Wyze Outdoor Cam on an unserviced site

I’m considering the purchase of an outdoor Wyzecam and solar panel for an unserviced site. The site has periodic power and internet connectivity, when I’m onsite and have the generator running, but not full time. I’m interested in knowing if anyone has any experience/guidance to share for such a setup.

I don’t need notification for activity (so full time internet not essential on my end), but I don’t know what the system itself needs for support.

Can such a setup work independently, with weekly tending, checking on-device recordings, etc.? Solar seems to provide ample power for the camera itself to run, and all I need is motion-activated recording that I can access by wifi when onsite.

I see that someone has recommended a trailcam for a similar purpose, but that would involve regular battery changes and easy physical access to the SD card. I wouldn’t be able to check the camera in my app to see if any recordings had occurred, or to review/download them.

Any thoughts, guidance or experience in doing this?

If you set the cam to scheduled recording and events only, it should record them locally and they should be accessible in the app. Haven’t tested this though, so someone can confirm they are accessible.

It will most likely stay charged with a solar panel as long as it’s sunny.

When the cam starts up it needs internet connection to initialize, but it should continue recording locally when it’s lost. Not sure if it will fully recover when internet is restored, as most Wyze devices have some trouble with that, though recent firmware updates are helping significantly.

In my experience if the base station losses power, the cam constantly tries to connect and kills its battery super quickly. Though im not sure if this happens always, and you may be able to just put the cam in travel mode. I haven’t used travel mode, so someone else would have to help with that.

1 Like

That’s useful information. I was unaware of travel mode.

The only overview of travel mode that I could find was on YouTube, and it’s about two years old. Do you happen to know, or does anyone know, if you can do motion detection in travel mode? It appears that originally you couldn’t, but that would be kind of important for me.

Thanks in advance.

I think travel mode is strictly live view when on Bluetooth connection with your phone, but you may be able to view recorded stuff for the sd card through the app. Do you know @R.Good?

Thanks for the tag @IEatBeans. Unfortunately the one device in the Wyze ecosystem I have not dove deep into is the WCO. @Antonius is usually my WCO go to. :wink:

1 Like

Travel mode info in this link I tried it once and didn’t like it. You need to set it up at the location of the base, then connect your phone wi-fi to the cams wi-fi signal. I don’t think scheduled event recording will work either without a wi-fi signal from the base but I have never tried it. I do a lot of scheduled event recording with the cams at home with a steady connection to the base and I think that if the base is not powered and sending a wi-fi signal the cam will show off-line.

2 Likes

Yea, so looks like this product isn’t Gunna be for you @allan. Sorry! Wyze has said they hope to move towards more local control in a recent ama, and maybe with the upcoming matter initiative that will help make stuff like this more possible.

I have the Wyze cam outdoor located abut 300 feet from my cabin. I use a WiFi extender that I am pleased with.

Several months ago I installed the solar panel that I bought through Amazon. It works great. The battery is always 98%+. It will be interesting to see how it works in the cloudy winter time.

All the features work just fine.

Typically, an Outdoor Camera needs a charge every month or two. So as long as you get a couple sunny days in that time, you should be fine. :slight_smile:

Unless of course you start doing something like live streaming the cam, lol.