Is Anyone Actually Satisfied With Their Wyze Camera?

Some posts were removed or edited that did not follow the Community Guidelines. Please flag posts that violate the guidelines so the moderators can respond appropriately.

Key points from the guidelines to keep in mind:

  • Remember to criticize ideas, not people
  • Please avoid name-calling
  • Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream
  • Keep posts relevant to Wyze

Important sections:

Always Be Civil

Sometimes We Disagree

4 Likes

I suspect that one reason why there seems to be such disparity in opinion and experiences among users in regard to Wyze equipment is that there seems to be discrepancies in the quality of the equipment.

My first order of cams were puzzling and disappointing because of a sound problem within the cams that others on this forum could not identify and had not experienced in theirs. A subsequent cam I received two weeks later has no such sound problem. I tested all of them on the same circuits, different circuits, distances from the router, etc. No changes were found, I did notice that I could hear an electrical crackling noise coming from the rear grill of the cam when brought close to my ear on the cams with the bad sound problems. . The cams from the first order appear to have come from a “bad batch and are being replaced under warranty.

So i surmise that a certain amount of customer troubleshooting could be saved if the manufacturing process had a better handle on quality control before those products ever reach customers’ hands.

1 Like

But not JUST customer troubleshooting. Also load on their customer service agents and cost of providing warranty replacements and/or lost goodwill and reputation.

Once again, I am very happy with our cams. The problems we have crossed have been quickly solved using this board. We have 4 very expensive outdoor cams that are hardwired and connected to a 1g DVD recorder. This is a very professional system. But the Wize cams do a very good job and are much less expensive. We also don’t have to pay to have them installed. We have one outdoor cam that is working great now that the wind is not blowing so hard ever day. We have 3 cameras indoor and all of them have worked very well. Still having a few issues with our living room camera which I believe I solved moving the camera slightly.

As far as internet security, my wifi is about as secure as they come. It it is not only password protected but it runs on a VPN and has advanced encryption with the WireGuard protocol. No one is going to intercept our video streams. Even our cell phone run off the same wifi VPN.

Even if they were able to intercept our video streams they are going to be in for hours of boredom. Empty bedrooms with an occasional cat walking in and out or our driveway with two vehicles parked in it. Anyone in our neighborhood can see our driveway.

I agree! My event notification of motion detection as no videos for either of my cameras todat and yesterday they worked fine. Why is WYZE forcing me to pay more? Cam+ has been installed to my account that i might have to pay up to 19.99/camera. and it states the i now have 2 unassigned licenses due may 7. What the heck is going on?

You should be able to get it worked out if you give them a call. They helped me out twice already with mine.

1 Like

Thanks. So far people on this forum have been able to help solve all the issues.

2 Likes

It seems that way. One of my issues was with the subscription, so the problem was coming from their end.

the cameras are about the only thing form Wyze that seems to work fairly well. My only complaint is the huge delay from the time an incident is detected to the time an announcement is heard over Alexa. Typically it can be anywhere form 3-5 seconds. Also of major concern is the number of false alarms, expecially when their Amazon instance is having problems which has occured several times over the past year.

Overall, I’m a disenchanted Wyse lover. When I started building my smart home, I bought a lot of Wyze products. In the beginning they were great but over the past year the quality of their products and support has drastically decreased. All my sensors have died after the batteries died and they are totally useless now. The thermostat I purchased never worked and I had to return it but I can’t remove it from the app for over a year, and finally, I purchased a Wyze doorbell plus, it worked great for a few months but then the battery died and now it will no longer work with Alexa. support is totally useless.

I think the wyze door bell plus was the last product I will ever buy from Wyze and I’m probably going to need to replace that becasue support has been unable to help.

2 Likes

I was very happy with my four WYZE3 till I saw my internet usage. I used up my 30gb in four days.

