New 5-Camera System: First Impressions

[Astroboy86]

About ten years ago, my wife and I installed a Leviton structured wiring panel and wired our 2-story house for data & phones (Cat-5e) and video (RG-6 quad-shield).  I really wasn't up for another cable-pulling effort to run signal and/or power for a wired video surveillance system, although I've been looking at various such products for several years now.

Amazon offered a "Black Friday Week" discount on all the Arlo packages, so I ordered the 5-camera system (base w/1 camera, plus 4 add-on cameras) for the same price they normally charge for the 4-camera setup.  It came in this past Monday and I immediately installed three cameras indoors on the magnetic mounts.  I placed one in our front hallway covering the front door and stairs, and another in the living room (next to our alarm system motion detector) covering the front windows, part of the dining room, and part of the front hallway/stairs looking through double pocket doors on the opposite side of the room.  The third camera was mounted in the kitchen, also next to an alarm motion detector, covering the kitchen bay windows, back door, and looking into the family room.

The base unit sits just below our structured wiring panel on the second floor, close to the center of the house, plugged into a Netgear 8-port switch.  It's about 20-ft. and two walls away from the Apple Airport Extreme in my home office, which serves as the main router and WiFi access point. 

All three cams are mounted about 8-ft high and I added a rule to record on the living room camera whenever the hallway camera detects motion.  We turn them on when we go upstairs for the night and have captured some very satisfactory clips of our two cats going up & down the stairs and wandering around in the LR & kitchen.  I've also been quite pleased with the performance of the Arlo app on our two iPhones, iPad, and web portal on our iMac and MacBook Pro.  (I've also kudo'd the "Allow Multiple Concurrent Logins" suggestion on the Arlo Idea Exchange, as this capability is badly needed.) 

As happy as we are with the indoor cameras, the ones we mounted outdoors are another matter entirely!  I'll detail that experience further in a separate post. 

[Astroboy86]

Here's the follow-up detailing our experience with the outdoor cameras.  Last Tuesday, I mounted one on the soffit above the kitchen bay windows looking toward the deck and back door, using the VideoSecu mount from Amazon ($16.99 for a 2-pack).  The camera also catches our garden shed and part of the backyard.  We've had practically zero false alarms on this cam, although it doesn't start recording a person approaching the back door as soon as I'd like due to the delay and the fact that such an approach means walking toward the camera instead of across its path.

The driveway camera, on the other hand, has been nothing but a nightmare from the start.  Also on Tuesday, I temp-mounted one of the magnetic bases in various spots using duct tape until I found a position that seemed to provide the best compromise between coverage and false-triggers.  The best spot seemed to be on the corner of the garage about 9-ft up, looking across the driveway and down nearly 45º (aimed as low as possible).  This provides an acceptable view of both cars and the approach to our front door, so I attached the mag-mount to the vinyl siding corner post with a couple of 3M Command strips.  Unfortunately, the lack of motion detection zone masking means the camera is still triggered by every single car that drives past our house.  After two days of this, the camera battery was already down a bar, so a better solution was obviously needed.  I can certainly appreciate the frustration expressed by Hula_Rock and others regarding the very poor implementation of motion sensing on a camera that otherwise seems very well-designed for outdoor use.

On Wednesday, I relocated the kitchen camera to the front porch, since we plan to replace that one with an Arlo Q or some other camera with 2-way audio.  I turned motion sensing all the way down on the first driveway cam and created a rule to have that camera record whenever the front porch cam detects motion.  I used the other VideoSecu mount to hang the porch cam from a soffit, but even with all the extension poles, the lowest I could get it is 11-ft above the ground.  To limit motion sensing on the street, the camera points downward about 30º from vertical, so steep that it mostly gets the top of our heads and can only see the cars from the front bumpers to about the top of the windshields.  Even with this arrangement, it still triggers on passing cars about a dozen or more times per day.

My next attempt to make this work will require the Arlo table/ceiling mount, which has a ball on a stalk instead of the metal hemisphere.  This will allow me to mount the porch camera on the opposite front corner of the garage at the same 9-ft height, but aimed bit lower.  I suspect this arrangment will still allow the camera to detect some motion from passing cars, but wait, there's more!

Back in May, on a Forum Discussions/Motion Detection thread titled Privacy Masking, Stubee mentioned he was trying out a mechanical masking solution using a short tube placed over the motion detector "ball" to limit the motion detection field of view without affecting the camera's FOV.   He never followed-up with how well this worked, so I grabbed a piece of scrap 3/4" diameter PVC pipe from my garage junk drawer and marked off 1/4" ticks along its length.

Holding the tube against the front of the camera while watching live view reveals that on the side of the ball nearest the lens, anything over 1/2" is visible in the FOV.  On the side opposite the lens, however, (nearest the edge of the camera housing), the tube can be up to 1.5" long without blocking the view.  Therefore, I plan to cut a piece of this PVC pipe in roughly the same shape as those shields they place over each lamp in a traffic signal, fasten it to the front of the unit with a bit of outdoor mounting tape, and position the camera upside-down on the table/ceiling mount when it comes in tomorrow.

I'll start out for a day or two without the shield in place to establish a performance baseline, then attach it and see if it improves resistance to motion-triggering by passing cars.  After that, I'll follow-up with a brief report and photos.

[TomMac]

If your picking up cars going by in the street ( unless a small front yard area ) the field of view is prob to much which leads to many false triggers.

The PIR seems to be more sensitive on the corners and edges to movement, that's prob the main reason the subject should be across the fields of view as opposed to directly into it.

However mounted, I found a max view of about 25+ ft to be the best for max range and less false triggers.

\good luck