What do you guys use for home security cameras? There’s a ton of difference companies out there – ring, blink, wyze, swan, eufy, and tons of different products from each company.
I’m looking to add an exterior one to my garage. Based on angles of the house/garage/driveway, one camera should cover everything I need to see. What cameras do you guys use? Do you pay a monthly fee? Is it hard wired for power or battery operated?
What cameras do you guys use? Do you pay a monthly fee? Is it hard wired for power or battery operated?
I use the Ring doorbell one. Pay about $35/year to use their services for recording, history, etc. It operates from my wi fi and its hard wired. I had to adjust the motion sensitivity because it kept sending alerts even when cars drove by in the street.
Blink, battery op, the batteries are supposed to last 2 years at a time. Literally took me 20 minutes to install and hook up 3 cameras and a door bell, was up and recording 5 minutes after that. Pay 100 bucks or so a year for unlimited storage. You’ll need to fiddle with the sensitivity, but it’s not rocket science either. The literal only problem is forgetting to turn them on, and that’s only cuz we’ve been too lazy to just schedule it.
I have a Ring Stick Up cam that is hard wired. It’s like $30-$40 per year. It works pretty well. You can adjust the sensitivity so that it only alerts when a person is present (not 100% perfect, but it eliminates a lot of false alerts). I also like the I can adjust the zones so that I can exclude anything in the first few feet of the driveway (so cars, mail delivery don’t set off an alert). I also adjust the alert zone in the winter when the boat is not parked in the driveway.
I’m sure there are better options out there, but it’s pretty affordable and does a decent job.
Here’s my view:
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I use Amcrest NVR and camera. They have a App that lets me see my camera anytime I want on my phone. I pay no monthly service charge. The camera is High Def and has IR for at night. To use the app you need to setup port forwarding in your router which is pretty basic. If you are not sure just Google it for your brand of router. The NVR comes without a hard drive but I like that I choose the size and brand. Make sure to get one that is designed for a NVR. MY drive overwrites in about a month which I figure is plenty of time to pull footage if needed.
Ring stickup cam that is hard-wired… love it!
Nest, works great. Also can adjust zones and set alerts.
Eufy hardwired to my garage has been great. NO monthly fees or start up fee. Just ran the wire through the soffit and under the siding . Easy to use and great features. Great quality and app. Highly recommend.
I have 5 arlo cameras. 3 are outside, one in the garage and one looking out my front window. They are wireless and run off batteries but I have a charging cable ram to them full time. I’ve had them for 4-5 years now
Eufy hardwired to my garage has been great. NO monthly fees or start up fee. Just ran the wire through the soffit and under the siding . Easy to use and great features. Great quality and app. Highly recommend.
the eufy’s have caught my attention for the lack of an on going fee. do you have access to the videos/motion recordings thru an app? like you can watch the video clip hours or days after it happened? or is it only a live type view?
I use Unifi stuff for home network and a couple security cameras. It’s more complicated than the other things mentioned here but there is no fee and you can view from app remotely. The cameras use PoE so you have to be able to run a network cable from your PoE switch to where the cameras are. Advantage is that it’s not using wifi and has constant power though. They do have wifi cameras too that can get power from another source but I haven’t used one.
Simplisafe has been great for us. 2 exterior cameras, sensor for the front door, garage utility door, and the 2 sliding patio doors all set up in a couple hours and running.
You have to be careful with those cheaper camera systems. So of them have been proven to phone home to China through a backdoor into your network. Stay away from Hikvision and Dahua for sure.
I would recommend you get a higher quality camera with a high resolution to cover your driveway so you can capture license plates and good still images of people in case there is an incident and you need to provide this to the police. I use Axis cameras for this purpose, they are expensive but they have onboard recording to an SD card, a free desktop and mobile app with no fees. Unifi also makes good stuff, I haven’t used their cameras, but I believe they only work with their recorder and you have to buy that separate.
