Building a House - thinking of using the Pro 5S 2K to monitor remotely

[RunnerMrD]

We're about to start building a new house. They will demolish our current home and build a new one in it's place. I was thinking of installing a camera in a neighbor's tree and he offered to let me use his wifi. Thought it would be cool to be able to watch progress remotely and in the end pull together some sort of time lapse of the project.

How long can footage be retained? I think I read 30 days. Can I export monthly?

In the back of the house, the best location for a second camera is out of range for my neighbor's wifi. I think I read that the camera has onboard storage. Do you think that would be practical for me to download every month or two manually?

[StephenB]

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@RunnerMrD wrote:

I think I read that the camera has onboard storage. 

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It does not.  The Go 2 (which connects over cellular) is the only Arlo camera with onboard storage.

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@RunnerMrD wrote:

How long can footage be retained? I think I read 30 days. Can I export monthly?

Do you think that would be practical for me to download every month or two manually?

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Monthly is right on the edge of the retention for the cloud storage.  Best to download every 2 weeks or so. 

Also, your cameras would likely be too far away to reliably detect motion at the construction site.  The passive infrared (PIR) sensors only have a range of 20-25 feet.  They will pick up some motion (particularly vehicles) from further away, but not that reliably.

Unfortunately there is no way to schedule recordings to build a time-lapse later on.  You'd need to access the cameras regularly from the app and make a manual recording for that to work.

Another factor is battery drain.  If the cameras do end up triggering frequently, you would need to recharge them during the project.

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@RunnerMrD wrote:

In the back of the house, the best location for a second camera is out of range for my neighbor's wifi. 

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The Go 2 camera is an option, though you'd need a data plan for it (as well as an Arlo Secure Subscription).

The other option is to somehow extend the neighbor's wifi (which might not be practical).  There are some outdoor wifi extenders you could use, but they would need to be powered somehow.