Smart Home devices

[Kev D]

That's impressive.  I'll never go to that level of automation.

[Kev D]

Amazon prime day on Oct 13th/14th should be some good deals, hopefully the studios will be reduced, I fancy a stereo pair of those in my living room.

[Kev D]

I just added a ring 4 doorbell camera and show 8 2nd gen to display it on to my slowly growing collection of smart home devices.

I'd read loads of reviews about various doorbells and a lot of them were conflicting about picture quality, so never pulled the trigger on one as a result.  After seeing a ring 2 on someone else's phone I finally decided to get one and its been great so far.  Battery life won't be anywhere near as advertised due to the settings I have meaning it will drain much faster, but I have a spare so should only be a minute to swap it out. If you ever get a battery ring doorbell, definitely buy a spare, they take 7 to 8 hours to charge (and that was from 30% out of the box).  I figure now I have stopped playing with settings often and its just doing its normal thing, I'll get 2 months out of a battery instead of 3 to 6 as can be possible.  Though I have no idea how with the sensible settings most will want, which I think mine are.

Day picture quality is good and night picture quality is far better than I thought it would be. The only annoying thing with it so far is people walking past my yard at night. Even though I have the motion zone set for in my yard, their shadow created by the new LED streetlight opposite is detected as a person in my motion zone, so sets it off.  I've created routines in the amazon app to display the camera motion detection only on the show 8 (and my phone & tablet) so we can see if its anyone actually coming in the yard, rather than an alert on every Alexa in the house as with doorbell presses.  I've only had it 3 weeks but so far I'm impressed with it, so much so I'm now looking at adding camera's to it.

[zoidberg]

Good to see you Kev!!

[Kev D]

Good to see you Kev!!

Thank you 

[Poncho65]

Good to see you Kev!!

 

Been a while

[Kev D]

Been a while

Thank you 

[Kev D]

I just added a ring 4 doorbell camera and show 8 2nd gen to display it on to my slowly growing collection of smart home devices.

I'd read loads of reviews about various doorbells and a lot of them were conflicting about picture quality, so never pulled the trigger on one as a result.  After seeing a ring 2 on someone else's phone I finally decided to get one and its been great so far.  Battery life won't be anywhere near as advertised due to the settings I have meaning it will drain much faster, but I have a spare so should only be a minute to swap it out. If you ever get a battery ring doorbell, definitely buy a spare, they take 7 to 8 hours to charge (and that was from 30% out of the box).  I figure now I have stopped playing with settings often and its just doing its normal thing, I'll get 2 months out of a battery instead of 3 to 6 as can be possible.  Though I have no idea how with the sensible settings most will want, which I think mine are.

Day picture quality is good and night picture quality is far better than I thought it would be. The only annoying thing with it so far is people walking past my yard at night. Even though I have the motion zone set for in my yard, their shadow created by the new LED streetlight opposite is detected as a person in my motion zone, so sets it off.  I've created routines in the amazon app to display the camera motion detection only on the show 8 (and my phone & tablet) so we can see if its anyone actually coming in the yard, rather than an alert on every Alexa in the house as with doorbell presses.  I've only had it 3 weeks but so far I'm impressed with it, so much so I'm now looking at adding camera's to it.

Well I fixed that, by removing it and mounting it at the lower height they recommend of 48".  Would be nice if that instruction was in the box though rather than finding it a week later online and having screw holes to fill in my door frame.

[Whoey]

As it's that big yearly one day sale that lasts over a week now, we added a 5th gen Echo dot...

[Grant Lamontagne]

Nice.

We have a Google Home in every room already (yes, even that one!) and I'm really glad to have them.

I rarely ever use my Echo Dot anymore though.

Def

[Whoey]

 It's supposed to have a better speaker than previous versions, and some sort of WiFi mesh capabilities, but you need a specific router I think. For 25€ it'll do. I want to pair the old ones with the tv or something.

[Kev D]

It's supposed to have a better speaker than previous versions, and some sort of WiFi mesh capabilities, but you need a specific router I think. For 25€ it'll do. I want to pair the old ones with the tv or something.

Yes you need the Eero mesh system, it acts as an extra 100mbit mesh node I believe. They also released the same capability in the full size gen 4 echo's. 

I have the Eero pro 6 mesh system, but haven't noticed any benefit with the echo's adding to it since they released that capability.  The mesh already has such a great signal I was already getting wifi speeds far in excess of 100mbit everywhere already so no idea if it helps or not.    When looking at the devices on my network through the Eero app, they are showing up as Eero built-in devices so assume they do something, maybe??