After a month or two of living with the Noon system, it’s getting positive reviews from the “normal” people and visitors in the house who just want to have lights that work well. It’s easy to understand what it does and use it. Next step is to add a second room, so I’m planning the master bedroom suite installation.

One glitch so far, after a month or two the director lost it’s network connection and all the switches reverted to just controlling their own lights. The fix was to pop the director out of its socket and toggle the switch on it’s back off-on, that brought it back online to WiFi/cloud/iPhone app, and to communicating with the extensions to manage the room. A bug that they fixed in an update.

Update: I also installed a Noon system in the master bedroom suite, another director, eight extensions and two LIFX bulbs (wifi controlled) for the bedside lamps. It all works very nicely. After nine months with the main system, and six with the bedroom, we like it a lot. Has anyone else tried it?

I’ve also been looking at smoke alarms, we have nine wired+battery units that are a decade old and need to be replaced. I looked at the connected units like the Nest Protect, and they are very expensive and still suffer from false alarms. There are some bad reviews for just about every model I looked at. In the end I’ve decided to go for a simple wired+battery First Alert unit that costs about $15 and fit them all with Roost connected batteries. These have a 9V PP3 format with a 5+ year life replaceable battery and a wifi connection. They will alert the mobile app indicating which named alarm sees smoke or has a low battery.