Are you or someone else viewing them from another network? That is a very unusual amount of data. :neutral_face:

3 Likes

That’s not normal. I have 2 dozen+ cams all with Cam plus, some that are recording and uploading to the cloud nearly 24/7, and a total of over 200 Wyze devices total, though several of them are sensors and other things connected through a Hub, there are still nearly 60 Wyze devices with their own individual WiFi Connection currently using my internet, and my total use over the last 24hrs is just over 12GB. If you’re getting 30GB with just 4 cams there is something EXTREME going on here. Are you absolutely sure the Wyze cams are using all that bandwidth, and not someone streaming Netflix and playing video games? Those use tons more data than Wyze cams…

I’m just trying to think of what would cause a Wyze cam to do that? Maybe something is blocking the ping attempts to Google server to verify internet is still connected or something (this is pretty standard with a lot of IoT), and maybe it keeps retrying over and over again if it fails. Something like that (pings don’t use enough bandwidth to account for this anyway, but there has to be SOMETHING, because that amount of bandwidth on 4 cams makes NO sense…I guarantee mine have got to be uploading to the cloud WAY more than your 4 cams…it makes no sense your 4 cams would have more use than all mine together which are doing everything through the cloud all the time (I work from home, and the multiple cams in my office basically record ALL DAY, let alone the rooms our 4 cats are in, not to mention the constant uploading for outside cams with bushes, shadows, etc all day and night.

4 Likes

Copied from my internet and this is just one camera and I run four. Just my Wyze camera, It’s more than my computer and I don’t download movies etc. I live alon and the only one that has access.
Device Name
WyzeCam Signal Quality Good
One day Device Usage
1.11 GB
Router Connection
2.4G

Usage Details 25 days remaining in your data cycle

errorYou’ve exceeded your allowance for this Plan Data Cycle. Your Service is now degraded. You can buy a Token to restore services.help

Plan Data

29.9 GB used

Bonus Zone help

3.9 GB used

The weird thing is normal 12-second event clips are like 1.5 MB in size. So you would need like 740 clips a day from that cam to eat 1.11 GB in one day. That’s a clip every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day. That’s a lot. Do you get 740 clips from that camera every day?

Now the fact that you have a day counter on your billing cycle leads me to believe we are talking cell phone here. Are your cams on a cell phone connection, or do you view your cams often from a cell phone connection? Live viewing from another network full-time can generate a lot of data.

2 Likes

My phone is Verizon unlimited data and I have wifi internet turned off so I don’t use up my internet. I also have Apple tablet and it is internet. My cameras were turned on 24/7 till yesterday. The one thing I wondered is I have the cameras set to continuous record to sd card because I noticed not all motion is there when I look at Events in the evening… Would that run the internet up or is that of internal thing? The cloud setting is motion.

I just read several post back in Jun 2019 that was covering what I have been trying to find out. They talked about packets for devise heartbeat and how it can run up internet. Also covered trying to use camera without internet. I’m not teck savvy but I thing I got the jest of it. I’m a 76 year old that has let new things pass me and it is very hard trying to figure things out now. I guess I can manually shut cameras down for 12 hours and cut things in half.

I used to be, and I have 3 outdoor cameras (with solar panels), a V2, V3 and the car. But i think things have gone down hill. Seems new firmware breaks things, things that you had in the past are taken away, forced to subscribe to one of their services (even if you can offer $0.00 for it), and lots of complaints about things (see shipping) fall on deaf ears…
Honestly i think a lot of it is because the world is on fire… a pandemic (with the possibility of another around the corner) Russia fighting Ukraine and their general aggression, and the crazy high inflation. I think all that has a lot to answer for.

but the simple answer, is that I used to be very satisfied, but an not at the moment. Im just grateful that my system is still usable.
DeVoiD

2 Likes

This may be your issue. There is usually no limit in the US on how much Internet you use from your ISP, but there usually is a limit on how much you can use from your phone company. Allow your phone to connect to your WiFi. I usually also turn off cellular permissions for the app so I know exactly when it doesn’t use WiFi.

5 Likes