Life After Wink

As I began my Life After Wink, one of the first things I needed to fix (since it was broken already with Wink) were my Nest products.   As most should know by now, Google discontinued their "Works with Nest" program .  This generated fairly wide spread negative reactions across the internet. When it happened, I had 7 Nest Protects (6 AC, 1 DC) and 3 Nest Thermostats.   I had however, just started a new job at First Alert (I work on connected products for them -- disclaimer)  so was already looking at the Safe & Sound devices as a "homekit" upgrade to the smoke detectors. (and figured employee pricing would help me out).  So that "fixed' part of the problem.   While they aren't perfect (yes, I'll say that about products that my company produces :-) ) they fit the bill.  Homekit, check, Connected, check, Alexa (not-all-that-interested-in, but can turn it off), and play music.   That solved one part of the problem.  (though installing 7 of the

So to give some background. My wife, son and I live in a 7 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 2 kitchen, etc. house.   Yes, that’s overkill for 3 people. It made more sense when we moved in. My parents were coming to live with us, my mother-in-law was going to be staying over the winters, and my grandmother was going to be visiting regularly. This meant my sister and brother-in law would probably also be coming to   We hadn’t begun the process of adopting a child yet. 15 years later, my parents, grandmother and mother-in-law are all in heaven, and we completed an adoption ( which took 6 years ) of a special needs child from Kyrgyzstan.   As part of adopting our son, it became obvious to us that some home automation would be helpful in managing and monitoring stuff around the house to keep us all safe and aware of what was going on.  After looking at solutions, I decided on a Wink Hub 1, mostly because it was really the only solution that I could find that allowed me to choose between diff