Sensor Bridge location

Hey guys,

I am about to purchase a Sensor Kit for my home but I was a little confused regarding the Sensor Bridge and the Wyze Cam which it would get plugged behind in.

Does the Wyze Cam (and the Sensor Bridge plugged behind it) need to be in the same room as the motion & contact sensors? I don’t have any cameras inside the rooms of my house, just in the garage. Can I plug in the Sensor Bridge to the camera that’s in the garage and use the contact and motion sensors that will be inside?

With all the metal in a typical garage, the closer the better. If you have a camera in the garage, then that is perfect for sensors in the garage, but sensors in the house had better be close if the bridge is out in the garage. And that’s a connecting garage.

As a for-instance on metal, my router is just on the other side of the connecting garage wall. I can’t place a cam on the outside garage wall in the window (which is maybe 25 feet), because just the other side of the wall from my router is my furnace & it’s duct work, plus my water heater. Might as well be a wall of metal. Makes communication with the cam difficult at best. Many garage doors are metal. Then there are metal rails, pipe, wiring to a CB panel… All killers to signal strength.

Heck, I had to put my contact sensor on TOP of the garage door to clear enough metal to get to a bridge in a ‘very-close-but-inside-the-house cam’ to pick up the sensor’s signal. It was so blocked by the door & rails it would only read ‘open’ when it cleared the rails. It wouldn’t show closed until I moved it.

Metal is a bg thing to think about when communicating between the garage and any other location.

3 Likes

+1 re the advice from NewsHound. Metal is bad.

My first deployment of a sensor was on my garage door. The V2 cam with the bridge was in the kitchen, at the rear of the house. The distance between the two was too great. No sensing whatsoever.

I relocated the camera to the dining room, which is at the front of the house, adjacent to the attached garage. Bridge-sensor separation about 10 feet, through the common wall between garage and house interior. Wall construction is plaster & lath on the interior, cement parging over particle board on the garage side. with blown cellulose insulation in between. (All those materials will attenuate the RF transmitted by the sensor).

At first, I thought it was working OK, but after putting it into service, the sensor function was unreliable. My garage door is the really old kind with a pair of counterweights (one on each side of the door) comprising big steel cylinders full of concrete that go up and down. When the door is closed, the counterweight rises up, and was right next to where I had mounted the sensor on the side of the door near the top. And right next to the sensor, blocking the radio waves from the sensor to the bridge. Doh!

I relocated the sensor and the magnet to the top of the door, away from the counterweight. Although the distance between sensor and bridge is now a bit longer, the operation is more reliable.

The operating range of the bridge is really quite limited.
Metal in the way - bad. Intervening walls - bad.

3 Likes