New to WYZE coming from an ARLO system. Turns out the ARLO PRO 2 cameras will record to the cloud and locally. The ARLO PRO 4 cameras will only record locally or in the cloud if ARLO is paid $2.99 per camera, per month. No thanks. I purchased the PRO 4 cameras to replace two PRO 2 cameras that died. Big mistake.
Anyway, I hoping better from WYZE. Son has two cameras, indoor only, local recording, no base station. He likes the cameras. I liked the price.
I purchased two cameras and a base station, one camera and base station were packaged together. Hoping for good results with WYZE. I will keep my ARLO PRO 2 cameras until they die then replace with WYZE cameras.
Just a note – your son has either a V2 (indoor) or V3 (outdoor) wire-powered camera, cameras that are capable of continuous recording and constant streaming.
If you are using a base, then you have the battery-powered Outdoor camera that is not intended to record continuously or stay awake to live stream. It typically sleeps, waiting for a heat source to pass. Then it wakes up and reports that event, and then it goes back to sleep. All this is because it is battery powered.
It also has not been upgraded to the new Starlight sensor yet.
So your experience may be different than your son’s.
Exactly what I wanted. Record an event for a few seconds, then back to sleep. The ARLO cameras are battery powered and not meant for continuous recording. The cameras will only be active between the hours of midnight and 6:00 am when I am home. When I am gone they will be active at all hours looking for motion. I have been with ARLO for several years. This latest stunt of not allowing cameras to record locally unless a fee is paid is just stupid. I want the cameras for my purposes, without the use of their cloud, therefore I should not be required to pay a few to use my resources.
Wyze does have an optional charge of about $1.25 a month to increase the event capture to more than 12 seconds (helps defray the cost of the extra server needs). On a V2 or V3 you can slap a SD card in them to see hours and hours beyond the 12 second barrier, but you can’t do the SD card thing on a battery-powered Outdoor Camera. So hopefully the 12-second thing won’t be an issue to you.
On top of what my buddy newshound started, the subscription also gives you the ability to utilize the wyze artificial intelligence and alert you only for specific things such as person, pet, or vehicle detection. With the V2 or V3 cameras with the general settings even changes in lighting such as headlights, lightning, or a light in the house being turned on can trigger “motion” on the camera and thus an alert, using the artificial intelligence will allow you to bypass the false triggers such as those for alerts
My battery powered outdoor cam does have a disk slot. I decided to go with year cloud since it was so cheap. Does it not go beyond 12 secs even if a disc is installed? Just curious.
Cloud recordings are limited to 12 seconds without Cam Plus, and the SD card does not extend that time on a battery-powered camera. A Cam Plus subscription will fix that issue, though.
