Blink Video Doorbell | Two-way audio, HD video, motion and chime app alerts, and Alexa enabled — wired or wire-free (White)

Simple install and works with my indoor chimes
I had an old style push button door bell when I moved into my circa 1999 home six years ago. I quickly replaced it with a SkyBell which worked fine until about a year ago. It stopped consistently advising me of visitors and the microphone / speaker never really worked correctly. So I wanted to replace it with something a bit more up-to-date. My choice of brands would be something that worked with my existing smart home components and existing apps or something that wasn’t going to clobber me with monthly subscription costs.I am a legacy customer of Blink, meaning that I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for cloud storage. And I have several smart plugs and light switches on TP-Link’s excellent app so I pretty much decided that I would go with one of these two brands. TP-Link wanted a subscription fee, so when I saw Blink’s doorbell camera at a good price, I jumped. It came the same day, so I installed it the next day.Would it fit the current placement and cover the crude hole carved on my porch for the wires?Would it be an easy setup and would the voltage in my 22+ year old home be sufficient?Would it feel secure when mounted? Yes to all these questions.The existing Sky Bell doorbell cam is pretty small and didn’t protrude from the wall very much. The Blink is longer and fatter, so the mount, while secure, is a bit less solid than I would like – it seems to rock a bit when pressed hard. But the wiring was simple. Installation required that I drill one additional hole in my stucco, but it took all of 15 minutes to complete the installation job. Well, 15 minutes doesn’t include:- the time I spent undoing the mounting bracket because I put it on backwards (!) and- the time I spent unmounting the whole doorcam to remove the sticky transparent plastic wrap that Blink puts on the cam to protect it from damage while shipping and handling. Funny – no where in the instructions did I see anything about this wrap and it’s almost invisible – until you mount it.One pro tip – there is a funny little tool that comes in the bottom of the package that you use to open the doorbell up from the bottom when it is time to replace batteries. A) Don’t throw it out as it is perfectly sized to do that job. B) It comes in mighty handy to also force the doorbell on to the mount as well. I had trouble getting the body of the doorbell onto the mount and snapping into place until I used the tool. I put my tool on top of the chime box inside the house where I will completely forget it when I need it.In operation, The Blink door cam works well in detecting approaching visitors and I love how it works with my existing chimes. One thing that needs work is that the app allows me to exclude areas of the camera view from motion detection. This app feature seems to work with my other Blink cameras but not with my door cam. I block out motion detection right next to my door, but it detects motion there anyway. Minor, but it should work better in this regard.I’m very glad I purchased this tool for monitoring my front door. It was a great price and was easy to install. Anyone could do this!

Well, it works like it said it would
In the process of automating my home, and finally got around to adding a video doorbell. Awhile back I decided to go with amazon, mostly because the non-internet version (hubitat) I settled with was too involved a process to set up, and required more attention. I’m gone alot, and have a truckload of things to do when I get home, so I literally don’t have the time to mess with something like that. Enter Alexa’s repertoire of things I can utilize. Since I’m already subscribed to pretty much everything amazon has, may as well just go all in, right?Anyhow, item came in a day early (surprising, since I live in the middle of nowhere) along with my tp-link mesh system. Pretty much doing a tech overhaul at my house. Got rid of Starlink (great service, but support sucks in general) since spectrum entered into the area and signed up with them. Starlink uses just a single wireless router if you don’t want to spend more $ for additional hardware. And then there’s other issues I just didn’t want to subject myself. I digress…. Set up the mesh system, got spectrum running, and started connecting things.First thing was the doorbell. This to me is still a novel thing. Yes I know its been around for awhile now, but remember, i’m doing a tech overhaul here. Didn’t bother with such things before, nor cared too much about em. So, after some thinking, I installed it at the traditional place (front door), and used the wedge to angle it a bit to catch the front sidewalk. Connected it to the mesh system (took a minute, as I was unfamiliar with the system). It pretty much installs itself. It’s all run off the phone as far as configuring and whatnot. You WILL be required to install the blink app. It’s not part of the amazon app. Not sure why, ask Jeff about that one. Sync module is a no brainer, just follow the directions.Here’s the interesting part. I don’t need yet another subscription, so I opted out of the cloud storage thing. With the app, you can pull clips off the sync module using your phone, and do whatever you want with them anyhow, don’t need a sub to get it. Save yourself a few dollars and go the route I went. Get a usb stick. HOWEVER, I didn’t get a usb stick just for the sync module. I have a microsd storage card (350 gig) from my previous phone that I couldn’t use in my new one (fold 5), so it just sat around being randomly used as a transfer tool between pc’s. So why not use it as storage for the module? Well, I plugged it into a sd card multireader and stuck it into the module… AND IT WORKS. Amazon states max is 250, but I’ve got an extra 100 gigs with my microsd card :)Will tech support help if it breaks down? Doubt it. The research I did says that although higher capacity cards may or may not work in the module, support is limited to cards with a max of 250 gigs. Not sure how that works out, but I don’t write software so whatever.Long story short, camera works great. Fiddle with the sensitivity though. I set it too high (lvl 7) and got alerts from the clouds going by. Dropped it to 6, but its too dark to tell if that helped. In the end, i’m happy with my purchase. Quality is great, and does what it says it’s supposed to do. Good luck!