hey everybody it’s lon seidman this is a re-upload of my nest battery doorbell review that i did a few months ago i took that video down shortly after i published it because i got some details wrong about the subscription fee and originally i thought this was a pretty useful doorbell without a subscription but as it turns out it’s not useful at all if you don’t keep paying that ongoing fee to nest and google and where i got tripped up was in regards to video storage they said on their website that they’ll store three hours of video if you’re not a subscriber and i thought that meant three cumulative hours of video clips from the doorbell when in fact three hours means that after three hours they delete every clip that it records and so if somebody was marching around your property at 2 am and then you woke up at 6 the video would have been deleted an hour before you woke up and i think that is really turning this really somewhat useful product into a doorstop if you will unless you’re willing to pay that fee but there are some endearing features on this especially for nest subscribers so i have reworked the original video with more accurate information and we’re going to start that right now hey everybody it’s lon zeidman i needed a new doorbell the other day so i bought the new nest battery doorbell this as its name implies runs off a battery and does not require any wiring to operate although it does work with battery wiring if you have it and we’re going to take a closer look at this product and what it’s all about in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that i paid for this
with my own funds all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this new doorbell is all about now the price point on this is 179 that puts its price slightly ahead of the entry-level ring doorbell as i mentioned it has a battery on board google says this will operate for about two to three months before you have to bring it in and charge it if you wire it up to your doorbell’s existing wiring you don’t need to charge it at all and the charge time unfortunately is rather long they say it takes about five hours to get to a full charge once the battery is depleted as such this is more of a notification camera then a security camera which means that it’s only going to record something when it detects something it won’t do an ongoing recording of video even if it’s plugged into the wiring from your existing doorbell and even if you’re paying the subscription fee so it’s only going to give you video when somebody or something comes to the door or you have a motion event configured to set the recording to go but by and large it will be off most of the time to preserve its battery now if you have a door with a lot of foot traffic you might see less battery life google is basing their battery life assumptions on about 16 activations a day so if you have more than that you’re going to see less battery life if you have less than 16 activations a day you’ll see better battery life and of course if you have it wired into your doorbell system you don’t have to worry about battery life at all but if you are intending to use this on the battery just know your mileage will vary now the build quality on this is really nice it is super solid it comes in four different colors and you have to buy the color you want there’s no
removable face plates on this it is waterproof so you can put it someplace where it will get rained on you shouldn’t have any problems with water invasion on it you do have a big button here to ring the doorbell and to let people know that this is a button it will illuminate this ring around the button when somebody walks up to the door and that will invite them to push it to let you know that they are there now here’s a problem with this there doesn’t appear to be at the moment any kind of plug in chime device like you might see from ring so if you don’t have a nest home speaker or one of those nest homes with the screen the only way you’re going to know somebody’s at your door is if your phone goes off because you’re not going to be able to hear the chime on this device because it’s outside so if you don’t have one of those nest home devices you might have a hard time hearing that somebody’s at the door now if you are using your existing doorbell wiring and you have a chime wired into that doorbell now this will work with it but if you’re intending to use the battery be prepared to put in one of those nest speakers into your shopping cart so you can hear when somebody gets to the door now it’s very easy to install there’s a bracket that you screw into your house and then you just snap this thing down on top of it there is a key that they give you to get it out of the bracket when you need to charge it and that key gets inserted into a slot here at the top and then you just kind of pull it off the bracket then you come inside and plug in its usb c cable to charge it up and then when you put it back on the bracket it reactivates and you’re back up and running and the manual says that if you happen to lose the key you can use a phillips head screwdriver to pop it out of the bracket it does of course require wi-fi to operate it works with 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi and it also connected to my 5 gigahertz wi-fi here
so find the strongest wi-fi signal and connect to that it does actually work when the internet goes down it’ll record about an hour of footage when it doesn’t have a wi-fi signal so it will capture things that are going on even if the power goes out now one thing to note is that at the time i’m recording this video the only thing it works with is the google home app on android and ios i could not get it to work with my amazon system it also doesn’t work with home kit but that’s at the moment i’m shooting this video that could change in the near future now to control the doorbell we’re going to jump into the doorbell icon here on my front door and as you can see i’ve got other devices that i can control through the home app we’re going to click on the front door and you can see here my battery is at 98 percent if i click on live video what i will get is a live feed from the doorbell sitting on my front door there i’ll give you a closer look at it here and as you can see it shoots its video vertically the resolution is 960 by 1280 it shoots at 30 frames per second and has a three to four aspect ratio with a 145 degree field of view now because it is vertically oriented you can see that it’s showing more of my house on the left hand side than i might like so what they included in the box is this angled bracket that you can use to nudge the camera’s position over a little bit so you can see more of the walkway for example and that might be something that i install a little bit later now the camera can record day and night you’re looking at a daytime shot that was taken a little bit earlier it is a bit rainy today but you can see what it can pick up in typical daylight conditions this shot was taken in the evening
