We've caught raccoons, coyotes, hawks, rabbits and rats on our Ring camera.
No bobcats, bears, dear or foxes.
Mountain lions have wandered into backyards within a couple of miles.
This turkey vulture found some road kill right in front of our house. It's the only one I've seen that wasn't in the wilderness.
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I built this perch outside our front window. The hummingbirds love it. We'll, this bully anyways. The wife has 6 dang hummingbird feeders. 3 in front, 3 in back.
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We've had a ring doorbell video cam since their early invention. My wife had been asking me about home security at the time. I was being cheap and wasn't interested in paying a large monthly fee. The ring doorbell development had just gotten past the early adopters who were, essentially, beta testers. Many owners at the time were upset that firmware updates were reseting their doorbells, causing them to have to go through first time setup all over again. Lol! Fortunately, we missed that headache. I think we paid close to $180 for ours at the time.
I checked into getting ring security cameras at the same time. I seem to recall the cost was about $250 each. We would have needed a minimum of 6 to cover every part of the outside of our house. I did not want to spend that much on it. And, I would have had to run power to them which is a lot of work for a lazy person like me. Lol! So, I stopped at the one doorbell cam.
Ahead of Christmas, I started checking out lightbulb security cams. Some guy did an awesome YT video comparing all the pros and cons of each lightbulb video camera option and he ranked them. One of the most expensive options had a lousy ability to connect to wifi. Paying more does not always get better performance. I bought the more expensive model of the Symynelec 5G dual band lightbulb video cams because it is relatively feature rich. I purchased during Cyber Monday via Amazon because it was cheaper than buying direct through the Symynelec website. I'm not sure it was any cheaper than their typical Amazon price. I bought 4x 2-packs for 8 cams to replace 2 floodlights at each corner of our house. The price came out to roughly $48 before tax, per lightbulb cam.
I also purchased 4x 2-packs of 128GB mini SD cards for recording, so I don't have to pay for extra cloud service, which came to about $96 total, pretax. Finally, I bought two lightbulb socket splitters and a 2-pack of motion sensor flood lamps for the front corners of the house ($42).
The Symynelec app works well on iOS via our iPhones or iPads. It's also supposed to be compatible with Android. It sort of works on Mac but turns the image sideways if you try to enlarge it. Lol! It's, obviously, designed to work on phones and tablets. I don't even know if there's a Windows option.
The biggest con is the sound recording is noisy. I think the Christmas lights may be causing interference. It's not as if a cheap mike is going to get great sound recording from a long distance anyway. When, the weather gets warm, I'll crank up a 100 watt amp rig, point it one of the cams and see what happens.
The cameras can rotate via app control, up, down, left, right. The lights can be turned on manually or set to turn on when motion is detected. The motion detection is activated by any movement in the frame of the camera. cars, animals, moving shadows, blowing snow. But, they only record for brief time until the motion stops. Night recording via IR shows as black and white and color when the cam lights are on.
I did not like the front cam lights turning on each time a car drove past the house, so I panned the cams close to the house. But, I missed the longer views. So, I panned them back out to the street and switch them to night infrared mode. That's why, just tonight, I added two motion sensor floodlights to the front corners of the house. The floods turn on automatically if someone approaches the house and NOT when cars drive by on the street. The back cam lights are set to turn on with motion which happens when snow blows. Our tree cover keeps the lights from annoying the neighbors.
Obviously, these cheap cams are not the quality of the more expensive, dedicated security cams. But, they get the job done for a low investment of $522 (pretax) for all of this gear and no monthly fee.
I had my wife open this Symynelec video cam present early so my son and I could climb ladders to install these while the weather is still decent. I also bought a ring security package, sensors, break-in detection, etc, for installation inside that my wife will open on Christmas.
Do we really need all this stuff? Probably not. But, my wife has always wanted it. And, it's only a matter of time before all this wildlife becomes violent. When I become part of the food chain, I want it caught on video.
This is what it looked like before the motion sensor floodlights were added…
