Home Depot's Kidde WiFi Alarm Is Made for Your Smart Home

Woman connecting to Kidde Smoke + Carbon Monoxide Wi-Fi Alarm with smart features on phone.

It’s always exciting to see new devices introduced to the modern age, particularly with useful smart features. Like Home Depot’s newest smart home device, the Kidde Smoke + Carbon Monoxide Alarm with smart features. It offers an excellent selection of useful features, integrations, and beyond — it even works with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

It is a Wi-Fi-enabled, smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarm that syncs up with other Kidde alarms in your home as long as they are interconnected via hardwire. It’s hardwired, but unlike a standard alarm, has a 10-year backup battery. Most importantly, it delivers alerts, notifications, and information right to where you are, your mobile device, thanks to a Kidde mobile app. Why would you want a smart alarm with a mobile app? It can send alerts to you directly when something is amiss. From within your home, you can deactivate false alarms much quicker, especially if you have vaulted ceilings, without the need for a ladder or step stool. You can also set up the app to notify other important contacts like friends and family. The best part is that it’s available at a fraction of the cost of its competitors, like Nest, First Alert Onelink, and so on. The Kidde smart alarm is just $90 ($89.97), compared to Nest Protect which is $119 for just the hardware.

Why Kidde is perfect for your smart home

Starting with the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support built-in, you’ll be able to query the alarm using voice commands and by interacting with your voice assistant of choice. That’s perfect for setting up automations and tasks using your existing smart home solutions. Plus, the Kidde Wi-Fi alarm can be interconnected with other, in-home alarms, and it will convert all of those alarms into connected devices — provided they are from Kidde and interconnected via hardwire. Basically, it means whole home alarm activation, so that when one alarm goes off, they will all go off and send a mobile notification using the Kidde app. However, you will only get limited information and control of the interconnected hardwired alarms — only smoke or CO event notifications. To have more control over your home and notification on all alarms, Kidde recommends installing multiple Wi-Fi enabled alarms.

After installing the Kidde Wi-Fi alarm, and downloading the app, you can access it and mobile notifications from the Kidde app. No more digging out the ladder to interact with the Kidde smoke or CO alarm, it can all be done remotely. Since the Kidde smart alarm is hardwired with a lithium-sealed 10-year backup battery out of the box, there’s no need to change batteries. After ten years, you just replace the unit. Back to the mobile app, you can use it to check sensors and readings, to send an app-controlled test signal — to make sure the alarm is working — and disable false alarms when it goes off. You can keep your kids and pets happy by disabling the alarm from your phone — at home — much faster when it goes off late at night.

Because you can check in using the mobile app, it means you can also monitor your home from afar, or check in on your family. If you’re on a business trip, on vacation, or just visiting a neighbor, you’ll stay connected to what’s going on inside your home, at least when it comes to a potential fire or CO leak. Alerts give you enough time to get everyone to safety, take the necessary precautions, and call for help, wherever applicable. Every year, on average around 430 people in the U.S. die from accidental carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, and about 50,000 people visit the ER for CO poisoning incidents. That’s precisely why alarms like the Kidde exist. Now you can receive alerts no matter where you are, potentially saving lives.