There is a remote garden in the mountains, where rarely everyone goes and we want to safeguard it from trespassers and animals, the main issue are sheep when they occasionally stray into the garden.
We have a wired, not smart, CCTV system installed to monitor the place but we want to built alternative, parallel system of not expensive cameras with smart motion detection, to be alerted of people/animal approaching the electric fence.
The question
We think investing in Wyze Cam v3 and install them along the perimeter. The perimeter is pretty long, we will need more than a couple… that’s why Cam Plus isn’t an option (would be too expensive for that many cameras).
My questions is: if we don’t have the Cam Plus subscription, would the events be smart anyway? And how effective is the AI?
The garden is so far away, that it doesn’t matter if it sends unfiltered alerts about people, animals or vehicles, but it’s in a woody area, so IF the smart detection is poor and we get tons of grass and tree motion alerts, then it doesn’t worth the spending.
The main question would be do you have a reliable and fast internet connection there? The wyze cameras a cloud dependent, and while they will record to the SD card if the internet goes down in most cases, for notifications, AI, live streaming, and cloud events they require internet. If you have many of them the internet, Wi-Fi, and router will need to be powerful enough to handle them.
The base v3 cameras support the Cam Plus Lite subscription which can be free, and includes person detection and 12 second videos with a 5 minute cooldown. You can then jump to the SD card to view the full footage if you have one installed.
If you want additional AI like animal, vehicle, etc you will need cam plus. This also removes the length and cooldown restrictions. Wyze offers cam plus unlimited, which is $9.99 a month for unlimited cameras. This will probably be the best deal for you (I think if you have like more than 5 cameras it’s worth it)
It’s up to you, but I think cam plus unlimited will be best (if it fits within your budget). In my experience the AI works pretty good, though you will definitely need to spend some time tuning the settings for detections at first.
Thank you for taking some time and replying in a detailed manner.
We have a radio internet with fairly good internet speeds + we will have a failover option with mobile gprs internet wifi router in case there is something wrong with the radio.
I am more concerned with what you told me about the free subscription.
The way I imagined it before, was that I get all smart notifications, but they are not filtered: so pet + vehicle + person are bundled together. This isn’t worrying as the location is scarcely visited by anyone, so it won’t be a bother to check all the smart notifications.
But from your answer I infer that with the free subscription the only smart notification will be for persons, is that correct? This changes my calculus, because in that case indeed I would need to purchase the paid subscription (to benefit from the pet detection aka sheep), which will total to 100$ a month for 10 cameras, it’s too much…
Don’t mean to overstep my boundaries in replying back to you instead of IEatBeans. The price is $9.99 a month for unlimited number of cameras, not $100 a month for 10 cameras.
I purchased the Cam Plus annual unlimited plan last year. It is $99.00 for up to 99 cameras. It cost about 28 U.S. cents a day. One issue with Cam Plus is it auto renews and if you cancel it prior to the expiration date there is no refund for unused portion.
My two cents here. A camera workout Cam Plus is certainly functional but you will miss a lot of events.
I have a Flood plus camera above the garage and when i got it i ran the trial plus for 3 months and the detection was solid and consistent. When the trial expired i had a really hard time getting the camera to detect me event when jumping right in front of it, and it would miss cars pulling in the garage and/or have a very delayed reaction.
I later added the camera to my can plus yearly unlimited plan and it now detects me and any person/car in a very reliable fashion.
It shouldn’t work that way. You should not be required to up-pay for a basic service. My V3 cams work great without an added service. Granted I can’t determine a car from a person, but basic detection should work better.
We are also fixing the detection settings on our AI to be wayyyyyy less jumpy.
For example, sometimes if a person walks into frame of your Floodlight and your car is also in frame, you’ll get a “Person and Vehicle” detected notification. When all you really needed was “Person Detected” because that’s what is causing the motion.
We are fixing that, very very soon.
Thanks for being an Unlimited subscriber by the way
Without cam plus the cameras have a 5 minute cooldown. If the camera detects lots of motion, like a leaf blowing, then it will start the cooldown which could potentially ignore real motion like people.
The best way to fix this without cam plus is to reduce the sensitivity and create a detection zone so less false detections are recording, increasing the chance that the cooldown will NOT be in effect when your real motion is in frame.
Here’s my experience with it. I’s can be unreliable and theirs a very fine balance on false triggers vs capturing all the real events. And once a event is triggered, theirs a 5 min wait till it will trigger again. I almost missed the most important event because of this, by accident I was scrolling through the footage and found it because it didn’t get triggered because some random movement. And by the time you get it fine tuned, aa new firmware comes out and your starting over because they change things. If you have multiple cameras, good luck with that. The detection is not that good from my experience. I also had the camera stop recording so many times on all the cams, its not even funny. But theirs’s no way to know unless you check. Often times the event doesn’t show what triggered the camera in the screenshot. Sometimes the camera just crash for whatever reason and you have to manually reboot them. They are very unreliable. I switched to a other brand for my new cams and its a huge difference in quality. These are essentially toys because you cannot count on them. They use to be better back in the day. But I refuse to pay for a subscription. My new cams have a good ai built into the cams and simply just work for about the same price and without paying a monthly fee.
Agreed. Just one of the many gadgets Wyze offers. While I enjoy them for what they are, as useful gadgets, I wouldn’t consider them a security camera.
It’s unreliable for your use case. But that doesn’t mean it is for others. For example, I used these for checking up on my dogs when I’m out, and the cameras were indispensable when one had epileptic attacks. I know there are bird watchers in the forum. Keep that in mind when you say these are toys.
From my side I would say the detection with AI is good in the use case you describe.
There are not background objects it would only need to detect new objects entering the view.
My V3 cams detect will animals as pets (cats, dogs, squirrels, foxes) & person detection is fine.
My problems with it in an urban environment is exactly how Matt describes.
I have my cameras pointing at my parking place with a vehicle in view.
I don’t want to exclude this region because the vehicle is what I’m trying to protect.
However, each time there is motion detected, I get an AI alert that says vehicle motion detected.
Something to consider if they internet is not strong in the area is the V3 Pro cam which has onboard AI processing.
My V3 cameras outside upload several GBs of data each per month for analysis on the cloud.
Another point concerning the cost, I bought the cam plus unlimited as I have 20 cameras.
I use Edge and there is a coupon function which alerts you to discount vouchers available for the can plus subscription.
I saved 20% on the annual price using this…
For me 99$ is a great price for up to 100 cameras.
Agree, these cams are so frustrating! I’ve v2s & v3s. Ever since they lost exnor ai, they went to crap. I picked up V3 thinking issues would be better but only things better were resolution & nighttime video.
Always detecting movement outside the detection zone, or events don’t record, or can’t load… seems neverending!
Will never spend another penny on this company’s products. Services get taken away &/or don’t work consistently.
