Anker Eufycam 2 Wireless Security System
Are two 1080p cameras enough to protect your home? You’d be surprised...
To start off, it’s worth clarifying that the Eufycam 2 is a wireless outdoor camera. It’s IP67 rated to survive below-freezing temperatures and constant deluges of wet and winter weather. It’s an elongated, all-white camera that’s a seriously tough piece of equipment.
That being said, a key component of its wireless-ness is the included HomeBase that comes in the box. The HomeBase looks like an all-white wireless router – it’s fairly plain but still a bit bulky. That’s ironic, of course, because you’ll need to connect it to a router and will find all the wires to do so inside the box.
If you’re like us, you might hate the idea of giving up a precious port on your router for the Eufy hub, but it really is the brains of the operation. It securely stores all the footage – which means, if your camera is ever stolen, all of the video is still safely stored inside. Even better, Eufy uses a proprietary communication technology that’s more powerefficient than standard Wi-Fi, allowing the wireless camera to work for months without recharging.
The HomeBase supports up to 16 devices, which means if you ever want to expand your home system with, say, a Eufy Video Doorbell 2K, it’s no hassle.
Setup
All things considered, setup isn’t terrible and is a lot smoother than most other smart home devices. The key is to charge each camera before you do anything, and then proceed to hook the HomeBase up to your router and download the Eufy Security app.
Once you download the app, create an account if you don’t have one already and touch the ‘add new device’ option. The HomeBase will send out a high-pitch tone that, when heard by the Eufycam, pairs the two together. This whole process takes five to 10 minutes and shouldn’t be too difficult.
Inside the app, you’ll be able to see all the cameras you have paired as well as check in on the cameras, take screenshots of the videos or record short videos.
Once they’re paired, it’s time to go outside and mount the cameras. We mounted ours onto the roof of our house – which took a bit of finagling – but theoretically it could mount to
most surfaces if you’re handy enough with a power drill.
Unmounting the cameras when it’s time to recharge is as simple as unscrewing the top plate and bringing the camera back inside.
Performance
Thanks to its pretty stellar feature set, the performance of the Eufycam 2 is surprisingly solid... as long as it’s within 60 to 100 feet of the HomeBase.
In terms of features, the Eufycam 2 has a built-in two-way microphone system that lets you yell at any potential intruders, as well as a night mode to capture any details in the dark.
Any time a person or event is detected you’ll get a notification on your phone with a thumbnail for easy identification and the video stream loads up in seconds, or you can always check in on a video-enabled Alexa or Google Assistant device.
Speaking of clips, they’re all stored directly on the HomeBase – which is actually a good thing in case someone were to ever come along and take the camera. The HomeBase has 16GB of internal storage for clips, which should last you around a month before it needs to start erasing old footage, but keep in mind that it will all be in 1080p resolution.
The resolution is a bit of a double-edged sword here. Because it’s only 1080p, the HomeBase can store more footage of the Eufycam 2 than it can of the Eufy Video Doorbell that has a 2K resolution. The downside, of course, is that there’s slightly less detail in the 1080p footage. It’s not enough to blur essential details, but it does make it slightly harder to identify faces at longer distances.
While you could certainly stand to find higher-resolution cameras – Eufy’s solution is still pretty good and delivers when it counts.
Battery life
According to Eufy, the Eufycam 2 lasts 365 days on a single charge. After doing some research on that number, the company says in its forums that it achieved that by only having 10 events in a day and recording 30-second clips for each event with the benefit of fairly nice weather most of the year. But depending on where your cameras are located and where you live geographically, your number could vary.
Over our three-week testing period, we recorded well over 80 events from a single camera that were about 10 seconds each and the camera is still holding strong at around 95% battery life with the optimal surveillance option selected (Eufy gives you three options – Optimal Battery Life, Optimal Surveillance and Custom - in regards to how often you want events recorded and how long the camera should record in each event).
Subscription
The good news here is that there is no overhead to any Eufy camera. You buy it, you own it and you can manage it all without ever having to pay a subscription fee.
That is a massive advantage to other systems that try to squeeze you for a monthly subscription just to see the footage your camera has recorded.
Now, of course, Eufy does offer rolling 30-day coverage for US$29.99 per year per camera for the Basic Plan or US$99.99 per year and gives you 30 days of rolling storage for up to 10 cameras. But Eufy rarely if ever tells you about this service, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the other apps that seem to shove the paid plan down your throat.
While that price is in line with what Ring charges – and seems to be the going rate across smart cameras right now – we opted to just use the built-in 16GB of storage and were able to get by just fine.
Any time a person or event is detected you’ll get a notification on your phone with a thumbnail for easy identification and the video stream loads up in seconds, or you can always check in on a video-enabled Alexa or Google Assistant device.
While it doesn’t offer professional grade protection that backups every second of the day, the Eufycam 2 offers a seriously large feature set without a monthly fee attached. If you like affordable security cameras with a 365-day battery life, you can’t do much better. Nick Pino