I bought two Wyze v2 Pan Cameras for interior monitoring of entrance-ways several years ago and was very pleased with the performance and price, ease of setup and use, and the Android connection App.
When I bought my new house, I decided to install a Floodlight/camera and my FIRST inclination was to look at the available Wyze models that suited my needs.
Home Depot had a ‘WIRED’ Wyze Floodlight + Cam v2 on sale, which I bought and installed. It hooked right into the exterior Lamp fixture sitting right over my Garage door. The installation AND setup took ONLY half an hour and was picked up by my Android Wyze App without a hitch! And it continues to work fine except for this one problem…
The included literature and in-App camera interface described the camera’s ‘COOLDOWN’ as necessary to preserve Battery capacity for SOLAR powered units. I had foolishly thought that since MY camera did NOT use a battery, this would not apply to me. But it was part of a DECEPTIVE marketing strategy by Wyze to force customers to buy into a monthly subscription to eliminate the CoolDown feature.
Wyze must think I am poor, cheap, or stupid. I’ll do a better job of researching the purchase of my next cameras and replace the Wyze cameras I have. I don’t like being deceived and jerked around by having the product I trusted and purchased to be purposely LIMITED as part of a strategy to increase their revenue streams. Let’s see; Blink, Simpli-Safe, or dozens of alternates on Ebay?
I bought a bunch of cams last year, none of which support Cam Lite, and it was clear that without a subscription it would be 5 minutes between logged events, didn’t find it deceptive at all.
With an SD card, even if set to motion only, they still record all events even if they aren’t “tagged”, which was actually a pleasant surprise, I figured on the ones I didn’t have 24x7 recording enabled on that those in-between events wouldn’t be recorded at all.
Can you provide a copy of this? The Floodlight should not have anything talking about solar in the first place, so this seems like an error that should be corrected. Or was it literature from Home Depot? I have now gotten 9 different floodlights from Wyze (every model) and to my recollection, none of them have ever given a reason in literature or in the app to believe they wouldn’t have a cooldown of any kind, so I’d like to see what changed or what you received that was different so this can be reported to Wyze’s marketing department to address it if needed.
You said you had Pan v2 cameras you bought years ago, and I would’ve thought that you would’ve been aware of the 5-minute cooldown on all cameras from those.
I would certainly not keep a floodlight you are not satisfied with though. If you are not satisfied with your purchase for any reason, definitely return it. If it’s past the return date, consider reselling it. Wyze devices actually hold their value really well because they are already sold at really low profit margins.
No, those 2 have cooldown periods on most of their devices unless you pay for a subscription too. It’s fairly industry standard for cloud-dependent devices. You’ll have to look at ones that aren’t cloud dependent.
Reolink and Eufy are likely more expensive but should allow you to not have a cooldown period. So if that is non-negotiable for you, I’d recommend looking in that direction.
An Alternative that some people do for Wyze is to get an RTSP converter and have notifications sent to them through something like Home Assistant = no cooldown and all free and you can save recordings to a harddrive or NAS instead of to a MicroSD card. Wyze even offers an official API Key to allow us to do these kinds of things ourselves. I’m partial to Docker Wyze Bridge myself.
Despite having my Floodlight V2 Camera set to Motion Detection, the camera is recording continuously. This is also NOT the way it’s suppose to operate. It is watching all the time, but should trigger ‘Recording’ only when a Motion is detected inside the Detection Zone.
I’m not familiar with the floodlight cams but I believe some are basically just v3 cams?
Are you sure you don’t have the SD card set to record continuously? If not, I would suspect that it is just bugs and other stuff being picked up by the lights and triggering lots of motion. You can try reducing the sensitivity.
Check your Continuous vs Events Only setting. It’s always looked backwards to me. The light background is what is currently selected, and the darker background is what is not selected right now. Just check to make sure.
That’s correct for Cam Floodlight (v1), but this is tagged floodlight-v2. (I don’t own any, either, but I’d definitely be interested if I had a place to mount one.)
I dig. I wanted to affirm your comment. You’re right that tagging isn’t always accurate, though the Moderators are good at retagging topics to help them get better visibility and be categorized more properly when a post is flagged with sufficient detail to assist.
but that’s why I said some, I wasn’t sure which one(s).