I have a Ring doorbell. I like it and it does the job. I was considering getting some of the Ring Stick Up cameras to place around the house, I went to Costco to order and the reviews did not inspire confidence. Complaints were slow to pick up motion and horrible battery life.

I will get one for the front of the house, the area not covered by the doorbell. And one for the back of the house, mainly to overlook the trampoline and pool.

Where these will be attached to the house, there is no power, so these running on battery power is a must.

Sound is not a priority. If it has it, great, if not, I do not care.

Obviously I want to be able to monitor through an app on the phone.

Which camera will be quickest to pick up motion and have a battery that does not need to be charged every two weeks?

I’ve been researching myself and will probably go with Arlo. Check them out.

For a quick wireless easy setup Arlo is very good.

The reason I like Arlo is the quality is very good and the cameras are versatile.
I also like that if you do lose WiFi, while you will loose access to cameras remotely, they do not stop recording.

The cameras make a connection to the base station under their own protocol and not a WiFi connection. You can connect a hard drive to the base station to save the recordings.
So if you connect the base station to a battery backup you’ll still be recording even when power is out.

In laws have an Arlo system and I set one up for my mom.
It is super simple and easy with great quality. Also no reason for a monthly fee subscription (which they do have) since you can record to a hard drive.


I built a PC to run BlueIris and a bunch of IP cameras.
It was more for a project and was fun. When this PC dies I likely won’t build another and just replace all my stuff with Arlo.

I was going to do a few more cameras to my PC system but think I’ll just start switching over to Arlo honestly and rework the PC to a media server.

My past research suggested Arlo Pro was the best of the wireless surveillance/security camera solutions. The potential problem is they don't use WiFi directly, but instead go through their own dedicated wireless base station.

Since I knew, from experience, that wireless coverage in our house is a tricky proposition, and I didn't want Yet Another Wireless Signal floating around, that was a non-starter for us. So I bit the bullet and finally put in a wired system.

I had a Reolink wireless cam covering the front porch for a while. It was ok, but required battery replacement about every 4-6 weeks or so. The newer version of that same camera now uses a proprietary battery pack. (Mine uses four CR123 batteries.)

I’m using Arlo Ultra cameras at my house which suffers from rather spotty Wi-Fi, but that hasn’t seemed to bother the Arlo cams (or Arlo video doorbells, for that matter, which work much better than the Ring I used to have.

-Rob

I have Arlo Ultra cameras; they have their own base station but that does not affect anything. I use an eero mesh Wi-Fi network and added a “Beacon” extender to cover the Arlo camera outside the garage.
I am very impressed with the cameras: they take up to 4K video; have a light that goes on when motion is sensed so you have color video even at night, or IR video if no spotlight is on.
I got two more cameras to cover the back yard, haven’t installed them.

Costco has the best deal on them.

I favored the Arlo system because they work well in the Apple Home environment, but am very happy. Needed to call customer support for setup of the doorbell, but not needed since.

We’re using Wyze cameras. They are releasing a doorbell cam soon. Also a Wyze lock. They just started 24 hour monitoring for $4.99 a month

My daughter uses Blink, she has not had an issue, cameras are clear as far as internet connection she has Verizon Fios. She also pays no monthly fee.

someone recommended Swan from best buy for a cheap system. They showed me the cams on their phone. Seemed pretty good in the daylight. Said price was $250. Other than that I have no other info on it. I am researching a system now but wifi is iffy so I am not sure how any monitoring would be.

We use arlo and are very happy with it.

I have 4 Blink cameras deployed around the house. They have been in about 8 months. Great battery life, solid low light performance, not real ugly. You can really dial in the motion detection to minimize false trips. Woot.com regularly feature gently used or refurbished packages that are tough to beat. None of my cameras are "New".

I had a previous generation of Arlo cameras. They took so long to start recording after motion that whatever triggered the motion would be gone. They also used IR motion detectors, which have plenty of limitations. We've since gone whole-hog with the Ring ecosystem. The camera quality is great, features are well thought out, and things work together. There are some sacrifices with the battery-operated units, but most can be bypassed. Still, I'd plug in or use solar wherever possible.

Blink works for my rather basic needs and is a good set up if you don't want to pay fees. It does a good job picking up audio which can be useful and is good enough to grab plates. You need to run it in medium ir if you have a dark driveway. My only gripe would be they sometimes cut out before the action is over or come in a few seconds after something should have been picked up.

