I got a mains-powered indoor camera in a special pack just over a year ago, alongside an Amazon Alexa - It was a special deal and, as I’ve been interested in trying various CCTV monitoring for a while, I thought I trial the Ring. I’ve got it set up in a not particularly ideal place - set to look out of an upstairs window outside, as we have problems with antisocial behaviour occasionally outside our house. I also have a proper hard-wired 24/7 CCTV camera system looking in the same area, however, the quality isn’t very good and it doesn’t have the “extras” of things like motion sensors, etc.
I’ve set up the ring camera to have a specific area where motion is triggered, and for the maximum recording length, and, now, for the new snapshot capture. But it just doesn’t seem to work.
The motion sensor will pick up the majority of things - cars going past, people walking past, or cycling, even cats or the occasional fox/hedgehog (which is pretty cool). Yet sometimes, randomly, it doesn’t get triggered.
For example, a while back, someone up the street had their car stolen. Our street is only one way in/out and we are virtually at the entrance - drivers HAVE to go past our house. Yet the Ring device never noticed. My normal CCTV picked it up, but because it doesn’t have any triggers, it’s a matter of scrolling through hours of footage or knowing what time to look at.
When the Snapshot capture arrived, I thought that would be great, there’s more chance of catching something like that.
Tonight we had someone park opposite our house - the movement of the car well within the trigger area of the Ring camera, get out of their car (again within the trigger area), and urinate, in public, at the side of the road. I know this, because I happened to be at my computer at the time, and saw it on the CCTV. Which is black and white and grainy. I noted the time at 18:50 to 18:53. The guy got back in his car, did a three point turn directly in front of the house, still in the trigger area, and then drove back up the street. When I checked the history for the Ring camera, there was nothing there, at all. It had picked up someone walking their dog at 18:29, and more movement at 18:56 … but a complete blank for the required time period.
No worries I thought - he’d been there long enough that it should have been picked up on the Snapshot thing … yet I cannot for the life of me work out how to actually access that. It is not showing on the history and, when I look at footage, it only shows the standard footage, no snapshots.
Is the camera faulty? Are my settings wrong? Does my camera simply not do any of these things? Or is this just how Ring operates?