Nest’s Smoke Alarm Returns, With Price Cut

Tony Fadell, chief executive of Nest, with one of his company’s smoke detectors.

Nest’s Smoke Alarm Returns, With Price Cut

Nest’s smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are coming back to store shelves two months after safety concerns prompted a recall of the devices.

Nest, which is owned by Google, is also cutting the price on the product to $99 from $130.

The company said the detector, known as Nest Protect, will go back on sale without a feature that prompted the recall in April. That feature, which it calls Nest Wave, was designed to let people temporarily silence the alarm by waving their arms beneath it. In laboratory tests earlier this year, Nest said it had determined that body movements near the detector could be misinterpreted by software in the device, resulting in the unintentional silencing of the alarm.

Nest has still not fixed the glitch. Instead, the company said, it has deactivated the feature in the detectors being returned to store shelves and will reactivate it once it solves the problem. Immediately after it announced the problem in April, Nest remotely deactivated the Wave feature in alarms that were already installed in homes.

Nest alarms need to be connected to the Internet for the company to be able to update them remotely. Most of them are.

Although the Wave function is one of Nest’s big selling points for the product, the device has other capabilities that distinguish it from conventional smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. For example, it transmits alerts to smartphones when the alarm sounds.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission reported last month that the problem with the Nest products affected about 440,000 devices, including alarms Nest had already sold and those that were still on store shelves.

Nest also released a white paper based on anonymous data from Nest Protect customers in the United States, Canada and Britain that revealed that 0.15 percent of homes with the alarms installed had experienced a carbon monoxide alert between November 2013 and May 2014.

The length of those events ranged from 3 minutes to over 24 hours, with a median alert time of 1 hour and 17 minutes. Carbon monoxide is an odorless, toxic gas produced by furnaces, stoves and water heaters that can cause serious health problems and death in homes with poor ventilation.

Based on its analysis, Nest estimated that at least one million households in the United States, Canada and Britain are exposed to high levels of carbon monoxide each year.