Considering on replacing the Wyze Cam Outdoor v2 with the battery cam pro. My main concerns is manual reboots. I want to avoid the hassle of taking the camera down. Just want to hook up the solar panel and leave it up there. I currently have the outdoor V2 at my grandparents. And I’m really annoyed how often they need to take it down. So I’m hoping to hear from battery cam pro users how their experience have been so far.
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Honestly any electronic device can need it from time to time. To be safe, I have an automation scheduled to reboot all my cams once a week. You may want to try that with the v2, just reboot it a bit more often than it seems to stop responding.
It could also be a wifi coverage issue, sometimes when in a fringe area they can go offline until the congestion or interference clears up, that may be at play here too.
Personally I don’t have a BCP but I haven’t seen any complaints here of having to reboot it.
For a wired camera, rebooting is relatively simple. Just pair a smart plug. But for battery powered cameras there usually is no other way than manually flipping the switch. Rebooting the base station sometimes just won’t cut it.
You can do it right from the app with the BCP. Not sure about the v2. The intent is to reboot it more frequently than it locks up so that it will never lock up.
You could setup reboot automation shortcuts within the Wyze app. Tried that, still crashes. Sometimes the camera appears to be online. But you won’t notice anything wrong until you realize there are no new event clips.
I have a V3 which has stopped writing to the SD card. I didn’t notice it because I have Cam Ultimate. It seems to be a recent issue because it wasn’t too long ago that it was working OK. Looks like Wyze breaks something else every time it releases a fix.
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The BCP is a well engineered battery camera. We currently have 4 monitoring the perimeter of our property. Three of the four are on solar. The oldest is a year and a half old and requires a ladder to access it.
If your referring to a software restart that is trivial. All the suggestions above are valid. Manually in the app, automations, smart plugs, all will do it. If the BCP needs a hardware (cold start) restart that is not trivial. The battery must be temporarily removed–a few seconds will do.
In the earliest days of the BCP there were definite growing pains. My son had to go up the ladder a few times. It took Wyze about 2 months to sort things out and it has been rock solid since then–almost a year and a half. Even when the car thieves took their foot long screwdriver, jumped up and whacked the camera it survived. They did not get our car but managed to steal our neighbors. With our camera footage in tow the police where able to recover the car the next day.
We have not been up the ladder in ~17 months!
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Not shortcuts, have it happen automatically on a schedule. Do it daily if you have to. Maye prevent it from getting to the point of needing a hard reset. However if the issue is related to a weak wifi signal or something else, that probably won’t help.
We had crashes just hours after a reboot. Trust me I tried your solution. Signals always has 3 bars. Having to constantly reboot is not normal. I have another Eufy solar cam that never needed to be taken down. My grandpa prefers the Wyze browser interface otherwise I wouldn’t be asking about the BCP.
I remember having to power cycle V3s after an update. Haven’t needed to do that for the V4s. Pro tip: pair smart plugs with your cameras. And do NOT use smart plugs under the same brand as your cameras. I recommend the Kasa brand smart plugs. Unfortunately that solution won’t work for solar powered cameras.
We have not been up the ladder in ~17 months!
That sounds promising. Guess we’ll give it a go.
OK, didn’t know you had already tried it. I think eliminating the base station and going to BCP is probably going to be more reliable, especially given how old the WCO is.
As I remember I had 2 or 3 v2’s with the base station. The base station was my nemesis. I had to cold start it at least once a month. Just enough to be on my radar. I even purchased a second base station–didn’t help. When I started moving to the BCP’s there were so many issues at the very beginning that I was starting to put my decision on the “that was stupid pile”. Luckily it all sorted out.
Good luck @polarteddyneo.
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I understand the reason people suggest this, but if the entire ecosystem is down (wyze servers having issues etc), power cycling the camera isn’t going to help anyway. Don’t think it really matters which brand of smart plug you use and if people don’t want another app and another brand to deal with, not really any reason you can’t just use a wyze plug.
The WCO needed constant supervision since day one. Had to reset the cooldown time almost everyday! The latest update fixing that problem just went online a few months ago. Which made an absolute huge difference. Just hope the BCP can be as reliable and care free as the Eufy E40.
Seems to be the general consensus here. Seems like over time the radios in it die too, which is not unheard of with many wifi devices, but the base station seems to be especially prone.
Considering that if it does totally die, your cams become paperweights (can’t be released from the account and thus can’t be reset or reused), I’m not a fan of the setup overall anyway.
Oh, I’m completly pass that. I’m the family IT guy. We got Wyze, Eufy, Reolink, Switchbot, Tapo, Yolink… I wished I could just go with one brand and be done with it. But a diverse system actually makes it easier to locate problems.
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For some that’s fine, I happened to get a great deal on TP Link smart plugs with energy monitoring and have used those for various purposes from time to time (no need to have them in use all the time).
But for many average wyze camera users, if they just want a “fail safe” remote hard reboot option, I don’t think it buys them anything by using a different brand of smart plug. Or at the very least I don’t think it needs an all caps warning against doing it.
I guess that warning was really just a note for myself. I’ve got 2 V3s connected to 2 Wyze plugs that have been offline overseas for months. Luckily I got V4s covering the same area. So I’m not in a hurry fixing those.
The plugs are offline, or the cams, or both?
There really isn’t anything that would explain them all being offline (yet other wyze stuff working fine) other than a wifi issue in that area, or the plugs aren’t getting power at all.
I guess the plugs could have frozen in a “power off” state, but that seems pretty unlikely, and technically cold happen with any brand. Then we get to the point of saying to plug the smart plug into another brand smart plug in case one plug locks up 