My fiance and I recently moved into a brand new house, and one of the first things I wanted
to sort out once we moved in was our home security. We live in what I think is a pretty
safe neighbourhood, but you can never be too sure. I’d explored the idea of getting an
alarm installed, but when I researched it, I found that most alarm technology nowadays
is still super old-fashioned.
In fact, I think the entire concept of an alarm is a bit out of date with today’s
world. Think about it, you need someone to actually break a window or breach a door in
order to trigger them, and even when an alarm goes off, say at your neighbour’s house,
how often do you actually pay attention to it?
I wanted something more proactive than an alarm system, and so I decided to kit our
house out with CCTV. But again, I wanted to ensure we were utilising the latest technology,
and not simply paying a CCTV company a crazy amount of money to install something that
we could do ourselves.
Enter the 2C Pro kit by Eufy, which I installed about a week ago, and have been using to monitor
our home ever since. In this video review, I’ll show you what you get in the kit, show
you the process of getting everything setup, show you what it can do, and give you my honest
thoughts after about a week of using it.
OK, so first up let’s unbox this. Now, I’ve purchased this setup in three parts total,
the starter kit which you can see on the screen now, which comes with the HomeBase 2, and
two cameras, but on top of that I purchased an additional two cameras, one right away,
and another a few days later once I’d got this all setup and realised we had a blind
spot that I wanted to cover.
The packaging is actually really nice, way nicer than I would have expected for a security
product. You get some paperwork, which explains the installation process, includes things
like your warranty documents, and also includes some stickers which you can fix to your windows
if you wanted to give any possible burglars a heads-up that your home is being monitored.
You also get these handy little mounting screw positioning stickers, which I’ll cover when
we talk about mounting the cameras. You then get the HomeBase, this very small and very
light little router-looking thing which, appropriately, plugs into your router, and then of course
the two cameras themselves.
The cameras are extremely small, about the size of a bluetooth mouse, but chunky and
weighty, which I’m guessing is mainly the internal battery. You also get power adaptors
for the HomeBase to cover the region that you’re in, and mounting hardware for the
cameras themselves.
In the spare camera box, it’s much the same story, although you are of course not getting
anything related to the HomeBase, just the camera, a mounting bracket, mounting hardware
and some paperwork, all in a very neat little box.
Setting this up was a piece of cake. Firstly, charge your cameras, which you’ll do via
Micro USB. From empty, they need about 4 hours of charge time, and yours will likely come
with some battery life already, but I’d say better to be safe than sorry and give
them all a full charge before doing anything with them. You’ll know the camera is charging
when the blue LED is on, and you’ll know it’s charged when the blue LED goes off.
When you’re ready to set the cameras up, start with the HomeBase. Plug it into the
mains and connect the included ethernet cable to your home router, and install the Eufy
Security app on your iPhone or Android device. Follow the setup process, which will include
registering for a Eufy Security account.
Once you’re into the app, you’ll use the Add Device button to setup first your HomeBase,
and then each camera separately, a setup which takes just a few seconds each, it really is
amazingly simple.
With each camera that you add to the setup, you can choose the surveillance mode that
you’d prefer, either custom, or optimal battery life or optimal surveillance. I’ve
gone for optimal surveillance, and I’m doing so on the highest quality video possible,
2K for these cameras, and the highest video bandwidth possible, which I know is going
to knock that promised 180 day battery life down.
But to be honest, even if it means charging the cameras once every couple of months, rather
than once every 6 months, I’d rather that if it means having the best possible surveillance
setup. Obviously time will tell regarding the battery life, and I’ll look to make
a followup video in a few months time, once I’ve had more time with the cameras.
Oh, and that HomeBase, while it does need to connect via Ethernet for setup, you can
then move it if you wish and connect it via Wifi. I’ve not done that, but it is there
as an option if you need it.
Once you’ve set a camera up, added it to the network and given it a name, it’s time
to mount it, and this is where you’re going to need to do a little bit of DIY. Obviously,
your own personal appetite for drilling into walls is going to determine whether you do
this yourself or rope in a professional, but it’s honestly dead easy, and I’m a novice
DIYer at best.
You’ll need masonry bits for your drill, and Eufy do provide the required fixings in
the form of rawl plugs and screws. You remember that mounting screw positioning sticker that
I mentioned earlier? This is where that comes in handy.
Simply stick that to the wall where you know you want to drill, and then either drill right
through, or mark the wall with a sharpie or similar at the points that you’re going
to cut into. I did find when drilling through the sticker that the sticker would catch,
and then spin round like crazy on the drill bit, so marking up is probably the way to
go.
Make your two holes, insert the plugs, screw the mounting bracket into place, then add
the camera, position it, and that’s it, you’re done.
