Question unlikely to have a good response

Cameras
1

We inexplicably lose power at my house, a LOT. Whenever we do, my Outdoor Cam (v1) goes offline. Not a big deal to reach out the window and power it off/on, but I invariably have to re-aim it which DOES take considerable effort (the action of snapping it off the magnetic stand and then back on moves it enough that the PIR zone doesn’t end up where I need it).

So I will ask again - is there ANY hope that Wyze will someday come up with a way to un-offline a camera without having to physically touch it? The router and base unit all come back up online just fine.

2

This isn’t an answer to your question, but have you considered employing an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS… aka battery backup) for your internet?

I don’t know what particular flavor of ISP you have or if your ISP goes down when the power is out, but my ISP is not affected by local power outages. My local equipment, however is.

I installed a small UPS that I use to power my Modem, WiFi Router, and Hub. When the power goes out, the UPS batteries kick in and I still have internet and WiFi with a working and connected Hub.

You could use it to power your Modem, Router, and WCO Base. Since the Base would never loose connection with the WiFi Router when the power goes out and the cam is battery operated, it shouldn’t need restarted. If your ISP is unaffected by the outage, you should also be able to access your cams and get notifications during the outage.

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3

Is the root issue that when a outdoor base loses power (not internet, power) that the WCO loses its connection, and cannot reconnect to a base unless the WCO is power cycled? Thanks.

Is the thought process that having a UPS connected to the ISP’s modem, the router/gateway/switch, any wifi access points/mesh system, and the outdoor base gateway will make it impossible for the WCO to lose its connection to the base, and therefore stay happy?

I have this setup in 3 houses. UPS devices aren’t cheap. They cost 3x what the WCO cost. Not everyone can afford that. of coarse each room where I have a wireless mesh router I have one, and there are many other ports open on the UPS, and I plug in the outdoor cam base/gateway into that (as well as the wyze lock gateway, and a lamp with a wyze bulb in it, and a google nest mini). I’m set, but not everyone can afford to do this.

I also have the power go out often. The houses I monitor are in different countries, so having the power connected up and internet working so I can view live streams and event videos will record is very important. But when the internet dies and comes back - which happens often - and can be down for days - the restoration of the internet at the ISP level doesn’t magicaly make the wyze devices work every single time. And without internet connection, i cannot cycle them from afar or patch their firmware. So usually when traveling back to a property in another location I have at least one device I have to unplug and plug back in. That is getting better with the newer devices.

In case you haven’t lived outside the USA, it is not uncommon to still have a strong connection from your home router to your ISP - all green lights - but the ISP itself loses connection. Say there is a storm somewhere upstream from the ISP - like a mountain range - and a point-to-point microwave dish is swaying back and forth in a tropical storm or hurricane. Because they cannot reach between the two towers (or more) due to a violent storm, there is no internet connection (WAN) between the two points, so the whole city/county/region/state/country will have no internet. It happens. A cellular internet connection will not help - those connect to fiber, the fiber connects to the ISP, the ISP gets it connection from a tower, the tower is being tossed around.

4

I wouldn’t say it will make it impossible. There are myriad ways for a base to loose connection with the cam.

My focus in suggesting this was to prevent a loss in local IP connection when the base and the WiFi router loose power. Even though both reset, the cam, which remains powered thru the process, isn’t being supplied with an updated IP after the reboot and is therefore offline. The cam must be hanging onto its old IP and is only assigned a new one when rebooted.

The UPS would insure the WiFi Router remains powered and would safeguard the local IP assignments made to those devices that remain powered, namely the base. If the base and the router never realize there was a local network failure, they shouldn’t need any reboot at all and therefore the cam should stay happy with its uninterrupted connection to the base.

I have dedicated fiber from the ISP to my ONT. The ISP has dedicated redundant power as well. I only power my ONT, Base Router Node, HMS Hub connected by Ethernet, and 6 dedicated Wyze Plugs used only for Alexa and IFTTT Automations from the UPS. My focus is on the continued operation and connectivity of my HMS in a power outage. None of my cams or other Wyze IoT are powered by the single 1500VA UPS.

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5

You said:

“Even though both reset, the cam, which remains powered thru the process, isn’t being supplied with an updated IP after the reboot and is therefore offline.”

