I really feel like the way the detection and cool down period really let me down because the camera only took a couple shots of the person that had stolen items valued at almost $1,500 from my backyard. I only got a couple glimpse of the person with their back facing the camera. It seems that my purchase of two Wyze Cams and Wyze Cam Pan was a waste of my money if they can’t even properly monitor my property. Looks like I may just dump these in the trash or find some other purpose other than a security camera.
Thanks for nothing Wyze Cam Team
-A very disappointed customer
The 12-second clip is good for quick notifications, but if you want to see what happened before and after you need an SD card in the cam with either continuous or event-only recording. I know it doesn’t help after the fact, but if you’re going to depend on them to monitor continuously you definitely need SD cards.
Wyze is also planning to roll out a subscription to remove the 5-minute cool down and/or 12-second clip limitations, so that might be useful in the future when it’s available.
Hopefully the police can use the clip you have to get a rough description even if the face isn’t visible.
That’s a shame. I hope you manage to get your stuff back. No matter what you buy, it’s definitely worth paying attention to how the cameras work first. Most of these cameras with cloud recording don’t have CONTINUOUS cloud recording. It would be expensive to offer that, and would definitely require an ongoing subscription. It may also slow down your internet speed overall, especially if you have multiple cameras continuously recording to the cloud. And a lot of ISPs have a monthly bandwidth limit, and 24/7 HD video takes a lot of bandwidth.
Wyze is ahead of a lot of the similar cameras, since there IS a continuous recording option, by using a Mini-SD card. Of course, that’s not a perfect system either. Someone could still steal the physical camera, and you’d only be left with whatever’s in the cloud. Ultimately, you’ve got to decide what’s acceptable risk for you.
Well, I guess that’s good to hear they’re implementing features to remove the cool down and 12 sec limitation but doesn’t help me at the moment especially since I’m not able to recover anything. Looks like a total loss for me and just gonna trash these good for nothing cameras.
The cameras are good for many things. I have them watching my home and with 64GB SD cards I get several days of playback in HD in the event something happens. These are not marketed as security cameras, but even if they were, no security camera or system is 100% effective. I recommend you don’t throw them out, but instead buy a couple of cheap SD cards to bring their usability closer to your expectations. This route is far less expensive than replacing these with a full NVR solution.
I have to somewhat agree with mikey5112. I was happy with my purchase until I discovered some lapses in notifications today.
I bought two cameras because my car was broken into and I wanted to catch the person doing it. Also, since I was leaving on a 3 week trip I wanted the extra security of knowing what is going on around my house and catch any unwanted activity. I noticed over the last week that there are some notifications or events that are not recorded in the log that should be such as me leaving the house or driving my car out of the drive way or mail delivery etc.
After inquiring about this issue with the Wyze team it turns out that there is a 5 minute cool down period after an event has been recorded. Perhaps this has something to do with storage limits, but I find this to be a big flaw in the usage of this device. I want to receive a notification of any activity whenever it occurs and not just once every 5 minutes. Yes I have an SD card in both cameras and continues recording is enabled as well as the playback but there is also a problem with this. Let me explain….
There are 86400 seconds in a 24 hr period. If an event triggers a recording of only 12 seconds (it will only record for 12 seconds regardless if the activity is still ongoing) it will then stop any further notifications for 5 minutes or 300 seconds. So based on this, the camera is only capable of providing an event notification every 312 seconds. That means in a day it can roughly provide 277 event notifications. That seems like a lot but that equates to 3324 seconds (277*12) of event recording. That means that for the remaining 83076 seconds or 1384.6 minutes or 23.1 hours there are no notifications of events. You get the point.
Now of course it has continuous recording and you have the play back feature and should you be lucky enough that the camera recorded an event of interest you can time stamp and go back and look…… but what are you supposed to do if the event did not get notified and you have to search through 23 hrs of footage on a single speed playback function? Are you really going to sit there for 23 hrs looking for some activity of interest (yes you can cut that down based on sunlight in the video etc.)? What if you were gone for a week and noticed something was missing/broken into are you going to sit through days’ worth of footage? Shouldn’t the camera do this for me and isn’t this what I bought it for?
I am very disappointed that what I thought was a good way of catching perpetrator turns out to be very ineffective. All you need is for the camera to be distracted by a car driving/person walking/animal setting of the event notification and after 12 seconds the perpetrator has 5 minutes of unnotified time which leaves me clueless to when it happened. If I’m up for the challenge of sifting through hours of boring footage this may not be a problem but who has time for that.
Had I known of this characteristic before I would not have purchased these cameras. I also did not see any mention of this in any of the online reviews so perhaps there are other users with a false sense of security and are unknowingly missing important notifications?
Either way I think this is a critical component that the Wyze team needs to address and get it fixed as soon as possible.
Yes that recording function is on but let’s say a car drives buy and the event notification turns on and records for 12 seconds. After 12 seconds it starts the 5 minute cool down period at which point it’s still recording but no event notifications are being alerted. And let’s say after the 12 seconds, one minute later (still within that 5 min cool down window) someone decides to snoop around your backyard or car, you never get a notification of this and unless something was taken you would never know this event happened. So then you have to go through hours of playback looking for said event.
The reason for the 5-minute cool down is to mitigate server costs since they offer this for free, if you look in the roadmap they are currently working on a subscription format that would leave the free version (12-sec videos, 5-minute cool down) but also add some sort of pay service to lengthen videos and/or eliminate the 5-minute cool down. I have added a link below if you would like to see the discussion on that or add to it.
You can also add your ‘vote’ in the upper left of any items in the Roadmap or Wishlist you would like to see.
Unless you’re right there, you won’t be able to stop this even with a notification. Depending on your ISP, it will take as much as 20-30 seconds to receive that notification. It will take local law enforcement at least 10 minutes to respond. You’ll want that video that you have to look through to actually do anything about a crime. After the fact.
I may be skeptical but video cameras only allow you to identify the perpetrator after the fact. They won’t stop crime if the person doesn’t care about being on video. I see this all the time with the Ring Network. People always asking for help with identifying package thieves. The doorbell didn’t stop them.