The cameras are weatherproof, although Eufy do recommend installing them out of direct
sunlight if possible. They also recommend mounting them around 2 to 3 metres from the
ground level. I’ve installed ours about 2 and a half metres up, tall enough that most
people would need some kind of step ladder to access them, but not so high up as to make
them too far away to not be able to capture decent footage.
So, now that we’ve got the cameras setup, let’s talk about day to day usage, and this
is where you notice the first difference between this, and a conventional CCTV setup. This
is what’s known as Smart CCTV.
Conventional CCTV works by constantly recording a given area, taking up massive amounts of
file storage in the process, which is why you often see corner shops with grainy footage
captured at a really low frame rate, it’s because capturing in a higher quality would
mean they could only keep footage for a day or so at a time.
If you’re a cornershop owner or monitoring a busy high street, you want to be constantly
recording, but for the average homeowner, that’s way more than you need. What you
need, is to record only when motion is detected, and this is exactly what the Eufy system aims
to do.
Rather than constantly record, it activates once it detects motion, and the onboard AI
can pretty accurately tell the difference between a human and anything else - car, cat,
dog etc. It isn’t perfect though, although I’ll cover my gripes a bit later in the
review.
When motion is detected by one of the cameras in your network, a couple of things happen.
Firstly, a notification is sent to you and anyone else connected to your camera network,
letting you know that motion has been detected, and where it’s been detected. The next thing
that happens is that the impacted camera begins streaming footage to your HomeBase, which
is where all of your footage is stored.
This footage is known as an ‘event’, and the system is pretty good at capturing only
the footage it needs, but each event can be up to 60 seconds in length. You can view events
in the app, by either looking at all of the events for your network using this button
down at the bottom, or by viewing events for each specific camera.
Events are separated out by day, and in the calendar view you can see a black dot to denote
days where an event happened. The app will tell you where the event happened, the time,
and whether it was a person or simply motion. The events are always stored chronologically,
so it’s easy to find something later on.
You can snooze a camera if you need to, which can be extremely useful if you have a camera
positioned in an area where you know you’re going to have a lot of irrelevant activity
happening. For example, in a couple of weeks, we have to have a window in the house replaced,
and one of our cameras points directly at that window.
It’s a 2 day job, and I don’t want alerts going off constantly, so I could snooze the
camera if I wanted to, while the builders are here. The system would continue to capture
events, but it wouldn’t push out alerts. The other alternative of course is that you
can switch the camera off for a period of time, and you can do that via the app, it’s
just a toggle switch, the same with switching it back on, but you’ll obviously have to
remember to do that.
The cameras record in 2K resolution, and the picture quality is excellent. Obviously, the
better the light source for the cameras to work with, the better the picture you’re
going to get, but images during the day are crisp and clear, with good colour accuracy.
The footage is definitely good enough for you to use to identify someone, and if you
pause on a frame and zoom in, you could actually get a pretty good identifying mugshot of someone
from this, should you need to.
At night, the cameras still do a good job, although night time recording is challenging
for any camera system. You’ve got a few options to choose from at night, and you can
set them individually by camera. You can either have all visual aids switched off, where the
camera will simply continue to record in full colour, as if it were doing so in the daytime.
This could be handy if you’re filming a well illuminated area at night, maybe a place
that’s covered already by a constantly on porch or street light. You can have the camera
use black and white night vision, which is actually very effective, although you do then
lose the ability to make out colour. When this mode is activated, the cameras work in
infra red, so a potential burglar would probably have no idea that they were being filmed.
Finally, you can activate the camera’s built-in spotlight, and record in full colour. I’ll
be honest, I had higher hopes for the spotlight, as it’s really not that bright, but in fairness
when you look at this thing up close, it’s a tiny little light. This is a spotlight,
not a floodlight, so if you’re looking to cover a very dark, large expanse of ground
with one of these, you will either want to opt for a floodlight camera instead, which
Eufy do sell, or install a floodlight nearby.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what I was able to do in our back garden, and a £25 floodlight
from Amazon now sits some 20 cm away from our camera, pointed in the same area, and
makes an enormous difference in terms of light for the camera.
At our back door, the spotlight on the camera does a good enough job as it’s quite a small
space to cover, and at our front door, the camera is pointed down at anyone who would
be walking up the driveway, so again the spotlight is generally sufficient here at night.
The cameras also record audio, and rather than tell you about it, I’ll pause here
for a moment and give you an example.
They also feature two-way communication, so you can speak to people via the cameras. It’s
a bit laggy, and this is also going to be highly dependent on the quality of the signal
wherever you are at the time. Again, I’ll pause and give you a sample.
We’ve had mixed success with this feature, but again, I think this was down to the signal
issues we were having. We were out for lunch when a delivery person tried to drop off a
parcel, and by the time we’d got the notification, connected to the HomeBase via the poor cellular
signal where we were, the person had gone, so we weren’t able to ask them to leave
the parcel on the doorstep.
