First off, I HATE using the word "smart" to describe any kind of consumer technology, most notably phones and houses. :rant:
So this guy thinks that having his smoke detectors text his phone is a substitute for having them monitored by a service that would have immediately notified the fire department?
All kinds of "what ifs" come to mind as to why that's NOT a smart idea.
How many homeowners in America do you suppose pay to install and subscribe to monthly active alarm monitoring? About 5% perhaps? That's probably a over-estimation.
Considering that standard "dumb" smoke detectors do nothing more than wake/alert people inside their homes that something is amiss (typically, nothing more than some overzealous cooking), the introduction of smart devices such as smoke detectors, water leak detectors, video monitoring, etc., all of which can send remote alerts to smartphones, are HUGE improvements over the norm.
Although the OP's news article is not specific as to how the fire dept was initially notified, it's certainly possible that the home owners called the fire in after getting the alert notification on their phone. If so, that alert saved their house and all their belongings. That sounds like a very SMART idea to me.
When I was a young adult, I was visiting my family home for Christmas one year. One evening, we noticed a glow outside the living room window. We went out on the back deck and saw that our neighbor's home, that was below us on the hill, was on fire. We immediately called the fire department and then broke out hoses to start wetting down our wood-sided house (with wood shake roof) and the vegetation on the hill because burning embers were flying everywhere. The fire station was at the bottom of the hill, just 1.5 miles away, so it took the firefighters only about 5 minutes to arrive. But in that short time, the home was completely engulfed. It's incredible to see just how fast a house can become a raging inferno. The heat was so great that the neighbor's car, which was parked in the driveway at least 20 feet from the home, literally melted. Fortunately, no one was home because the family was out-of-town for the holidays; the only casualty was their property. The cause of the fire was determined to be a plug-in timer for christmas lights.
I'm recounting this story because the neighbor's mandatory dumb smoke detectors did nothing to save their home. Had smart smoke detectors been available back then and installed, it's very possible they could have saved their home because they could have been alerted while the overloaded or defective timer was still smoldering or while the fire was very small. What's so "NOT smart" about that? Worst case scenario, they don't receive (or they don't notice) the alert on their phone, in which case their smart detector is no worse than a dumb detector.
ETA: Given a choice between installing AFCI's or smart detectors, I'd take the smart detectors hands-down.
