Eufy Battery Doorbell Review so far

#1

Still work to be done - I have had this installed for a week so far and here are my thoughts.

Looks slick - quite understated. Decent build quality.

At first the doorbell was picking up all motion - even when set to human (even outside the activity zones). Every passing car triggered recording. Now this has been fixed in ver 2.2.0.0.

Still it captures humans walking by outside the activity zone - needs to be fixed - Eufy has told me 2-3 weeks.

Video can be jerky at 2K resolution and delays in audio between me and people at the door. If I change the setting to low video quality compression (1600 x 1200) this resolves video smoothness and audio delay. Apparently this will be improved and is also an issue with the iPhone which they are fixing.

Battery lasted for 5 days in week one! Week 2 is better but have already lost 2 bars - probably because everyone walking past still triggers the recording. This has to improve as so far the battery life is terrible vs my Eufycam’s.

The Homebase chime is loud and clear.

Cannot get it to connect to my Echo Dot to chime though - despite it enabled in the Alexa app and doorbell press activated.

Finally the LED always on option - literally seems to be on all day. It’s not clear if this is meant to turn on when motion is detected or not. This would be ideal to save battery. Most people who have visited at night when the LED doorbell button light is off have pressed the camera as the infra red LED’s surround it!

More work to be done on the firmware and in a month or so reviews will probably be more representative of what the doorbell is capable of…

Eufy customer service as always has been excellent and they are responsive and trying to improve the product with updates quickly.

Edit - week 2 and the battery lasted 4 days this time on a full charge - possibly a defective unit as the other Eufycam batteries are working fine.

Confirmed by customer service - the LED doorbell button light is activated by motion. I still need to look at this tonight myself to see.

Finally - be aware that with the 2K video footage, this eats into your Homebase storage twice as fast now as the 1080p cameras. My storage has run out, then the Homebase attempts to make some space by deleting footage.

The major issue here is that rather than deleting the oldest recordings it has deleted the most recent - therefore losing a few GB’s of the last few days of recordings of all devices connected to that Homebase. Major flaw which has been reported and I hope can be fixed!

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#2

Great review @david_ebanks
Sounds like there’s still work to be done to make this a great product, it’s brilliant Eufy support are communicating with you on the issues.

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#3

Awesome review, a few pictures would make your review even better

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#4

Nice review!! Hope the issues highlighted are resolved.

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#5

Nice review

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#6

So it’s got to the stage where I’m thinking about having to wire up the doorbell. It’s still lasting only 4-5 days per full charge. Unfortunately I’m in the UK so I’m not in a position to exchange - Eufy can’t send a replacement to the UK as it’s not sold here. Not their fault to be fair but still frustrating.

Mine may be faulty - is anyone else experiencing this?

As an aside here are some extra notes;

When choosing High quality video mode - 2K, video is stuttery, audio cuts out and this is with the Homebase 2 literally a foot away the other side of the window. I have to lower the quality to 1600 x 1200 for it to be usable - it’s then acceptable. Video quality is good still just not as sharp.

2K - only maxes out at 10FPS so video is not as smooth and you could miss key moments. Sometimes the FPS can drop as low as 3FPS as it auto adjusts with available bandwidth - effectively terrible!

1600 x 1200 I get up to 15FPS.

File sizes using the 2K footage are almost 10 times the size of the equivalent 1080p videos of the same length from my Eufycam’s which are all smooth. This means the Homebase fills up VERY quickly! I now have to use a second Homebase just for the doorbell to stop it wiping out my eufycam videos (Homebase still deletes the most recent rather than oldest until they fix via firmware).

All in all it’s been a disappointing experience compared to the cameras. But I’m stuck with it and will have to hope things improve with firmware over time.

I’m considering buying the Ring plug in adaptor to power the doorbell and have worked out a path to fully hide the wires that should be fine. However that product only gives out 24V at 20VA, the Eufy doorbell asks for 30VA so waiting on Eufy to confirm if this will be adequate. :crossed_fingers:

#7

Come on, Eufy. Fix the audio delay .
You’ve had enough customers complain
about it and enough time to fix it.
Get with it

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#8

Fix the audio delay

What’s the hold up

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#9

Glad the ver 2.2.0.0. fixed the bad detection for you but I’m running V3.30_791 and it goes off for every car that passes by. How is it so hard the write a fix that WILL ONLY CATCH SOMEONE IN YOUR ACTIVITY ZONE??? Peole have been complaing about this since June of 2019. Too late for me to return this doorbell but I will not buy another thing from Eufy.

#10

I have to echo some of the comments on here.
I was given the Eufy Battery 1080p doorbell as a gift last week.
I’d researched video doorbells for some time and the reviews seemed great (apart from the audio delay but i thought a firmware fix would sort that - didn’t realise it had been an issue for so long).
Anyway i already have a Blink Outdoor camera covering the front of my house and hoped the Eufy would take its place and the Blink could move to another location.
So far the Eufy experience has been frustrating and disappointing.

  • Battery lasting three days due to the high number of false alerts
  • The Activity zones function is fiddly and doesn’t seem to work properly. Even when the only activity zone is a square of block pave driveway and nothing moves it still registers false alerts. It still must be processing the image outside the activity zone. The Blink system is much better as it gives you a grid, which you can zoom in on and you grey out the sections you don’t want recorded. Its much more flexible than the 3 rectangle system used by Eufy.

As a result the Eufy doorbell has required three charges since it was installed less than a week ago. It was charged 100% yesterday and today is on 75%.

Whilst i was away for 10 days, the Blink camera was on 24/7. I had zero false alerts and all the alerts and video showed the postman or other putting things through my letter box. Didn’t even pick up the neighbours cat. The Blink cameras is still on 100% battery after 2 months of service.

Friday i had no alert from the Eufy Video Doorbell after the postman visited, some posted a pizza leaflet through my door or a visitor arrived. Blink worked each time.

Yesterday i messed about with the sensitivity setting, the active zones and the Working Mode.

I went in and out a couple of times and it “selectively” detected me about half the time. Still had a lot of false alerts and when my curry was delivered last night nothing was detected but it did work when the lad rang the doorbell.

I was hoping for a decent security camera and video doorbell in one.
Got a great video door bell (other than the audio delay) but a terrible security camera.

#11

In the beginning i liked the Eufy VIdeobell, but with the time more and more bugs summed up. Battery Life was a mess, connection to my Amazon Echo Show buggy and random delays up to several minutes when someone ringed the bell.

Now i have a Ring videobell for quite some time and it does what the Eufy Videobell should have done in the beginning. I think Anker has awesome hardware in general, but the software lacks the quality of the hardware products.