Kitchen hazards are the ones your senses miss

Natural gas has no smell of its own; the odourant is added so people can detect it, but at low concentrations you may well not notice, and asleep you certainly will not. Carbon monoxide has no colour and no smell at all — people being poisoned typically just feel dizzy and sleepy, and then fall asleep.

An unattended hob is a different failure. It is not that you cannot smell it — you are simply not in the room. You put something on to simmer, sit down in the living room, and half an hour goes by.

All three share one property: none requires judgement, only that something keeps watching. Which is precisely what sensors are good at.

What actually runs during those thirty minutes

The chart above is the outside view; this is the inside. The four stages are not four separate alarms — they are one timer being turned up. The moment anyone walks back into the kitchen, it resets to zero and starts over.

1. Minute 0

   The clock starts when you leave, not when you light the hob

   Two things have to be true at once before the stopwatch runs: the hob is on, and the kitchen has stopped seeing anyone. Stand at the pan turning things over for an hour and it never makes a sound.

2. Minute 15

   A quiet word, to you only

   One alert lands on your phone and the house stays silent — no flashing, no noise, nobody watching television in the living room is disturbed. Most of the time a glance is enough to remind you, and it ends there.

3. Minute 20

   Say it in the kitchen instead

   An alert is easy to miss: the phone is charging, or in a bag, or on do not disturb. So the second stage changes channel — lights flash, buzzer sounds. This one is addressed to whoever is in the house, and it does not have to be you who answers it.

4. Minute 25

   Alert again, this time spelling it out

   The third message reads differently from the first: it states how long the hob has been on and how long the kitchen has been empty. The system also records how far this episode escalated, so when you later want to retune the timings you have real numbers instead of guesses.

5. Minute 30

   It acts only after four unanswered warnings

   The valve closes, and you get told that the system closed it and at what time. It will not reopen by itself — restoring gas requires a person who has looked at the hob, and that step is deliberately left to you.

Three rules, three different priorities

Four things it takes care of

Match the hob timings to how you cook

What you need to have

How the whole thing works

Use the ready-made blueprints

The hub ships with 22 tested automation blueprints — think of one as a fill-in-the-blanks form. The safety pair use greenhouse; the unattended hob uses binary_sensor_trigger_things with entity_state_trigger_notify for the escalation.

Just say the word

The WOOWTECH hub ships with HA-MCP, which lets AI connect straight into your system, build the rules, and then check for itself that they really fire. You only have to describe the outcome you want.

Prompts you can copy straight across

Every block below can be copied whole with the button on the right. Pick the one closest to what you want — you do not need all five.

Have a look at what sensors are in my kitchen, then build me two
safety rules. On an abnormal gas reading, close the gas valve at
once, run the extraction at full, and send me a top-priority alert.
Do the same for carbon monoxide over the limit. Neither rule gets
any conditions or active hours — both run around the clock.

Build three kitchen rules, keeping the two safety ones completely
separate from the reminder one. On abnormal gas: close the valve,
extraction to full, top-priority alert. Same for carbon monoxide
above 35 ppm. Neither of those gets conditions or active hours.
The third is the unattended hob: hob on and kitchen empty for
fifteen minutes, alert me; at twenty, flash the kitchen lights and
sound the buzzer; at twenty-five, alert again; at thirty, close the
valve. Add a simmer mode switch that stretches those four timings
to 40, 50, 70 and 90 minutes without ever touching the safety rules.
Use the ready-made blueprints on the hub rather than writing your own.
When it is built, test it yourself, confirm it really fires, and then
tell me which devices you used.

We braise and stew a lot here, so two or three hours on a low
flame is completely normal. Loosen the unattended hob rule: first
reminder at forty minutes, a second one at sixty-five, and the
automatic valve shut-off at ninety. Leave the gas and carbon
monoxide rules exactly as they are — instant response, no delay.

The first unattended hob reminder comes too early. Move it to
twenty-five minutes and leave the automatic shut-off where it is.
Tell me what all four timings are once you have changed it.

I pressed the test button on the gas detector and it shrieks
loudly enough, but I still cannot tell whether the rest of the
chain reaches the valve. No real gas please: walk the whole thing
through as a drill instead. Make the system believe the detector
has gone off, then show me whether the valve closes, the
extraction spins up and my phone buzzes. Stop at whichever step
fails and name the device that did not answer. Put the valve and
the extraction back as they were once the drill is finished.

Common questions