When I moved i left my two blink cams up at my old place and it was good enough to let me see what the people checking out the house were doing ( insane, one dude actually drove through my grass in the backyard... There was no road there) It also helped me pass footage of 4 local dbags on to our County deputies when they scaled my trash cans and tried to break in since it was vacant. Got faces in the dark and the audio was good as you could hear them talking about it. Files were easy to pull from the server and send to his email immediately. The system seemed to work better than usual, probably because they were milling about a bit and most importantly they somehow didn't notice the camera staring them in the face. I put a house colored cover on them and placed it under an exterior light on that side.

At my new place they help me know when I get a package and when it's time to bring in the trash cans. Boring but the perks of moving to a (knock wood) better neighborhood.

I prefer the Arlo Q cameras over the Arlo Pro. The Arlo Q is wired for power and connects directly to your WiFi for signal. No base station required so they are great if you have WiFi extenders to cover your house.

I like that I don't ever have to change batteries, and I can run the motion sensitivity as high as I like it without having to worry about burning through batteries too fast. The motion sense range of the Arlo Q is actually better than the Arlo Pro.

I've been running these for 4 years and they have been trouble free. I also have one installed outside even though they say these are inside only. The outside one is installed under the garage soffit so it doesn't get directly rained on and it has been running for 2 years without a single issue.

You can run unlimited recordings on up to 5 camera from a single account without any monthly service or storage fees. It keeps the vids for 7 days which is plenty of time to review and download anything you need. They App is actually pretty good and is easy to use from your phone. At $75 each they are well worth it, especially since you don't have any monthly fees that really add up over time.

https://www.amazon.com/Arlo-Se...MC3040/dp/B017B2043W

Blink at two houses.

quote:

Originally posted by Anubismp:
Blink works for my rather basic needs and is a good set up if you don't want to pay fees. It does a good job picking up audio which can be useful and is good enough to grab plates. You need to run it in medium ir if you have a dark driveway. My only gripe would be they sometimes cut out before the action is over or come in a few seconds after something should have been picked up.

When I moved i left my two blink cams up at my old place and it was good enough to let me see what the people checking out the house were doing ( insane, one dude actually drove through my grass in the backyard... There was no road there) It also helped me pass footage of 4 local dbags on to our County deputies when they scaled my trash cans and tried to break in since it was vacant. Got faces in the dark and the audio was good as you could hear them talking about it. Files were easy to pull from the server and send to his email immediately. The system seemed to work better than usual, probably because they were milling about a bit and most importantly they somehow didn't notice the camera staring them in the face. I put a house colored cover on them and placed it under an exterior light on that side.

At my new place they help me know when I get a package and when it's time to bring in the trash cans. Boring but the perks of moving to a (knock wood) better neighborhood.

So I recently (yesterday) got a Blink mini camera. From what I can tell if you want to record anything you have to pay a monthly fee. It says you can record locally but the product for it doesn't exist yet.

Can anyone clarify about the no monthly fee thing? That's just for viewing correct?

Tradeoffs with all of them. I use Ring for the range of camera options, Cloud backup, etc. Wired system would be better / faster, but not that practical if not built in.

We have Ring doorbells at both the front door and the garage/driveway. They have batteries that are kept charged by the doorbell transformer, so easy peasy. I did have to add a Ring Chime Pro in the garage to get 100% reliable connection to the far doorbell. (Too far, too many walls, through kitchen appliances, vehicles in the garage, and a metal garage door.)

For the backyard we use the Ring Stick Up Cam Plug-In. It's mounted right below a motion-detection floodlight, and above a power outlet, so again easy. I added the internal battery for back-up. Plugging it in to AC gives the highest level of service the camera is capable of, as I believe that just running from the battery limits some of it's abilities in order to extend battery charge. The camera seems to be recording full time and starts saving a couple seconds before the outside motion activates it. For example; I see a couple of seconds of the backyard before the screendoor opens when I let the dog out.

These have all worked very well for us and make a very stable system at this time. We also have a UPS running our router and one powering the fiber termination in the basement to hopefully extend these abilities for some time into a power outage.

I don't consider every bad online review as actually coming from a person with the skills to make something work.

We have to pay for the cloud storage and knew that going in. It's very worth it to us.

Due to unruly shitty neighbors across the street and an in-ground pool out back I did my research and purchased nite owl with 4ea 4k night vision cameras, a 2 Terabyte dvr. All hardlined, so no worries about batteries dying fast in the cold here in NH. I used the recording to back up an episode” with before noted douche bags. I emailed to the PD to back my story. Cost was a bit over $400. But well worth it. I have an app where I get notifications and view. I can sit and monitor or just wait for notifications. 2 out back aimed at pool/deck and 2 out front. My dvr can handle 8 cameras, so I may pick up a couple more.
Thumbs up for mine!

We use ring, as does my wife and her family for my MIL who is instituionalized with advanced Alzheimers. Having the ability to easily watch and check at her long-term facilty is very helpful (BTW).