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Anyone use vape detectors in their buildings? I’ve been asked to check out vendors and offer solutions. Right now I have Triton, Zeptive, and Halo. I’m leaning towards Zeptive as they are bit more plug and play due to the wifi connectivity option as I’m looking at around 24 units to install if we move forward. Any info would be greatly appreciated.

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We started using Verkada, I haven’t worked with the system directly but Verkada came out and did the cabling and install and the admins all seem to like the interface.

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Recently came out of the educational field in September, but I doubt a lot has changed since then. At my last district, we deployed Zeptive wired and wireless vape detectors about 2 1/2 years ago and they are still active today. From my experiences, if you can do it go PoE ethernet where you can for far less hassle in the long run with battery swap outs and general wireless quirks. The wireless units can do wired if you can’t wire right away or have a tricky to wire bathroom and they supply hefty USB battery packs that will last about 1-2 months before they need to be charged / swapped out. I recall they gave us 2 battery packs per unit, so we always had a battery pack ready when one would start complaining about power.

A few items you’ll want to also be mindful of:

  • When they are installed, you want to place the unit on the ceiling, or as close to the ceiling as possible, over your restroom stalls.
  • Nearly all of our vaping hits were at the grade 9-12 level. I think we had 2-3 hits at the grade 7-8 range, and one of those may have been a false positive.
  • I remember early on that we had to adjust the detection threshold down from the super sensitive levels, because the units would constantly trigger an alert while any vape was lingering in the air, and that caused us to hit a back-end cap on the number of alerts we could get in one day (I think it was 100). Zeptive may have tweaked those starting settings since then.
  • We preferred the silent alarms for vaping and the audible alarms for tampering in most of our restrooms, as it gave staff more time to get to the restrooms to catch the students in the act. The one exception we made was for the unit we put in the nurse’s bathroom which had an audible vape alarm since students couldn’t use that bathroom without the nurse present in her area.
  • When you are configuring the units for who gets what alerts (email, text, app) I recommend having it all planned out ahead of time and doing them all at once. Otherwise making changes can be a bit obnoxious, as you’ll have to edit them one at a time. (FYI: We had Principals, School Resource Officers, HS Nurse, Superintendent, and IT all getting various alerts)
  • I recommend getting the Zeptive app (I know it’s on the iTunes store) as it offers a little more convenience for getting alerts and seeing battery life on wireless units, though you’ll also still be making use of their portal.
  • I’m not sure how close you are to Massachusetts, butthey are based out of Mass and actually will travel to at least NH to help with any major difficulties that pop up.

If you have any additional questions about the Zeptive side of things that I might be able to answer based on our experiences, feel free to reach out.

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Matt, that’s a whole bunch of info. THANK YOU!

I’m in Colorado, wonder if they’d make the trek. If we go with Zeptive, I definitely will take you up on your offer. Appreciate it.

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We also went the Zeptive route.

We have one unit in a HS bathroom. It’s wifi and battery. Silent vape & battery email alerts, audible tamper alarm.

Battery tends to last 2-3 months between charges. A couple odd things we noticed is the batteries have on/off switches & color-coded ports/plugs. The batteries need to be “on” while plugged in to charge, and the orange plug does not go in the orange port. Once we figured those things out, it went fairly well.

I wasn’t involved with the initial setup but I remember my boss had trouble getting the thing to accept the settings and programming (Zeptive support helped remotely).

The Canadian wildfire smoke, and a fire in the neighborhood a while ago, have triggered false-positive vape alerts in the past; but knowing what the air was like outside helped us to separate the false-positives from actual alerts.

Good Luck.

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So my school board freaked out at the pricing. Looking at grants and the like to make them more palatable. Thanks to everyone for the info!

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We started using Forensics Detectors Vape Detector and they are good.

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