Smart Smoke Detectors - Part 1: Alarms should be more than just a buzzer

I have been researching smart smoke detectors and water detectors for my house.  The goal is to be notified about problems when I'm not home.  A buzzer won't let me know my house is flooding when I'm at work.  I started by searching for "wifi smoke detectors".  This lead to some smoke detectors that communicate with each other over a proprietary wireless network.  The idea for those devices is if a fire starts in the basement, you want the smoke detector in your bedroom to wake you up.  Although this technology is better, it isn't what I'm looking for.

Eventually I found some smoke detectors that were made in China.  They list "WIRELESS" in the title of the product, but I couldn't find exactly what that means.  I tried googling the model number, but only resellers turned up in the search results.  Eventually, I found a smoke detector that supported something called Zigbee.  I searched around, and there were multiple smoke detectors and water detectors that support the Zigbee wireless protocol.

The Zigbee wireless protocol is a networking stack to allow low-power wireless communication.  The goal is to use so little power that devices can be battery powered and only need the battery replaced every few months.  A Zigbee network is ad-hoc and each device can act as a repeater.  This creates a mesh network of monitors and sensors.  This type of network works great for home automation.

The general idea and the fact that there are multiple devices that support the protocol make this standard look very promising.  I even found a USB stick to allow a computer to communicate with a Zigbee network.  Before purchasing the devices, I decided to look for Linux software.  That is when I found out the awful surprise.  I will dive deeper into the "problem" in my next post.