Multiple Wi-Fi sources for Nest Protects

[squeakyclean]

Hi, if you have multiple Nest Protect units that you wish to mount all around your house and you also have multiple Wi-Fi sources such as 4G router and a few extenders, is it true that you all Nest Protect units can be connected to just one of these sources? After adding all of smoke alarms in app and mounting the units onto appropriate rooms ot wouldn’t let me change the Wi-Fi connection to the nearest source.

I may perhaps misunderstand that Nest Protects communicate and share the same connection among themselves, still some are pretty far away from others, it would make sense to give access to the network with the best possible signal strenght.

For the moment it looks like they work fine, still in past I noticed eventually there was some unknown mishap and Protects for some reason stopped communicating and problems woth connectivity would appear. There have been obviously power shortages and network interruptions but I don’t see how that should disrupt connection permanently between these smoke alarms that I would have to erase all settings and link them anew just because of some temporary loss of network.

[David_K]

Even if the Wi-Fi network name and password is the same, you may experience issues with Wi-Fi extenders. You can only have one Wi-Fi network configured for each "home" in the Nest app. All your Nest Protects will try to connect to that same Wi-Fi and it cannot be different for each device.

[squeakyclean]

In that case obviously Google should have informed users that this product have a limited area it can cover so any medium to large house owners should look elsewhere. I understood you can basically supply whatever size building you want with these just need a Wi-Fi connection around.

[David_K]

It really comes down to how your Wi-Fi network is setup. Because you can only have one Wi-Fi network configured for each "home" in the Nest app, all your Nest Protects want to connect to that same network name. That isn't unique to Nest Protect, and applies to all products in the same "home" in the Nest app. You could argue that it's not an unfair design that it expects you to be using the same Wi-Fi network name and password for all the devices in the same "home". With that said, I’d encourage you to also send this feedback directly to Google. You will not receive a response, unless Google need more details from you, however the team are still reading the feedback.

[squeakyclean]

Heh, I could use some help with that, I actually wanted to send feedback directly and this isn’t first time I struggled to setup my Protects. It’s just I couldn’t find how you contact google or leave feedback, all I see are some generic answers to other questions which say nothing about this case.

[zoeuvre]

Hi squeakyclean, 

We hear you — and we're always looking for ways to improve. We appreciate your request for this additional feature, and please be assured that our product team is working non-stop with different partners to bring the best features to the Google Nest devices. So, please let our product team know about it by sending feedback. 

In the meantime, I'll go ahead and lock this thread within 24 hours. If you run into any more questions in the future, please feel free to create a new thread.

All thanks for your help, @David_K.  

Best,

Zoe