I think that if we’d been somewhere with good wifi or better cellular reception, we
might have been able to use the feature, as notifications do come through pretty quickly,
and connecting to the livefeed of a camera is really rapid when on wifi, a second or
two at the most.
The cameras and the HomeBase all feature an audible alarm, which you can either set to
trigger automatically if motion is detected, or you can manually trigger from the livefeed.
So I guess if you spotted someone on a camera doing something they shouldn’t be doing,
rather than speaking to them, you just hit the alarm button and a 100db alarm will trigger
until you switch it off.
It’s not a feature we’ve really tested out very much, and I definitely don’t want
the HomeBase screeching an alarm each time that a camera is triggered at night, but I
do understand that some people might want this feature.
Part of the reason why I wouldn’t want this, does bring me to a gripe that I have with
this setup. During the day, you can specify that you only want to be notified of human
motion. So if a cat walks across your driveway for example, no notification, no recording.
But at night, you don’t get the option to choose, activity or motion of any type will
trigger the cameras and send you a notification. This seems silly to me, as animals like cats,
foxes and badgers, all of which live on the land around us, tend to be most active at
night, leading to more false alerts than I’d like.
It means that I’ve had to switch off notifications overnight, which if I’m honest, is the time
when I’m most likely to want to be woken up if something dodgy is happening. I don’t
know if this is a decision by Eufy, or a restriction with night vision and the AI, it would be
great if it could be fixed in a future update.
The other good thing about motion detection is that you can set activity zones, which
can be helpful if you’re in a situation like us where our driveway is shared, and
the camera picks up a little bit of next door’s driveway. I’ve no interest in being alerted
if they walk on their own driveway, but I would like to know if people come over to
ours, and the motion detection zones make this possible.
My only complaint here is that you’re restricted to square or rectangle shapes, you can’t
simply drop points at the boundaries and mark out a non square zone. Again, it would be
awesome if Eufy could add this in a future update, but if this is important to you, it’s
not available at the moment.
As I mentioned earlier, storage is internal, kept on the HomeBase, which takes a feed from
the cameras. The HomeBase comes with 16gb of internal space, with about 1 gig of that
being dedicated to the internal workings of the system, but that remaining 15 gigs or
so is more than enough to hold a lot of clips.
The nice thing about the onboard AI is that it only records for as long as it needs to,
it doesn’t just keep recording after people have left the frame, so in general, you get
the footage you need without clogging the storage up. As I write this review, we’ve
had 4 cameras monitoring us for just under a week, and that’s accumulated a gig of
storage, so in theory, we could be monitored for a few months, 24/7, before the storage
fills up.
And when the storage does fill up, it just begins overwriting the oldest footage. Keep
in mind, if you wish to, you can download any clip at the touch of a button, so if there’s
ever anything that you think you might want to keep hold of, just download it to your
device. Oh, and that internal storage also means you don’t need to pay for any kind
of ongoing subscription, which is a huge bonus these days.
It does mean that if someone were to break into your house and steal the HomeBase, theoretically,
they could disconnect you from the cameras and destroy the footage, but that would be
a pretty targeted intrusion right there.
The kit also works with all of the major smart speakers, including Apple HomeKit.
So, there’s a huge amount to like here, but is there anything I don’t like? My main
gripes are software related, and they’re the ones I’ve already mentioned. I wish
you could have the AI for human detection operate at night because that would cut down
on the false alerts we’re currently getting, and I wish you could set motion detection
zones in shapes other than rectangles.
Also, the motion detection is very good, but not perfect. This morning for example, we
had someone walk across our driveway, right in the path of the driveway camera, and it
didn't activate. Someone walked pretty much the same path some 5 minutes later and it
did. We get more hits than misses to be fair, and I guess the whole point of AI is that
it can improve over time, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
With all that said, I’m really happy with the system so far. The proof of something
like this I guess, is not just how well it captures footage, but also whether it makes
you feel more safe, both in your home and when you’re away from it. And this definitely
does, without a doubt.
I love the fact that, wherever I am, so long as I have a data signal, I can connect to
my home and see in real time all of our entry points. I also love that even when I can’t
access the live feed, the onboard AI is monitoring everything for me, and keeping a lof of everything
that’s happening on our property.
I talk about security a lot in this video, and for good reason, but let’s be real,
you’re gonna spend more time looking to see what time Amazon Prime dropped off your
parcel, or whether Royal Mail really did attempt to deliver to you than anything else. And
this system allows you to do exactly that, plus much more.
What about you? What kind of smart home security are you using? Or, are you not convinced just
yet? Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it.
And as ever, I hope you found this video useful, if you did, do please consider leaving me
a like, and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.