Best Prices Today: Place Any Space Smart Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector

When it comes to home safety and fire protection devices, should you have a different detector for each room, one that takes into consideration the typical activities that take place there? That’s the question Gentex seeks to answer with its Place series of safety devices, maintaining that your kitchen, the children’s nursery, and the garage each deserve purpose-built smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) detectors.

It sounds logical, at least on paper, but the prices Gentex expects to fetch for its line of Wi-Fi-connected (hardwired for power and interconnected) Place smart home devices—some of which also feature integrated security cameras—could spike  the idea before it gets off the ground.

The Place Any Space reacted to smoke faster than any other smoke alarm I can recall testing.

Specifications

As indicated above, Gentex doesn’t build just one Place detector, it offers four models, each designed with a specific room in mind, although they are all equipped with carbon monoxide detectors, temperature and humidity sensors, and smart nightlights. Each of these devices also has localized voice alerts and a low-frequency sounder that’s said to be more effective at waking deep sleepers and hearing-impaired individuals.

• The Any Place, reviewed here, is the most straightforward of the lot. It detects both smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) in addition to the other features listed above.
• The Kitchen model detects smoke and CO, and it adds natural gas detection (but not propane, which many rural homes use).
• The Garage model has a CO detector, an integrated camera, and an intercom, but it replaces the smoke detector with a heat detector to avoid false alarms. It doesn’t include air quality monitoring, but it detects and alerts to the presence of VOCs.
• The Nursery model delivers the most features of the four SKUs, incorporating a security camera, an intercom, air quality and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) monitoring, and a white noise generator as well as a smoke and CO detector.

Once again, Place alarms must be hardwired for power, and they can be interconnected to each other. Each one gets backup power in the form of two pre-installed lithium AA batteries. The detectors are rated to last the industry standard 10 years; the backup batteries might require periodic replacement over that time. The devices connect to 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks, and you’ll interact with them using the Place mobile app.

Installation and setup

As a hardwired product, you’ll need to install the Place Any Space Smart Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector where you have access to basic two-wire house wiring (a ground wire is not required); plus, interconnect wiring if you plan to chain together multiple Place alarms. Building codes vary by region, but the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in 1989 declared that newly constructed homes are required to have hardwired and interconnected smoke alarms on every level of the home and outside of sleeping areas.

The alarm includes a small bracket plus the bolts and wire nuts needed to mount the alarm to an electrical box. A small clip-in wiring harness bridges your home’s bare wiring to the detector. All told, physical installation is not at all taxing, unless your electrical box is particularly crowded and/or hard to reach (as can happen when detectors are mounted on high ceilings).

Once connected to power, the Place app is used to onboard the detector to your network. The app itself isn’t easy to find (use the QR code in the manual to avoid sifting through thousands of apps named with some variation of “place”), but once installed, it’s easy to complete the setup process. A Bluetooth connection auto-discovered my detector, after which I input a few credentials to bridge it to my Wi-Fi network. You will need to create an account (with a verified email address) to complete the process.

Using the Place Any Space Smart Smoke + CO Alarm

Since it lacks the bells and whistles of the more room-centric smoke alarms that Place offers, the Place Any Space works largely like any other smart smoke detector. Testing with canned smoke caused the alarm to activate quickly, faster than I’ve encountered with any other smoke alarm I can recall testing. The unit is designed with a particularly low-frequency siren, which Place says improves audibility for those with hearing loss. It’s also extremely loud.

While the unit purports to have two cautionary alert levels that the device goes through before the alarm sounds, I didn’t encounter these in my testing because the alarm sounded so rapidly. It took about 30 seconds for a push alert to be sent to my mobile phone, which seems very slow.

Silencing the alarm is a different story. Even after the smoke cleared, the alarm kept sounding, and it took several presses of the test button (which is oddly touch-sensitive, not a physical button) to quiet the siren. The app can also be used to hush an alarm. However, even after silencing the alarm, the unit continued to chirp periodically, ostensibly an indicator that there was still smoke in the room. This continued for several minutes until I was ultimately forced to disable the alarm altogether by unplugging it from wall power and removing the batteries.

I’m unsure if this is the intended operation of the alarm, but it was certainly maddening and unlike any other smoke alarm I’ve reviewed. Memo to Place: If someone presses the silence button or uses the function in the app, hush should mean hush—completely.

The app includes perhaps minimally useful measurements of temperature and humidity, and it even tracks this data by day, week, and month. The nightlight feature (which can be activated either by low ambient light levels or motion detection) is a nice touch, and it can even be configured to illuminate in the color of your choice. Beyond this, the motion detection feature isn’t otherwise all that useful.

Located in a high-traffic area, I found the motion sensor sent dozens of alerts per day to my phone, but there’s no context for these alerts and nothing much you can do with them, nor is there even a way to set them to activate only during certain hours. In the absence of a larger security-centric environment, I quickly got overwhelmed with the flood of unhelpful notifications.

Should you buy the Place Any Space Smart Smoke + CO Alarm?

With its per-room, do-it-all smoke detectors, Place seems to be hoping to take a position where its hardware becomes the centerpiece of your smart home. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the concept really works, as these devices just don’t do enough to merit having that responsibility.

They’re also very, very expensive. The Any Space unit, at $139 (at press time, available only at Home Depot), is in the same realm as the $130 First Alert SC5, which connects directly to the powerful Google ecosystem. The additional units in the series are, however, outrageously expensive, running $250 (Kitchen), $300 (Garage), and $350 (Nursery). And remember that the Nursery model contains an embedded camera, an idea that doesn’t come across to me as a particularly smart idea, given concerns that visitors might feel they are being spied upon by a device with a hidden camera.

If you have absolutely no other smart home gear, a Place smoke detector might make some level of sense. The per-room concept is interesting; but in its current incarnation (and price level), it just doesn’t work all that well. Ultimately, I expect that most users will be better off with simpler, less expensive devices, regardless of what room they’re putting it in. In other words: If you need a camera, get a camera.

Best Prices Today: Place Any Space Smart Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector

Author: Christopher Null, Contributor, PCWorld