Next you said the following, which I’m hope someone can confirm 100% is true or false: “The cam must be hanging onto its old IP and is only assigned a new one when rebooted.”

I don’t know if the camera gets an IP for the outdoor camera. Maybe on the base gets the IP, and the camera talks over a different frequency. I honestly do not know.

However…

Let’s say you have a huge house and you have a wifi mesh system throughout the house, including at both ends of the house, including some coverage that reaches into the street around your house.

You have 2 cameras, and 2 bases. You put one base at the back of the house in your garage wired to your home LAN, and join one camera to it. Then you go to the front of the house in your foyer/entryway and add a base to your wired network, and join a camera to that front base.

If you were to take the camera from the front and move it to the back, it would not connect to the back base. The same is true the other direction – taking the camera from the back of the house and moving it to the front will not work.

Now let’s say you have a really skinny, long house, but you only have a wired connection in the garage, so you join a base to the network at the back of the house and join 2 outdoor cameras to the base in the rear of the house. In this same house, you have a strong wireless connection that reaches throughout the rear of the house, but doesn’t reach the front of the house. So you backhaul a wireless access point and run it as a range extender or even a mesh system to get coverage on the front porch of your house. You then take one of the outdoor cameras from the back of the house and move it to the front where you now have a wifi signal. The outdoor camera will still NOT connect to the home network from the front even though you have strong wireless because the outdoor base is in the rear of the house with those two small antennas and those don’t reach your front porch.

I think I am correct.

I am not sure if the outdoor doesn’t try over and over to get connected to the base.

I am pretty sure that the outdoor base does try over and over to get an IP address from the home LAN’s DHCP.

I am not sure that if the outdoor base gets a new/different IP address that it doesn’t try to push that to the WCO. I was pretty sure that it did.

All of this is to say that if you can wire up a camera like the Wyze Cam v3 or Wyze Cam OG, you reduce the stress of owning a WCO. That is the route I am going, although since adding the solar panels to the WCO several issues have been reduced for me.

6

Perhaps you can set all that up and test it. Let us know how it turns out.

1 Like
7

Was that question for me SlabSlayer?

Well I know that if I move any of my 4 cameras – 2 that are at the SW corner of the house and 2 that are at the NW corner of my house – to anywhere on the east side of the house they do not work because neither will reach the antennas of the base.

I also know through much experience that if I bring one camera from the north side of the house and one camera from the south side of the house to recharge overnight that if I accidentally put the south in the north and the north in the south and fire them up they cannot reach their respective, correct bases so they do not connect to anything. And yes, my wifi signal from a mesh router on the other side of a window, will reach to where the cameras go, but I don’t believe the cameras get any wifi signal from the mesh – they only get it from the base I AM GUESSING because they never did work when not near the base they were paired with.

From wyze.com: “Unlike other Wyze cameras, your Wyze Cam Outdoor must be connected to a Base Station to work.”

According to the FCC filings, the base operates on 2.4 MHz frequency as a range extender at 14.91 dBm

8

It wasn’t a question for you. It was a reply to your post. Logging into the forum will allow you to view which post a user is responding to. Email doesn’t easily provide that context.

My original post regarding the UPS can be summarized:

OP User’s Problem: WCO does not reconnect after Router & Base loose power and reboot.

Recommended Solution: Don’t let the Router & Base loose power.

Method: UPS

Principle: Occam’s Razor, Sheldon

2 Likes
9

Thank you - I don’t know why I didn’t think of this! I’m not really sure if my internet provider stays up when our power goes out - they (Comcast) actually have a box (not a clue what’s in it!) on the power pole at the end of our driveway - and I’m pretty sure that there’s a red LED that stays on through power outages - perhaps indicating that their equipment is on a UPS. In addition, they now have an automated system that somehow detects when our power goes out and sends us an email that we MIGHT lose internet. I’ll have to contact them to find out if their equipment has continuity during outages, but this would resolve a few issues! Thanks.

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10

My power and internet all went off twice the other day. I got a text from the power company and Xfinity (Comcast) . I also got two more text messages from Xfinity saying they were in the process of restoring the service and then another when is was restored. I got a text from the power company saying they restored power but it would be about 20 for minutes until my home would be restored. My Base came back on line after about 4 minutes after power was turned back on, the four version 1 WCO took another 8-10 min. before they were all on line again.

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