Installing a Nest Hello in your home can help give you peace of mind before answering the door to a visitor. But what’s stopping a thief from simply stealing your nest hello? In this article we examine this question and give you lots of possible solutions.
Can nest hello be stolen? Yes, sadly with ease. The nest removal tool that comes in the box can easily be replicated using some metal wire. Making the nest hello relatively easy to remove from its mounting.
That being said, it’s not quite an open and shut case, since Google wants you to continue to use their products and potentially sign up to their subscription services such as Nest aware. Therefore, they are quite generous in replacing stolen items.
This is a tactic that has been used by Amazon. For instance, if you were to break your Amazon Kindle, they are very likely to just replace it with a brand new one to keep you buying more Amazon Kindle digital products.
There are some real practical ways of securing your nest hello to make it that much more off putting to a potential burglar who is thinking about stealing your smart doorbell. Let’s look at those solutions.
How to prevent your nest from being stolen
When you look around for information on how to prevent your nest from being stolen, you often find a lot of people acquiescing and essentially saying there’s not really much you can do.
But I don’t agree with this. I think if you want to deter would be robbers from stealing your nest, then there are ways to achieve this. After searching for various products on the Internet, I came across this special housing for nest hello on Amazon.
This is a more robust way of mounting your nest hello to the wall next to your door. It also has curved edges around the nest hello device itself. In my opinion, this makes it more difficult for someone to get a good purchase on the nest. For instance, if they wanted to rip the nest hello off the wall. They won’t be able to do this.
One of the good things about this product as well is that it hides the ejection slot that allows the nest to be removed from its mounting. Which further reduces the possibility of someone who knows how to remove a nest from its housing using the ejection tool.
It’s pretty cheap at $20. And in my opinion, is well worth the cost. The only downside to doing this is you’re going if you already have your nest hello installed on your wall. Then you’re going to need to remove it from the housing and off the wall, and then use this new housing.
But in all honesty, it’s a 20 minute job at the most. So that wouldn’t put me off.
Does Nest Hello Have Anti Theft Built In?
Unfortunately, there aren’t really any credible anti theft features built into Nest hello. To counter this, Google has a very generous replacement policy. Meaning that if your nest has stolen, then they are likely to give you a new replacement.
While this isn’t exactly an anti theft feature. It does give the owner of the nests a little bit of Peace of Mind that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. The flipside of this is that Google can remove this policy at any time. So I guess that’s not too great.
Where as something that’s built physically into the hardware itself, would never expire. An example of this is for security cameras, where they can detect when they are removed from their mounting unexpectedly. Then they have a siren that blasts out 100 decibel alarm.
There’s nothing stopping Google and nest, including a feature like this in later models of Nest hello. Adding an additional feature such as this. Since it would deter would be criminals from opportunistically stealing a nest from your house.
There’s a certain level of irony in a device that is supposed to increase security becoming a desirable thing to steal and in effect attracting thieves to your home.
Is there an alarm?
No, unfortunately not. There’s not an inbuilt alarm in the nest hello. That being said, there is a loudspeaker. And in theory, all nest would need to do in order to build an alarm into their product is to include a very small battery that would power the loudspeaker when a theft is detected.
So the components are there to build an anti theft alarm in your nest hello. They just haven’t been connected up together. It would be interesting to see if anyone has hacked the nest allowed to make their own makeshift alarm. If you do know of an example like this, please let me know.
EUFY has a built in alarm for their security cameras. I think this is a really great feature. Only wish that nest would include it in theirs.
Find out – no I don’t think so (eufy does have this feature)
What Happens If Your Nest Hello Is Stolen?
In the unfortunate event that your nestalo is stolen, you’ll have to get in contact with Google. You then have to fill in Google’s forms and see if you meet the criteria to qualify for a replacement nest hello.
This is me putting my tin foil hat on, but I think if you are a an existing nest aware customer, something tells me that you’re far more likely to qualify for a replacement nest hello than you would be if you were on the free tier. My thinking behind this is that if you do have your camera stolen and you’re currently playing subscription, then the next thing you’re going to do is obviously cancel your subscription because you don’t have the device.
Therefore it’s in Nestan Google’s interest to provide you over replacement to ensure you continue paying that subscription fee for Nest aware.
There is an unfortunate caveat to this though. Namely, that if you live outside the continental United States, then you’re out of luck. This policy does not apply to the UK and Europe.
I’ve left a link to Google support page that answers this particular question about how you would go about requesting replacement to your nestalo in the event of a theft.
Google Support Page For Nest Hello Theft Here.
Conclusion
Okay, that’s it for this after call. I hope now you’ve got a better understanding of what happens if you in the unfortunate event that your nest hello is stolen.
The simple answer is that anything can be stolen if someone is sufficiently motivated to steal it. But like all things, we can make it as off putting as possible and purchase devices such as the mounting bracket I suggested above. That will make your nest hello that much more difficult to steal than, say, another one further down the street.
If you think of this like your bicycle and a bicycle lock, well, you’re just buying the best bicycle lock for your bicycle.
If you are interested in learning more about Nest Hello, then we have a bunch of articles on houshia that cover more topics of nest hello. Cheque them out in our home security section.
P.S.
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Steve
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