I bought a simple, consumer grade security camera; mostly just to test the waters and see what's what.

The camera works okay for the price. It doesn't have a lot of detail beyond 10-15 feet from the camera. But it does detect motion well and can discern people. So, I can set it alarm when it detects people but not alarm for motion (cars, what not). It still records for the latter but doesn't alarm.

I think I will buy a camera suitable for mounting outdoors. Generally, this camera may be enough (although it gets triggered by car lights even though the car itself is not visible; annoying but no real issue).

But the unit goes crazy during the rain; it detects all kinds of phantoms, especially when the rain hits the window and creates lens like effects. It's recording needlessly almost all the time. Again, probably not a real issue - doesn't rain much here, plenty of card space, automatically overwrites and worst case is just needing to replace the card sooner (but still a long time).

It is an issue if something happens and you have hours of recordings - makes it harder to find the event of interest. Which, again, itself is probably a never event.

Just an fyi - if you are entertaining an indoor camera to monitor outside, you may get a lot of false events recorded.

Does your camera have adjustable sensitivity settings?

My Blink camera system has that. Took a little trial and error after install to get the exterior camera over my garage to trigger from people or cars in my driveway but not rain/snow blowing past or the movement of headlight reflections from people turning on the street. That particular camera ended up at like 4 out of 10 on the sensitivity setting.

My outside cameras are PIR, (passive infrared) and they trigger on the basis of 2 things that must happen together, motion and heat. So you have to have something that's a different temperature than the ambient outside and motion.

So yes, it'll trigger on cars driving past although I could turn down the sensitivity and it wouldn't as it would shorten the detection range. Doing so would also increase the size of the object needed to trigger the camera.

The other thing is my SD card (memory). I set it to overwrite after it's full so I don't have to worry about changing out the cards. Currently they go a few months before going into the overwrite phase.

I have outdoor cameras, a bunch of them and they detect motion. They just record on the DVR. Now the ring cameras send push notifications and it could be a spider making a web, any sort of insect. It’s annoying but that not intrusive. Insects I just grab some water and splash the camera which usually sorts it out. But it’s part of the game.

Have a bunch of the Wyze V3 camera’s they are cheap $35. You can set the sensitivity and also block out areas that you don’t want them to detect movement or sound.
With the cloud monitor package they will detect automobiles, person or packages. Monitor package is around $2 a month per camera and they also have a spot for sd card if you don’t want to pay for monitoring.
You can get them at Wyze, Home Depot and Amazon.

I have Wyze too.
The instruction’s aren’t great but once you figure it out they work well. The video quality is excellent, especially considering the price.
I have the v2 and v3.

I went with the Arlo cameras. Four in the front and two in the back. They have quite customizable activity zones. Sensitivity control and it’s all cloud storage. Only records if motion is in the activity zone. I’m quite happy with them.

quote:

Originally posted by kg5388:
Have a bunch of the Wyze V3 camera’s they are cheap $35. You can set the sensitivity and also block out areas that you don’t want them to detect movement

Can you give a bit of guidance on how to block out areas to not watch? As 220-9er said, the instructions aren't great.

This article mentions detection zones under the Detection Settings portion, but I'm not seeing that in the app.

Thank you.

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Edit: I found it. There's "Detection Zone" text right beneath the low-high bar under "Motion Detection Sensitivity," and an on-off button over to the right of that.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
I bought a simple, consumer grade security camera; mostly just to test the waters and see what's what.

It becomes an addiction. Soon you will need more and better cameras.

I started out with an old i-pod in a window with a IP-cam app. It grew from there.

Hint: Buy the best night / low-light performance you can afford. So Much happens at night.