Review: The £55 smart home bargain that every house should have
This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement.
So many things in our house can be made smarter these days. Our lights, our locks, our speakers, our vacuum cleaners, even our fridges. So it feels like making essential safety kit smarter would be a natural progression.
And, while I'm really not sure why my dishwasher needs to have smart capabilities, making life-saving tech a little bit more savvy feels like a sensible progression.
To put that to the test, I've been reviewing part of a suite of smart safety tech from X-Sense a well-established global company that works hard to improve safety through innovation.
My choice of product was its new FS31 Smart Smoke Alarm Kit. Through a base station hub, which comes with the kit, you can rig it up to work alongside everything from carbon monoxide detectors and water leak sensors, but I know from my previous job as a news reporter, that the smoke alarm is one of the most important devices you can have in your house.
Truth be told, smart smoke alarms are nothing new. I've tested plenty of them, but the first thing that strikes you about the three alarm units included in this kit is how compact they are.
You just mount them in the key areas you need monitoring, connect them to the app through the base station, and let them get on with the job of keeping you safe.
Remarkably, you can add up to 50 devices to this little hub, which means you can create a whole ecosystem of monitoring tech, and it's all reporting live to the app.
If it detects smoke, there's a penetrating 100db alarm across all the units, and you get alerted via an app. The beauty of this is, obviously, you know there's a problem wherever you are - home or away.
It also means, if you get an alert because your wife has burned the scrambled eggs again, you can silence it from the sofa, using the app. No more getting up, climbing a ladder, and pressing a reset button.
It uses a conventional battery, which is said to last for up to five years, and the units will let you know if there's any sort of problem, or if the battery needs replacing. So no more getting out of bed at 3am to figure out which one's making that horrible little "pip" noise.
And I haven't even got to the best bit yet. A pack of three smoke alarms and a base station costs just £55.99 - if you can catch a 30% discount on Amazon. And that's incredibly cheap for smart tech, let alone a set of three smart devices which have a 10-year lifespan.
Adding extra X-Sense units is also a bargain, so it's clearly a company that has mastered the trick of providing quality products at sensible prices.
If the alarms were fiddly to use, unreliable, or felt poorly made, I'd understand the price. But the fact is they're just not. They work really well, they're easy to set up, and I'm impressed by the quality.
In fact I can't think of the last time I was this impressed with a product, taking into account all factors, especially the price.
Given this is a safety device, and given how important I know smoke alarms are, I can't hesitate to give it five stars. Every house should have one of these kits.