Recently, our part of town has been the subject of what appears to be two amateur thieves attempting to break into unlocked cars and at least one house. Thieves trying cars near our neighborhood? Disconcerting, to say the least. These same thieves trying to break into and enter occupied homes on a Friday night? That’s downright scary.
Almost everyone I know started upgrading their home security, and even I thought it was time to take additional precautions. For starters, it was time to upgrade our existing ADT Pulse alarm system to the new Command system. It’s easier to use, and we even have a nice touchscreen panel now.
Next, we thought it would be a smart move to add additional cameras around the house. While a lot of folks are opting for Ring devices or other products (because they may have a Ring doorbell), we’re a Google family, so I looked specifically at the Nest Cam Outdoor cameras.
I was torn between the Nest Cam Outdoor that came out a few years ago vs the newer Next Cam IQ Outdoor, which are nicer. Normally, you know I’d be all over the IQ cameras instead, but we’re talking about getting two HD cameras for the price of one slightly nicer 4K camera. $400 for two cameras or $800 for two cameras? If money was no object, I would have gone with the IQ cameras, but we couldn’t justify double the price for what seems to be slightly better resolution. I also read through a number of reviews, but I could not find definitive evidence that the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor cameras could justify the exorbitant cost.
I bought a dual set of Next Cam Outdoor cameras for the driveway and backyard from Lowes. I had planned to install them myself, but we had one of our electricians over for other work, and I said why don’t you just install them for me? Good idea, because he got it done in about 2 hours, while I attended about 52 video calls that day.
Once installed, you have to configure them via the Nest app. I set up Activity Zones that kinda work, but the alerts are good. Any motion in the defined activity zones gets picked up. I also opted for the Nest Aware Plus subscription that gives us 60 days of event video history + 10 days of 24/7 video history. The subscription applies to all of your Nest devices for cameras, so that enhances what we already have (e.g. Nest Hello doorbell, Nest Hub Max, other Nest indoor cameras.)
