Arlo by NETGEAR Add-on Night Camera (Open Box)

First off, my wife and I have been wanting to get some type of video surveillance for our home for a while now, but couldn't see spending all the extra money through our alarm system company to have it done...so I started researching an alternative. The cameras having sound wasn't important to me, but what I wanted them to be was 100% wireless, have night vision, be motion activated, get notifications when something triggers it, be able to view them on the go so I know whats going on at my home while I'm gone, and for them to be weatherproof...and Arlo met all those things. We've been using the Arlo system for about two months now...and I can say that even with a few issues, its been a good purchase. We have the cameras mounted around the outside of our home in different areas and they have come in handy more than once. Our house is a all brick home that is one level and is 2800 sq ft...so I set up the home base station in our kitchen, which is roughly the center of the house. I was a bit worried about the cameras having enough signal strength in some locations, but they all transmit perfectly and have great signal strength according to the app. A couple of our cameras are under locations where they are shielded from rain and such, but the other three are completely out in the elements and we have had a few good storms come through and the cameras did just fine. We have had some false recordings..mainly when the sun is shinning bright against our driveway, but these were fixed by adjusting the sensitivity of the motion system for that individual camera. I would advise you to fine tune each camera either through the app or by computer to what works best for the area you have it mounted in as far as sensitivity goes. Speaking of the app, it is pretty handy. We have the IOS version and from it you are able to view each camera, view the recordings library, change your systems mode that the cameras are currently set up in, edit individual cameras settings (handy if your getting a lot of false recordings and need to adjust things), and even restart the base station if none of the cameras are recording for some reason. Now as some have reported, there is a slight delay from when the motion is detected to when the camera wakes up and starts recording...but it hasn't been that much of an issue for us. It is really nice knowing when a package is left at the front door and also when someone pulls into our driveway. I usually have enough time to open the app and see who it is before they even get to the front door. Another fun use we have used a couple of our Arlo cameras for was to catch what was digging and tearing up our yard at night. It turned out to be an armadillo and with the help of the cameras night vision, we were alerted at 3 a.m. when the animal was outside doing its demolition and was able to live trap it and remove it from our property. One thing I really wish that could be improved upon is the battery life. We have already had to change the batteries in two of the cameras, but to be fair we did have them all recording two minute videos at the highest quality and these two particular cameras are the ones that get the most hits during the day. We have since turned the recording down to one minute on all of them and that should help some...also thinking about looking into possibly getting rechargeable batteries in the future. We did have one instance where one of the cameras stopped transmitting and we couldn't get it to respond or sync back up to the system, but one call to Netgear and all was taken care of. After trouble shooting a few things, they sent out a new camera and we had the replacement in just a few days. Overall, it has been a very good purchase and one that I would recommend. Also, the cameras do come with a mounting system that would work good inside...but if you are mounting them outside, I would highly recommend the VideoSecu Wall Ceiling Mount Bracket. They are a different shade of white than the Arlo camera, but they are made of metal and are fully adjustable just like the outside mount sold from Netgear...but they are currently $7.99 whereas the Netgear brackets are currently $19.99. You can see the bracket a little in the pictures below to see what they look like with the camera. I also included an image of what the app looks like when opened and as you can see, the night vision image for our back door and windows is pretty decent and clear. We also purchased two other Arlo cameras to make a set of five as Netgear will allow free monitoring and 1GB cloud storage for up to 5 cameras.