This 'Home Disaster Alert System' Is Catching Fire on Kickstarter

Is your home smart enough to handle disaster situations?

A new project seeking funding on Kickstarter aims to bump up its IQ. The creators of the Dome Alert say it is a two-sensor home disaster alert system that works to detect threats from fire, flooding, carbon monoxide and freezing conditions.

“When a sensor is triggered, an alert is immediately sent to both your smartphone and a professional monitoring station,” says founder Casey Hermansen in a video explaining the product. Users can then respond to the alert directly from the Dome app. If they do not respond after repeated notifications, the monitoring station will call users’ emergency contacts and, in the event of smoke or carbon monoxide alerts, dispatch emergency responders.

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The project, which launched yesterday, is already gaining steam. As of this writing, the campaign has raised more than $15,000 of its $25,000 goal.

Over the past few years, the entire "smart home" space has caught fire, so to speak, as indicated by Google’s splashy $3.2 billion dollar acquisition of Nest Labs in 2014. Nest Labs already offers a smart smoke and carbon monoxide sensor, which sends alerts to users’ smartphones.

Dome Alert’s selling point is that it offers flood and freeze protection, via separate battery-powered sensors that can be placed in potential problem areas, such as under the dishwasher or by the bath tub. For Hermansen, this capability fills a hole present in most home monitoring systems.

“I’ve had multiple experiences with water damage because of a leak I didn’t know about,” he says. “If I had a sensor that could tell me within a few minutes, instead of two or three days, I could have saved a lot of money.”

The Dome Alert System includes a smoke/carbon monoxide sensor plus a flood/freeze sensor, and costs $99 on Kickstarter (the same package was available for $79, but that reward option sold out). Monitoring services, which can be purchased month to month, cost an additional $108 a year, although the company says the majority of that price is offset by discounts on users’ insurance premiums.

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To see the Dome Alert in action, check out the project’s Kickstarter video below.