There’s plenty going on at the old folks home. We went out to dinner with neighbors yesterday. We’re going to a circle lunch/dinner a little later today. Friday was the last day our neighborhood pool is open. Danita and I decided to buy a swim membership for her at the Columbia indoor pool near us. We’ve resisted in the past because it’s a one-year minimum, not exactly cheap, and it’s redundant to have access to two pools when our neighborhood pool is open. But the winter months are long, and the exercise Danita enjoys is swimming. After we decided to go ahead with the membership, we learned that Danita can freeze her membership for 3 months. When the one-year plus 3 months are up, she’ll be on month-to-month and can cancel the member ship after the neighborhood pool opens in 2021. Danita’s taking great advantage of the pool. She’s already attended one swim exercise class, and is planning several more for the next week.
When we went to Italy, we turned the security cameras and light timers on. Normally, we get a motion warning email when the lights turn on. It didn’t take long for us to notice that we weren’t getting the emails. That makes the cameras pretty useless. When we got home, I found that Gmail has improved their security and the camera isn’t going to keep up. After 5 years, updates are no longer being offered. New security cameras are required. While surveying the market, I learned that many inexpensive cameras were receiving excellent reviews, but suffered from a defect. They would drop their WiFi connections and not try to reconnect. The only remedy is to cycle their power. This seems like a pretty serious limitation to me, especially given that it’s very possible to have a short power outage that would disconnect all the security cameras. I can’t see how these cameras got an even acceptable review.
I decided to buy one Nest camera, being careful to keep the box in case I want to return it. Nest is owned by Google, so updates should be available for a good long while. It seems to be well designed. It definitely reconnects if it looses the WiFi connection. It seems to work well, but it has two drawbacks. The first is the monthly cost. Advanced detection and saved video is only for those who pay the monthly fee. The annual fee is about the same cost as the camera. Without paying the fee, one can get a less sophisticated motion detection and watch live video, but the only thing saved is a snapshot, which is deleted after 3 hours. The second is that motion detection is done at the server. This means video is streamed to the server whether the camera is armed or not. That’s a privacy concern. Fortunately, our Verizon FIOS internet service gets us a lot of upload bandwidth, so having multiple cameras streaming video won’t be limited by our internet bandwidth. Nest is still being merged with Google and even support personnel are sometimes unsure of some details of the camera’s operation.
So far, the camera’s operation seems good. We haven’t received even one false alarm. We decided we can forego the advanced features except when we’re on an extended trip. That limits the fee to only several months a year. The camera’s nicest feature is automatic arming. The Nest server geofences our phones so the camera is automatically armed when both of us aren’t home. (That assumes I don’t forget my phone and leave it at home, as I did this morning.) We’re still evaluating. I want to create some alarms to see how it behaves when a phone is turned off and do a few other tests. Plus I want to just let it run and get more confidence in how it behaves. So far we like the Nest enough to forgive its shortcomings.
I hope this finds everybody doing well.