of incidents, injuries or property damage.

The high-tech home monitoring device company, which was acquired this year by Google Inc. for $3.2 billion, halted all new sales of the alarms in April after recognizing the problem. It said Wednesday that the recall does not differ from its earlier announcement.

Nest says the device must be connected to the Internet and linked to an account for an automatic update.

Consumers whose devices are already connected should confirm receipt of the update by going to “Nest Sense” on their account and ensuring the button for “Nest Wave” is set to off and grayed out. Those who have not connected their devices to a wireless network and a Nest account should do so. The devices will then be automatically updated and consumers should take the aforementioned steps to ensure the update is complete.