Looking for decent Wifi camera

BearGFR

BearGFR

n3wb
May 8, 2025
5
2
Parker County, Texas
Not sure if this is the right sub-section for this question, so here goes.


I'm new here, looking for gear recommendations better than what I already have.

So far the general recommendations I've seen here almost universally run towards, "Don't use wifi, don't use solar/battery, always use POE power and hard-wired ethernet connections." That's all fine and good, but for what I need it's not possible for me to follow that advice.

We live out in the country on 13+ acres and my primary need for camera monitoring is for wildlife - specifically feral hogs. I need to know when they show up so I can react before they start destroying stuff, something they're experts at doing. The areas I need to monitor do not have nearby electrical power or networking gear such as a switch or router, so unless I invest pretty heavily in running both power and networking to those locations which are currently a few hundred yards away from both plus building some sort of weather protection for both, my only options for camera monitoring are going to have to involve solar/battery powered Wifi connected cameras.

I don't need continuous surveillance. I just need real-time/near real-time motion detection and alerting (SMS and email), also event recording/capture and storage (preferably via FTP to my own server).

Not knowing any better, initially I deployed several different camera models from Reolink only to discover that the only thing worse than their software and equipment is their support. In my experience the gear and software both are fragile and unreliable, and dealing with their support is enough to make me want to find a monastery to join that's 1000 miles away from any kind of technology.

So, are there any solar/wifi systems out there that might work for what I need?

Thanks
 
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BearGFR said:
So far the general recommendations I've seen here almost universally run towards, "Don't use wifi, don't use solar/battery, always use POE power and hard-wired ethernet connections." That's all fine and good, but for what I need it's not possible for me to follow that advice.

We live out in the country on 13+ acres and my primary need for camera monitoring is for wildlife - specifically feral hogs. I need to know when they show up so I can react before they start destroying stuff, something they're experts at doing. The areas I need to monitor do not have nearby electrical power or networking gear such as a switch or router, so unless I invest pretty heavily in running both power and networking to those locations which are currently a few hundred yards away from both plus building some sort of weather protection for both, my only options for camera monitoring are going to have to involve solar/battery powered Wifi connected cameras.
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You said don't like your Reolink cameras, but you haven't told us which models you purchased, or explained your WiFi setup, or told us how they are failing. WiFi cameras are very sensitive to bandwidth limits and signal drops, so folks around here don't recommend them. A different camera brand isn't going to help if your WiFi isn't strong. I have two completely reliable WiFi cameras, but they are both inside my house, where the signal is never a problem.

I want to add a camera at the back of my yard, where running power would be a hassle. My situation is different because I want continuous recording to Blue Iris, and most battery cameras only record motion. Since I couldn't find a budget-friendly commercial solution, I'm experimenting with building my own. I got a 25w 12v solar panel, a charge controller, and a 7AH lithium battery from Amazon last week. It's powering an Amcrest IP2M-841W at the moment, and producing enough power to stream 24-7-365. This works when it is 30' from my house, but I don't expect to get enough WiFi signal 100' away at my back fence. To make that work, I would need additional networking hardware. As the complexity rises, the cost may eventually creep past the simple and reliable run-a-CAT5 option.
 
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Feral pigs....see if you can find someone who traps them. You might call the County Extension, County Ag Property Appraiser, County Animal Control or even look in Craigslist, etc. A lot of times there are people who have cages and trap them for free as they haul them off and butcher them for meat.
 
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Sybertiger said:
Feral pigs....see if you can find someone who traps them. You might call the County Extension, County Ag Property Appraiser, County Animal Control or even look in Craigslist, etc. A lot of times there are people who have cages and trap them for free as they haul them off and butcher them for meat.
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We tried that already - had someone who brought out a trap and left it for several months. It was a good sized trap - rectangular, probably close to 12 feet or so long, could have held a good portion if not all of a sounder. At the time (before I went down the IP camera rabbit hole) I had a trail cam set up to record. Night after night, we had recordings the next day of pigs around the trap, not once did one of them go inside. The closest got was one night a pig went inside maybe up to its shoulders but then backed out and left. All of the sounders around here must be 'trap smart'.
 
