I am officially moved out of my house into temporary living quarters while our new house is finished up. My Home app is in chaos as almost everything is offline. I am slowly getting a few essential HomeKit items back up and running in our temporary spot. However, one of the items I sold with the house was my beloved eufyCam Pro. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I am switching to the Nest Cam with Floodlight for the new house due to a continuous recording option. As I said goodbye to it, I want to give my parting thoughts for one of the best outdoor HomeKit camera options.
HomeKit Weekly is a series focused on smart home accessories, automation tips and tricks, and everything to do with Apple’s smart home framework.
Why eufyCam?
One of the smart home questions I get asked most often is about outdoor cameras. It seems like that’s one of the first types of equipment people look to install when getting started with smart home technology to solve problems around security. eufyCam has been a popular option for a couple of reasons:
Battery powered
Instead of running wires in hard-to-reach locations, the eufyCams are entirely battery powered. If you want to avoid the need to charge, you can install a solar panel adaptor that works extremely well in my experience. As long as you get a decent amount of sunlight, it’s fairly easy to keep it fully charged. After installing one of them in early 2021, I’ve had great luck with it. It gets sun for about half of the day, and I’ve had the near 100% for the entire time.
So for people looking for an easy-to-install-in camera setup, it’s hard to understate the benefit of battery-powered vs. running wires to power.
No monthly fee option
Although I prefer to use HomeKit Secure Video for cloud storage, eufyCam does offer a free local recording option to an SD card inside the base station. In all my testing, I’ve found the local record to work well and could be set up not to work outside of your local network if you have a router that supports that functionality.
HomeKit support
There are two ways eufyCam can work with HomeKit. First, if you don’t want to use HomeKit Secure Video, you can use the cameras only as outdoor motion sensors. They could then be combined with the Hue floodlights to create a HomeKit automation. In this automation, when eufyCam detects motion, it can turn the floodlights on.
You can also use eufyCam to store footage in HomeKit Secure Video. All footage is encrypted with HomeKit Secure Video, so only your iCloud account can access it.
Overall review of eufyCam
After a couple of years of using the eufyCam Pro, I think it’s one of the best outdoor camera options. It has incredible quality, works well with or without HomeKit, and is easy to install. I will miss it once we move, but I am glad the new homeowner can easily take it over and continue to make good use of it. If there was an option for continuous recording in HomeKit Secure Video with the eufyCam Floodlight, I’d likely still be inside the eufy ecosystem for many years to come. The only reason I am not rebuying new eufy gear is for continuous recording.
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