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Roost put its smart battery into a four-in-one smoke alarm

By Jenny McGrath May 4, 2016

For just $35, you can currently buy a Roost smart battery that fits inside your average smoke detector and makes it smart. The five-year battery will connect to your Wi-Fi, and its app will send alerts when your device detects smoke. Now, however, you can get a whole Roost Smart Smoke Alarm for $60 or $80.

Roost announced its two new devices today, the RSA-200, which detects smoke and fire, and the RSA-400, which has sensors for smoke, fire, carbon monoxide, and natural gas. These detectors come with the smart battery installed but are aimed at a different market, those building or remodeling their homes, CEO Roel Peeters told Digital Trends. “We’re basically taking all these lessons learned from that product and rolling that into a new product and delivering even more value,” he said of the smart battery.

One of the lessons involved the sensitivity of the alarm detector. While the battery started out erring on the side of caution, sounding the alarm at the slightest provocation, this caused too many false alerts. And while it may be a relief to rush home from work and not find your house on fire after the app tells you it is, it’s definitely not an experience you want to repeat.

At $60 and $80, the Roost alarms are less expensive than the Nest Protect, which retails for $99. That connected alarm detects smoke and CO, as does the $105 Onelink from First Alert.

“We believe we’re the only player in the smart smoke alarm space that offers natural gas detection,” Peeters said. “As a company, we’ve always had a philosophy about being able to deliver peace of mind and doing that in an affordable way.”

Of course, both the Protect and the Onelink hook up to larger ecosystems (the former works with Nest and the latter with HomeKit), while the Roost is a stand-alone device. It does work with IFTTT, so you could still get your Hue lights to flash in the event of an alarm if you set up a recipe.

The detectors are available for preorder now and should start shipping in June.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Jenny McGrath is a senior writer at Digital Trends covering the intersection of tech and the arts and the environment. Before…

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