Intruder Alarm - reasonable solution found

I have been searching for a way to include an alarm that will work with my Wyze cameras. My recently implemented solution is to use a power failure alarm. This is a relatively inexpensive device that sounds a smoke detector type of alarm sound when it no longer receives power from a socket. Using my wyze plug and the power failure alarm, I send a notification to the plug whenever a person is detected in an area and at a time when there should never be a person. The notification turns the plug “off”, when then sets off the alarm. As soon as the plug is powered back on, the alarm goes silent. I found two of these alarms on Amazon for under $15 each. The 120 dB alarm is VERY loud the other 70 dB is reasonably loud in the room it is in.

2 Likes

How reliable is your person detection?
From this thread some are getting poor results, others great.

My experience has been very good. I agree with the comments that talk about reduced accuracy in low light and I notice that distance effects accuracy as well. I combine the cameras with outdoor lighting and positioning the cameras to get reasonably close to the area I want to protect ( say, 20 feet or less). I have been running tests at night and day to optimize all the settings. I find that after three months I have only once had a false positive (it said there was a person when there wasn’t) after hundreds of events. I do have a greater amounts of false negatives, where there was a person and it didn’t pick it up. But it always seems to be related to lighting or distance. Still, it’s probably right more than 95% of the time for me.

1 Like

Very smart. I looked earlier for an alarm that triggers immediately when powered, but I never thought to look for one that triggers on absence of power. I may get one of these.

Was thinking about something like this as well (for the outside). My only issue with this is if there is a true power outage. I could be at work, power is truly out, and my poor neighbors (or my animals inside) have to deal with an alarm blaring for hours on end … and I have no way to cut it off.

I agree. It’s not the ideal solution, but it’s nice that it’s a simple plug-and-play option that can be accomplished with an existing “dumb” device.

Gboy, that is very true about issues in a real power outage and something to consider. For me, our power rarely goes out, and when it does, it usually has to do with really bad weather and I’m home anyway. Like Nerdland has commented, this is not what I would call an “elegant” solution. But it is simple, cheap, and it works until Wyze can give us better interfaces to solutions such as using Alexa.

1 Like