Earlier this year my wife and I decided to get a doorbell cam and chose to go with the
Ring Pro 2 video doorbell. Several months after that we decided to add some more cameras around
the exterior of our house and since we had already gotten ourselves into the Ring Ecosystem we bought
some battery powered Ring Stick Up Cams which we've been really happy with. In addition to
those cameras we also bought the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro to monitor the gate on the side of
our house and to also replace a normal floodlight that was a piece of crap and never worked right.
The Floodlight Cam Wired Pro has "wired" in it's name because it's powered by your
homes existing wiring. Ring does also have a battery powered spotlight cam if you have an
area you'd like to add a light to but do not have wiring at that location.
The majority of you watching this video are probably most curious to see the video quality
and how well the Floodlight Cam Pro lights things up so let's take a look at that first
and then we'll get into the installation and some of the cameras other features.
The Floodlight Cam Pro sports a 1080p
full HD camera with a 140 degree horizontal by 80 degree vertical field of view.
I positioned our Floodlight Cam Pro next to our garage
man door which is toward the back of our garage
and as you can see it gives us a nice view of our side yard here and the image is sharp and clear.
Switching over to Night Vision... the infrared emitters do a nice job
lighting things up directly in front of the camera but the periphery is pretty dark so
not a great showing in my opinion in that department.
However,
this is also a floodlight and most likely you're going to have the Motion Activated Lights setting
toggled on so when the Floodlight Cam detects motion at night the lights will
come on just like they did here when it detected a little bunny rabbit hopping through our yard.
We have the lights set to their maximum brightness and as you can see they do a great
job illuminating the cameras entire field of view giving you a nice clear look at what's going on.
The lights are rated at 2000 lumens and can be adjusted to point where ever you need them.
The Floodlight Cam Pro has two way talk just like Ring's doorbell cams and the Stick Up Cams we own,
allowing you to hear what's going on as well as talk with anyone that may be outside.
Hello down there.
Hi!
How are you doing out there?
I'm doing good.
Are you having fun?
Yep.
Oh good.
Ok, thanks. We'll talk to you later.
Bye.
Similar to our other Ring cameras the further away a subject is from
the camera's mic the worse the sound quality is.
Standing here in this corner I'm about 25 feet (7.62 meters) away from the camera,
and as you can tell the sound quality isn't really all that fantastic.
The mic appears to be omni-directional as it seems to pick up sound the same whether
the subject is directly in front of the camera or off to either side.
So what I've done here is I've drawn an arc on the ground about 14 feet away from the camera.
What I want to show you is that as I walk around here, as long as long as I'm facing toward the
camera and my voice is directed in that direction, you should be able to hear me the same pretty
much no matter where I'm at as I walk around since it uses an omni-directional microphone.
The audio quality improves dramatically the closer someone speaking is
to the camera. In my testing I found the optimal range is about 10' and closer.
Installing the Floodlight Cam Pro is about as simple as it gets.
Obviously you'll first need to remove your existing light fixture.
I first turned off the power to my light fixture by switching off the breaker at our electrical
panel and then got to work removing our old floodlight from it's mount on the side of our
house. I then installed this metal mounting bar that's included with the Floodlight Cam
to the electrical box... then installed the mounting plate to that bar with this
single screw here in the center. It was then time to wire the floodlight cam up.
Ring has designed this little hook onto the mounting plate which you loop this strap
from the Floodlight Cam onto and it holds the fixture in place so you
can use both hands to connect the wires. You simply connect the black wire on the
Floodlight Cam to the black wire in your box... and then white to white
and finally the green to ground; which most of the time is just a bare copper wire.
Once you've got the wiring all done you cram all the slack back into the box and place
the Floodlight Cam onto the mounting plate and secure it in place with the included cap nuts.
If you remove the bit from the orange handled screw driver included with the Floodlight Cam Pro
you can use it to secure the caps to the Floodlight Cam.
With that I turned the power back on and began setting up our Floodlight Cam via the Ring App.
If you're familiar with Ring products then you already know that setting them
up is very simple. You Go into the app, tap the settings icon in the upper left and tap on Set Up
a Device. You then tap on Security Cams and the app will then prompt you to scan the QR code on
the Floodlight Cam or the one included on the installation instructions. I scanned that one
and the next step was to set the location where I was installing the floodlight cam.
Since I already have other Ring cameras my address was already input here so I selected
it and then tapped Continue. From there you just follow the instructions in the app to connect
the Floodlight Cam Pro to your home network and get it all set up and put into service.
Once your Floodlight Cam is all set up and running you can access it
just like you would any of your other Ring cameras.
Here we can scrub through the timeline to see past recorded events... or tap on the
Play button in the preview window or the Live button next to the timeline to get a live view.
While in live view we have some different options we can play with. The little house icon here on
the left brings up the controls for turning the lights on and off as well as the siren controls.
The green button turns the Two Way Talk feature on and we can then use the icons
here on the right to mute the mic or the sound as we choose. The plus sign gives us some quick
controls for activating the siren, as well as turning the lights on and off
and we can even share what our camera is seeing with friends and family.
The red hang up button here will then end our Live View session.
Tapping on the gear icon in the upper right
takes us to our settings for this camera where we can use this toggle to turn the
floodlights on and off as well as enable and disable motion detection and motion alerts.
This Motion warning feature is apparently available on
other Ring devices, but not the Floodlight Cam Pro.
Here we can also activate the Siren with this red button
and access the live view with this blue button.
There's a lot of other options and settings here in the app for the Floodlight Cam Pro but I feel
if you're looking at purchasing one of these you most likely already have a Ring Doorbell or
other Ring products and are familiar with the App and the different options for your Ring devices
so I'm just going to go over the few that are more or less specific to the Floodlight Cam.
If we go into Motion Settings the first option is where you can set your Motion Zones. Here
you drag the pick points around the preview picture to highlight in blue the areas you
want motion to be detected in. Anything outside this blue area will be ignored.
You can set up to 3 motion zones if you need more than a single zone.
Backing out to the Motion Settings... we have motion sensitivity... Here you can make it more
or less sensitive using this slider. I've just left it at the default which I feel works great.
3D Motion Detection is a fairly new feature Ring has added to some of it's cameras and
it's one that I think is neat but at the same time I don't feel is really
all that useful. You setup where your camera is positioned on your house and the direction it's
facing and then when you're reviewing footage a little Birds Eye View window will appear
showing you an approximation of where the motion was taking place on your property.
Again I think this is neat but I don't see how it's really that helpful
since you can see where the motion is and what's going on in the video.
The last setting I want to look at before we wrap this video up is the
Light Settings under Device Settings.
In Light Settings we can toggle the Motion activation for the lights on and off.
Narrow and widen the motion zone for the lights.
Adjust how long the lights stay on when motion is detected.
Change the brightness of the lights when they turn on.
And even set up schedules to turn the lights on and off.