WiFi Siren

A WiFi siren with a strobe and a temperature and humidity sensor in one round white unit that joins 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi directly. No hub and no gateway.

• What a WiFi siren is for
• The offline alarm is the unusual part
• Eighteen tones, and why you want more than one
• Power, and the backup slot
• What sets it off, and what else to look at

What a WiFi siren is for

Everything else in a smart security setup is quiet. A door contact, a motion sensor, a water sensor: all of them send a notification to a phone that might be face down, on silent, charging in another room or flat. Link them to this in the app and the building hears about it instead, at 100 dB with a strobe going. It is the difference between a log of what happened and something that interrupts it.

The offline alarm is the unusual part

There is a temperature and humidity sensor inside, and you can set a safe range for it in the app. Go outside that range and the unit sounds on its own, with no network, no hub and no internet involved. For a server cupboard, a cold room, a stock room or a nursery that is the feature worth paying for, because the moment you most want to be told the temperature has gone wrong is often the moment the power and the line have both gone with it.

Eighteen tones, and why you want more than one

A single alarm sound teaches a household nothing. Give the water sensor one tone, the door contacts another and the temperature alarm a third, and after a week people know what has happened before they have looked at a phone. Eighteen is more than anyone needs and three is about right.

Power, and the backup slot

It runs from the included USB cable. There is a slot for backup batteries so it keeps sounding through a power cut, though the batteries themselves are not in the box. Fit them at the same time you fit the siren, because an alarm that stops when the supply is cut is an alarm with an obvious answer to it.

What sets it off, and what else to look at

Any Smart Life sensor on the same account: the WiFi door sensor, the WiFi motion sensor, or anything else you already run in that app. It joins 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi directly, with no hub, and answers to Alexa and Google Assistant.

On a Zigbee system the Zigbee siren is the equivalent at 85 dB, and on Z-Wave the Aeotec Siren goes to 110 dB. Everything here is configured in Smart Life, a free download.