Switching from Nest to UniFi for cameras
When I bought my home a few years ago I knew I wanted to do something with my home network that would be better than what I had been doing. I ended up going UniFi. I bought a couple of U6-Lites and installed them on my second floor ceiling in two places. I also picked up a Lite 16 PoE to power them. With a USG-3P to be the router. I of course self hosted the controller for all of that in a docker container. This little did I know was the begninning.
Eventually the USG-3P was pretty much discontinued and support for it was waning. At the time I was going all in on Nest cameras for inside and out, but cracks were forming with them to me. I decided it was time to upgrade the USG-3P to something more performant and supported. So I picked up a Dream Machine Pro as its replacement. At the same time I also picked up a G4 Instant camera to test out as possible replacemnet. Needless to say I was thrilled with its performance against nest cameras.
Why was I considering switching from Nest cameras? The ecosystem is fracturing. My older cameras were stuck in the Nest app, my newer cameras from them were in the Home app. The home app also lacks/ed features that the nest app has. It became annyoing which app do I need to open to view the cameras through out my downstairs due to this. Then there is the picture quality, just felt overly compressed and lacking detail. Last thing that started to annoy me is the storage of footage. You have to pay Google to store days of footage. Which is fine, but that is the only option.
Back to the UniFi switch. After I played with the G4 Instant I had for a couple of days. I was impressed enough with it I deployed it to living room and got the wife setup with the UniFi Protect app on her phone. She even liked the picture quality of the new camera. So I bought a second and deployed it in the Kitchen to replace on of the oldest Nest cams. But there is a problem with this, I had to find a way to hold the camera just over the hung cabinets with a steep angle down. Thats when i realized the little unmentioned feature of the G4s, it has a threaded mouting screwpoint. I ended up finding a baby monitor holder on amazon that screws in and holes the camera well along with giving me a flexable mount to help put the camera just over the top with the right angle.
Eventually the Nest camera over the driveway started to act up and become less and less connected and functional. We use this camera angle a lot due to sight lines out front from the inside of the house are mostly blocked by the garage sticking out. So I decided it was go time and started the true commitment to switching to UniFi cameras. I picked up a G5 Pro and with some assistance from my father replaaced the nest camera with the G5 Pro. Going from a USB powered wifi camera to one that is powered via PoE and data over the ethernet wire just was a big win for me. No more questionable wifi signal with the camera to deal with. Though I have a possible cause to why the old nest camera started acting up, its powercord started to be what appears to be chewed on.
What do I have left to replace? A whole bunch. I have five indoor cameras, a doorbell and one indoor/outdoor inside the garage to replace. I have two G4s coming today which will replace two of the five remaining indoor cameras. I am eyeballing changing out the doorbell next with a G4 Doorbell Pro as the nest doorbell is about to die itself anyway. So about seven more cameras to go, which in the end will total to 8x G4s, a doorbell and 1x G5. This is my base plan which can and most likely will evolve to add more.
What about storage for all that footage? Right now I have a 1TB drive in the Dream Machine Pro and with the 2xG4 Instant & G5 Pro I get about 1wk of video storage. Which to me seems acceptable, but as I add cameras this will have to be changed. For that I am thinking about picking up a Network Video Recorder at some point and per the Capcity Calculator if I want 14 days (which is my end target at this time) for the number of cameras and things I will have says to go with 3x 8TB drives. Though for security purposes I will not put the rack mount device with the rack in the garage. I will instead put it elsewhere hidden with a UPS. This is due to some criminals are getting smart to what video recorders are and have started stealing the hard drives.
What is the point of all this? It is mainly for me to look into the house throughout my day without having to leave my desk. Or when on vacation to check up on our cats which get into trouble it seems every time. It has the added benifit of if someone breaks in or if someone I hire to do something for me attempts to steal from me. Yes that last one did happen, hired a mover and they tried to steal from my wifes wallet when we were not in the same room. I can also hear it now, well what about those theives that use wifi jamming? That is why I am looking at the PoE to USB-C Adaptor to deploy with many (not all) of the G4s in the house. While wifi they will go happily to ethernet with this adaptor.