I recently got a Doorbell Pro, after having other Wyze cameras, and am happy with it. I’m a little concerned, though, that I came out this morning to find my garbage knocked over and strewn about, a common problem here with raccoons. I looked up notifications out of curiosity but the camera completely missed it, maybe 10 feet straight in front of my front door. I see one notification where the bin is upright, another a couple of hours later where it’s knocked over and strewn. I get lots of other notifications, including cars driving past. I’m really only concerned what else I’m missing. Any ideas?
Turn the sensitivity up
Thanks, will try. This reminded me I turned it down to reduce the number of alerts that are just passing cars. I like this doorbell better than the Arlo I ditched - it kept going offline - but I miss the ability to set detection zones. Will turn up sensitivity.
Try medium ?
Thanks. I thought I had it at a quarter but it was at medium. I turned it up to 3/4. Looking at the clips, I think it went offline or something because there is a 3-hour gap starting around 2:45 am, with lots of activations before and after the gap. Possible it was a wifi outage but I don’t like that at all.
It’s mostly because the VDBPro uses PIR sensors, so it turns on when there is enough of a heat change close enough. In this case, a raccoon out to your street does not emit enough heat for the PIR sensor to trigger at that distance…they’re too small and too far away. The reason it didn’t trigger for the garbage can is because even though it is much larger, and causes a lot of motion when it tips over, it has no body heat, so the PIR sensors aren’t triggered.
If you had the regular Doorbell or a V3 cam watching that area with high enough sensitivity and no detection zone excluding it, then it is much more likely they would have recorded it (obviously if you have a very big property and it was REALLY far away, of course even those have their limits too…but I am talking about an average urban or suburban residence). Although, detection does decrease a little in low-light conditions, so we have to consider some of that too. Basically, it depends (and that’s not a limitation of Wyze, but of ALL cameras using either PIR or pixel-based detections).
The bright side of the Pro version is that it is more likely to only record people coming up to your house and ignore other things like leaves, tree branches in the distance, headlights, etc…so in that sense it is more targeted and accurate in it’s way, but on the down side, it won’t record some things like this that have low heat signatures far away.
I have a VDBPro…and I love it, but I also overlap the view of the front of my house with a V3 cam in case there is something like this I want to go back and watch on the SD card.
That is very helpful, thanks!