Are there any good home video wireless surveillance systems that meet at least most of these requirements:
I do not want one that needs a paid subscription.
I want wireless cameras, including power and good quality wifi connectivity.
I want motion detection and at least 7 days video storage.
I want at least 8 camera capacity.
This is not necessarily for home security. It is more for home monitoring. I want to know when the house keeper or pet sitter or delivery guy or other contractors come and go when I'm not here (or more importantly, if they do NOT come when they are supposed to).
My last system was cheap but the remote monitoring was too bad to be useful so I sent it back.
I've been using the system made by Eufy (Eufy.com - also on Amazon) and I highly recommend it.
There are a number of different cameras. Most are battery-powered but either have built-in or outboard solar chargers so they run indefinitely. I have two indoors where it's not practical to have a solar charger, and the batteries typically give me 4-6 months to a charge, then a few hours plugged into USB keeps me going another six months or so. They have cameras between HD and 4K (I have the 4K) and at least one is a PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom). Picture quality is excellent during the daytime and acceptable at night. At night, you have the choice of turning on a small integrated LED spotlight if motion is detected and that gives you closer to daytime performance. The cameras have motion detection, an intercom function (so you can talk and listen) and some sort of AI algorithm that tries to distinguish between people, animals and vehicles (it works about 80%). Because they are completely wireless, they are easy to mount anywhere you like, interior or exterior. No cables whatsoever to run.
They are wireless, but it's not WiFi - it's a proprietary protocol that connects the camera to a base station, and the base station can be hard-wired with Ethernet. This helps battery life considerably and has the advantage of not consuming your WiFi capacity. It works fine even through network outages - and even power outages (if your base station is on a UPS). Once setup, I've never had a connectivity problem. The base stations have a slot for a hard drive - out of the box, there's something like 64G of memory in the device, but you can install whatever size hard drive you like. I ended up with two base stations in my home to cover the range I need. You can have an unlimited number of cameras per base station, though I'd worry that if you were recording off multiple cameras at the same time, you might start running out of bandwidth at about 8 cameras. I have six on one of my base stations and never had an issue.
The mobile apps are okay in my opinion. The system is good at sending alerts when something happens...often, I'll see the popup on my Apple Watch (it's a still clip with whatever the camera detected) and if I want to check it out, I just open the app on my phone or iPad and can either watch the clip of the event or I can watch live. The sensitivity of the sensors is such that a rabbit wandering onto my property from about 60 feet at night will trigger it. The number of false alarms from things like the wind causing trees to shuffle around in the breeze are small. I've used the process literally all over the world and it's always worked reliably, so long as I'm connected by cellular. The only thing that impedes playback is if your home might lost Internet connectivity...recording still happens - you just can't access your base stations remotely in that case.
In addition to my home, I have this same kind of setup in the hangar so I can keep track of my airplane. I put the base station there on a tiny UPS battery backup so that I'm confident I can monitor and record even in power outages. I happen to have WiFi near my hangar, but a cellular solution wouldn't be hard to rig up if you needed that.
There's no paid subscription required - the app you use for monitoring is totally free, and it works by connecting through the internet to those base stations I described.
To be clear, this isn't about continuous monitoring. The cameras have motion sensors and any time they detect motion, they will record a video clip. You can also connect to any camera through the app and watch the live feed, but it's not like a wired system that can record continuously. Because it's more of an "event based" system, the storage in the base station lasts nearly forever - the 2TB disk I have in one of mine is only about 20% full after over a year of recording, so you can keep events nearly forever without much effort. I thought I wanted continuous recording, but after living with the Eufy, the tradeoff is worth it.