Blink and Wyze are also very good for the money. Blink cameras can record locally to a USB drive with no monthly fees. They charge a fee for cloud recording. I use them where I don’t have power or would be difficult to get a cable to, such as inside my shed. The batteries really do last a long time and they work in the winter too. The Wyze cameras are great if you have power nearby. I have one inside the garage, mainly to check if the garage doors are closed. If you get a Wyze cam, make sure to also get a SD memory card. With that you can set it up to record all the time and send you motion alerts. You wouldn’t have to sign up for their monthly service then. This would be an easy and cheap way to start and see if it captures what you want.
<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>isu22andy wrote:</div>
Eufy hardwired to my garage has been great. NO monthly fees or start up fee. Just ran the wire through the soffit and under the siding . Easy to use and great features. Great quality and app. Highly recommend.the eufy’s have caught my attention for the lack of an on going fee. do you have access to the videos/motion recordings thru an app? like you can watch the video clip hours or days after it happened? or is it only a live type view?
Yep . App is great . Think it stores the recordings for a week for free . You can go live too anywhere you want . Night vision flips on a led light too so it shows intruders they are getting recorded ( can turn off that feature ) . Blink ring and wyze have monthly fees if I remember right . Not a big fan of monthly fees. Very impressed with it right now !
See if pics work .
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We got 5 wireless Blink cameras on our system. i did not want to pay yearly fees just the ability to record on motion or check in on our pets, house or whatever. you can schedule to turn on and off auto which is awesome.
i think i will be adding an outdoor solar charging camera too? company is top notch and always working on new things it seems. had them for over 4 years now and the batteries do last 2 years and then some. we are very happy with them.
I have the blink camera no fees and wireless. The led isn’t very good unless you have motion activated lights near by. They now have cameras with battery activated spot lights that take D cell. With the app you can turn the spotlights on and off. The ones with the spotlights go on sale for $88 form Amazon if you’re not in a hurry. You need a sync module and sd card. I would also recommend getting the ordering the better mounting brackets for the cameras with out the spotlights.
I struggle with knowing which ecosystem to buy into. So many brands, so many integration decisions. Do you want it to tie into Alexa, Apple, or other large home automation system? Do you want a wifi-enabled home door lock as well? And I feel like whatever you buy into it, will be outdated and won’t work anymore with technology two years from now.
There’s just so much continual churn in this and the decisions are overwhelming.
One day I will jump in.
Simply safe
My exterior camera does a pretty good job, good detail for to watch the neighborhood dog play with my cat at night. Odd thing is the neighbor only lets it out at night, but the cat is in great shape bc of it almost like it’s fighting for its life! Lol silly animals
Ring camera above my garage has enough angle to cover driveway to the street and entry way.
This Ring camera – you can talk through it, hit a siren switch and turn on/off the light.
It is great at picking up motion .. Daylight you can zoom your video feed nicely. Night time video is OK. We leave our front lights on at night and that is probably helps deter too.
Our ring camera is hard wired for electricity and then the video data is transferred via wireless network. We do you their boost …
I will also share that our garage door is connected to our wireless network. Never have to circle back to see …
Back to the Ring … entertaining. Maybe have seen people where they were not supposed to be about three times in several years, but often see opossum, fox, deer (bucks too), and we are in town.
I have Wisenet cameras. Six are up and I’ll put the other two up soon. Hard wired.
Here is a recording from about a month ago. This was taken by my cell videoing the screen the hard drive is connected to. It’s better on the monitor.
Too bad he’s not in your scope sights for that…….
Reolink Argus 2E has been great for us at our cabin all summer. Completely wireless with a small solar panel. Super easy setup when connected to WiFi. Add a micro SD card and get all the recording and playback features on a simple app on your phone. Price is very good ($80ish)
and there are no fees as it doesn’t use the cloud or any other online storage.
Too bad he’s not in your scope sights for that…….
Lights on around the house and all neighbors too. They stole the neighbors Audi about 15 houses down. It was unlocked and the keys in the glove box.
You could see the car leaving the subdivision by several cameras as most neighbors have something.
Police found the car about a week later undamaged. It was being used to steal in neighboring towns. Multiple FLOCK cameras in several towns picked the car up and followed it to southside of Chicago shortly after it was stolen and later when it was used in neighboring towns.
Notmafiaguy does your neighbor have a coyote as pet?
Notmafiaguy does your neighbor have a coyote as pet?
That was a video I seen on YouTube a while back.
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