It’s Birthmas time (Christmas + my birthday days later) in the SHR household and that means an influx of new gadgets coming through my doors. This year my wife picked up the First Alert OneLink Safe & Sound on super sale at Amazon for just under $150. Even at that price this is just about the most expensive smoke detector you can buy, but the feature set should make up for the price.
The Safe & Sound is a smoke detector, a carbon monoxide detector, a 10 watt speaker, a nightlight, and it’s Alexa enabled, so it will function like a (limited) Echo when installed in your house. One important thing to note, because of all of these features, this only comes in a hard wired model. Once wired up, though, it will also work with all of your existing smoke detectors no matter the type or brand.
Check out the video below to see what’s in the box and get my first impressions of the Safe & Sound.
Update: After making this video and installing the Safe & Sound I discovered two important things that have unfortunately lead me to return the item. First and foremost, this does not work with Alexa multi-room audio. You can’t add it to a group of devices and have it play synched music along with them throughout your house. In my case, this was the primary reason we wanted this. It was meant to replace the smoke detector at the top of my two story entry where it would then fill that space with music while the other Echo’s played in other rooms. That lead us to our second issue, the sound is tinny and lacking bass. This could be in part because of the very large space where I was playing it, but even with my head right beneath it, the audio was pretty lame. Turning up the volume (which required some serious yelling at high volumes) just made the audio distorted. Considering it says “Premium speaker” right on the box, I expected more.
