Occasionally one or more of my 6 V3 cams will go down/offline and I reset them. I’m going on a month long trip and I’m worried about one or more of the cams going down and not being home to reset them. I have to have a reliable system in place or I’ve got nothing. What say you?
Get some smart plugs and you can have them set to automatically power off and on once a week. That’s what i do.
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I do more or less the same thing but have it set so I can turn them on and off manually and remotely.
I tried to use Wyze smart plugs for this but they were too unreliable, out of 4 I bought one didn’t work at all and two others crashed so that I had to unplug and re-plug them to get them back. So, I had to buy some Kasa plugs which are working better.
I monitor the cameras on a more or less semi-regular basis when away, and if one of them is offine I switch over to the Kasa app and cycle power on that one. So far it has worked pretty well.
The trouble with just cycling power on the cameras once a week is that the SD card (if you have one) doesn’t shut down correctly and you can corrupt the SD card, requiring a session with chkdsk to get it back. The same can happen if you manually cycle power but at least then you are doing it on condition and not whether they need it or not.
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So far I have had no trouble with my SD cards when power cycling and I cycle all 16 of my outside V3’s at the same time.
The problem with using the Wyze app power or reset is that if the camera locks up or goes offline that will not work, also selecting on/off in app doesn’t actually turn off camera. Even the current draw stays nearly the same when the camera is off in app. It is not really off because it is still connected to your network waiting for a on command.
With a REAL power off through a smart plug turns off the power obviously, and upon power up if the camera does corrupt the SD you can format the SD via app most of the time.
If I was to be gone for a month I would not rely on the app based on/off or reset. Only a smart device to control the cams would be my choice.
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None of my V3s (including floodlight) have gone offline for months now. I’ve traveled for about a month and all of them worked fine. I have rules to turn them off and on twice a week, and I upgraded my router to mesh.
Couple of my Wyze plugs and the OG have gone offline, but I managed to get them back online via the ASUS router app. If your router can refresh connections to devices it can bring them back online.
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Agreed. Smart Plugs.
I have all my 5V AC Cams on Smart Plugs (Non-Wyze coincidentally) just in case I need to power cycle. But, since upgrading my network almost a year ago, I haven’t had to use any of them.
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Is this what you are recommending, a plug such as this?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089DR29T6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I use this one:
My cameras (all of them) go offline a few times a month and I have to cycle power using these smart plugs.
Note that there is ABSOLUTELY no excuse for having to do this, these cameras should not go offline like that. But since they do, these smart plugs are a reasonable workaround.
Thank you! This is what I was looking for.