I have used an Arlo system for several years now. I have two Arlo 2's with base station and one Arlo 2 Pro (also using the old base station). All three are running on AC with the battery just as a backup,
The 2 Pro has had both detection and connection issues ever since I bought it a couple years ago. They would never warranty it. Now one of my original Arlo 2's is having power issues.
My question for anyone that has used them, should I consider upgrading to a newer ARLO system with the new base station and keep my one good camera or should I consider completely switching everything to another style.
I did some digging online found a couple AC powered camera systems that connect by WIFI
Nightowl WNC2-841 and HeimVision HM241A that are reasonably priced and have an NVR.
I considered a complete wired system since my outside outlets are surface mounted using conduit but I'm not sure it would be good to run a data cable in with the electrical wire.
I surface mounted the power because of my old house having plaster and lathe walls and having multiple layers of wood siding under my aluminum siding. A major pain even trying to figure out where to safely drill through.
Putting camera screenshots or a video feed to my Hubitat dashboard would be nice, but I haven't had it all this time anyway, so not that big of a deal.
Arlo's field of view is 130 degrees. The newer ones go even higher then that. With that in mind don't forget that any new system you get would likely need to use more cameras. The new Arlo base stations allow for local recording so that means it is basically a NVR. That doesn't help with getting the camera data to Hubitat though.
My suggestion would be to look for something that supports POE if you are going to go wired with a NVR. That way you can avoid having to worry about outlets at all. Reolink is also a pretty good, and there are several good other options.
Keep in mind that many wired systems use motion based detection instead of PIR, so you will likely get more false alerts as well. Also don't forget to look at the FPS. Allot of wired systems reduce their FPS the more cameras are connected.
I have Arlo Q+ POE cameras inside, Nest doorbell WiFi, Ring Floodlight camera WiFi, and Blue Iris (mostly Dahua Starlight cameras outside with a few Amcrest cameras inside and out) all of my BI cameras are POE. I really like the BI integration to Hubitat using BI Control which allows Hubitat sync BI profiles with Hubitat's modes which allows me to have the indoor cameras record all the time and alert on motion only when we are away and at night and the outdoor to always record but to alert differently based on the profile. BI will work with many different camera manufacturers as long as the cameras are RTSP or NVIF compliant, there are a lot of indoor/outdoor WiFi options I just haven't tested any on BI since I have run Ethernet cables to all locations although I am using a Unifi gateway in our shed to get Ethernet out there to a POE switch in the shed.
With Arlo I'm relying on IFTTT to arm/disarm the Arlo based on Hubitat virtual switches I control based on modes which works most of the time to have them record on motion or not as expected.
The only downside to the way I use BI is I use OpenVPN for remote access so if I get an alert I need to launch OpenVPN and turn on the tunnel then open the BI app to see what's going on, there is NGROK integration which you could use with BI to make that work without the VPN tunnel connection without opening your system to much like you would if you used port forwarding.
I use my Arlos via tinyCam which gives me motion and object (person, face, vehicle, pet) detection with triggers into Hubitat via a custom app. It works pretty nicely and also allows live video in a dashboard via the built in webserver. TinyCam also provides local/NVR or cloud/ftp recording.
I just replaced my 4 Arlo pro 2s with 4 Wyze 3 cams only problem is they don’t have an the rtsp software for the 3s yet so I can’t integrate them with BI. But I do like them especially the starlight night vision. I also have 4 Eufy 2k cams on the inside that do rtsp Natively, issue my qnap to record to I like them better then my Wyze cams I wish Eufy would make outside versions of their 2k cams.
Agree with that. If Eufy could make there outdoor cameras allow continuous power i think they would smoke arlo now. The ability foe them to record locally and output a rstp stream is nice. I have 24/7 recording to both a sd card in each indoor camers SD Card and to a Motion based server.