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VictorS said:
You said don't like your Reolink cameras, but you haven't told us which models you purchased,
Click to expand...

Argus Track(1), Argus TrackMix(1), Argus PT(3), Argus PT Lite (1), RLC-510WA (1 - poe powered, "wired" -at least as far as the camera knows, actually on a remote switch via my Wifi backbone network), Lumus (1 - poe, actual Wifi - monitor for water well pump), E1 (poe - Wifi in garage)

or explained your WiFi setup,
Click to expand...

Main House:
Ubiquiti Edge Router - inside
Ubiquiti Edge Switch - inside - central network switch for the whole house
Ubiquiti U6 Pro indoor access point - inside - WiFi AP "in the house"
Ubiquiti Unifi AC Pro AP - outdoors, up on a pole - WiFi AP for outdoors in the vicinity of the house
Ubiquiti Nano Station 5AC Loco - outdoors up on a pole - multipoint hub for my Wifi backbone network to other buildings
(all kinds of so called 'smart' devices, TV's etc)

Water Well House
Ubiquiti Nano Station 5AC Loco - Wifi backbone - outside
Netgear un-managed switch - inside
RLC-510 WA camera (poe - mounted outside - wired to Netgear switch)
Lumus Camera (mounted inside - monitor for water well pump controller)
Control hub for "Water Hose" IOT hose bib valve

Workshop
Ubiquiti Nano Station 5AC Loco - Wifi backbone - outside
Netgear un-managed switch - inside
Ubiquiti U6 Pro indoor access point - inside - WiFi AP coverage inside the shop
Ubiquiti Unifi AC Pro AP - outdoors, up on a pole - WiFi AP for outdoors in the vicinity of the shop
Sensibo IOT HVAC controllers (3) - Wifi
IOT light switch for outdoors guard light - Wifi

Pool pavillion
Ubiquiti Nano Station 5AC Loco - Wifi backbone - outside
Netgear un-managed switch - inside
(Amazon FireTV w/ethernet attachment)

"Gym"
Ubiquiti Nano Station 5AC Loco - Wifi backbone - outside
Netgear un-managed switch - inside
Ubiquiti Unifi LR AP - inside coverage
(Amazon FireTV w/ethernet attachment)

or told us how they are failing.
Click to expand...
They randomly can't be connected to by at least one of the clients (Windows or Android) - despite the fact that every camera is "line of sight" to at least one of the outdoor AP's and no camera is more than 200 feet away from one.
Here are the common behavors:
1) Windows client can connect to one of the battery/solar/wifi cameras but the Android client can't - same camera, same point in time. Or vice versa (Android, but not Windows). Very often simply killing and restarting the CLIENT (not the camera) will cause things to start working.
2) The Argus Track recently quit alerting and quit recording at all. Because its location is just barely in the frame of the RLC-510 on the well house, I could at night see the IR light activating on the track when there was an animal, like a deer, nearby yet the camera never alerted nor did it record anything. I decided to try a factory reset on it. Working through the connection process, it wouldn't connect to Wifi - after at least 6 attempts. I opened a ticket. Support had me use a 3rd party web site (nothing from Reolink) to generate the connection QR code and try that. It worked. A visual comparison between the QR code from the 3rd party web site and the one that Reolink's own Android app had generated showed that they were markedly different.
3) Cameras are just generally unreliable. "Sometimes" motion detection works and we get alerts (usually deer, sometimes racoons or opossums, occasionally coyotes, and recently a BIG bobcat) -- sometimes they don't detect nor do they alert. I know this because from time to time we can see an animal moving in a direction along a path that should trigger multiple cameras, but one or more of them "misses". Yes, I've fiddled with all the motion detections settings, sensitivities, object/animal/person size limits, "non-detection" zones, and so on - all to no avail.
4) There are quite a few things about one or both of their monitoring clients that are problematic, but I don't feel like getting into them all right now.

My main problem is that they aren't reliable for the job I bought them to do, so I'm looking to see if there are others 'out there' that might be.
 
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