with my porch lights on it looks very nicely exposed and then it also has a night vision mode and it will pick up things in total darkness because it has an infrared illuminator that google says will go about 10 feet so no matter what the lighting conditions are you will be able to get a useful image out of the camera now the doorbell has a microphone and a speaker on board and if you’re curious as to what the microphone sounds like on the doorbell here you go this is a test of the audio i have found sometimes the lip sync is a little out of whack on the app although when i download the video it looks okay but sounds pretty good i think and you can definitely hear people when you’re communicating with them now in order to have a conversation with somebody at your door you do need to push down the microphone button either on the app or on your google home device i was very pleased with the quality of the audio out of the speaker that’s built into the doorbell it is very loud and clear so i think anyone who’s at the door should be able to make out what you’re trying to say to them and if you prefer not to talk to the person when they’re at the door let me go back into the camera here you can actually just have the google assistant read off a pre-prepared message so if i click on more here and go to quick responses
i can have it say you can just leave it hi there you can just leave it thanks now as i mentioned the doorbell will only record things that happen in front of it so to review what has happened in front of my doorbell let me click on it here again and go over to history and what it will do is pick up the last event that took place which was me putting the camera back up on its mount if i click on full history here it will give me every event that it’s recorded over the last couple of days and this is where that subscription fee comes into play because unless you are subscribed to the nest aware service your doorbell is only going to keep videos for three hours before they are deleted on the server you got to get to them quick even in the middle of the night if you want to preserve anything with the subscription you can start with 30 days on the regular nest aware plan or get up to 60 days on nest aware plus now i’m finding that the camera typically records only about 30 seconds of video at a time basically once the person that triggered it walks off the camera frame it turns off the recording the one thing that the subscription gets you that is not on the free tier is that the camera can do facial recognition or i’m guessing the google cloud does that for you so when somebody walks up to the doorbell it will recognize their face and as you can see here it saw that i came to the door a little bit
earlier and it automatically labeled the clip as my name and earlier i also tested it out with the doorbell on my google home so when i went up to the door and pushed the button the google home announced in addition to the chime that i was the one at the door now you do have to go through and manually tag everybody who comes to your door and you’ll be presented with a list of unknown faces so you can train the system to know who these people are when they get there and again on the free tier you don’t get the face recognition but you do get actually a lot of ai features for free one of them is a person detector so although on the free tier you don’t know who the person is the camera will tell you that a person came into the frame so that’s good another thing that it can do on the free tier is detect packages so if i click on package here and click show results i’m going to go to this one from 2 21 pm earlier today i was playing a ups guy and walked up to the bench there and put a package on it you can see me walking in there now there’s the box i walked away and as you can see the camera picked up a package now it does have my name here because i did opt for the 30-day free trial of the subscription plan after that free trial ends it’ll change my name to person but again it will detect people that walk into the frame i just won’t know who they are and it will also detect packages it can also detect animals on the free tier and where i live that’s kind of important
because i’ve got bears deer fisher cats dogs you name it walking through the yard all the time so i did a little test earlier with my dog i just walked in front of the camera with the dog and it detected me and the dog as we were walking by you can see lawn and animal here in what it picked up all right let’s jump into the camera settings now and see what we can configure i’m going to start off here in events because this is where you can more finely tune what the camera detects and how it notifies you so right now i’m not using this feature but there is a feature called activity zones and this will allow you to set up a specific portion of the image to be detecting motion in and so if you have a portion of your image where nobody should ever be you can block off a square so that anytime something enters that region you can get notified i have that turned off right now i’m kind of relying on the ai for my detections here because we are on the free tier right now i’ve got that familiar face detection enabled and you saw earlier how we were able to link up different faces now i have it now notifying me anytime a person comes into the frame and what that means is that anytime someone walks in front of the doorbell even if they don’t push the button i get a notification push to my phone it does not though set off my nest home device until somebody pushes the ring button on the doorbell itself so just be aware of that but you will get notified on your phone when somebody walks in front it’ll also detect the packages that we talked about earlier and i also have animal detection on but i do not have it
notifying me about animals because animals walk across my yard all the time in the middle of the night i don’t want to know about it but i do want it to record those events because sometimes it’s cool to see what kind of animals might be walking around my yard i can also enable vehicle detection i should never see a vehicle in my front yard but that might be something you might want to enable so you can do that and then you also can enable just raw motion detection but they recommend that you leave this off because things like a tree blowing in the wind or a bug landing on the camera might set it off and start recording and not only does that give you false alarms that you have to go through it also reduces the battery life so all of these trade-offs are on these notification cameras to try to give you as much battery life as possible before you have to haul it in and charge it for five hours now if you’re unhappy with the video quality you can boost it to the max setting i don’t think that’s necessary you saw the footage that it was generating with its default setting which it calls high that looked just fine to me but you can adjust that if you want if you have trouble with the night vision reflecting off of things you can turn it off here or leave it on all the time the default here is auto you can also adjust its status light if it’s too bright on the door you can set it to low so it doesn’t disturb people one last thing to look at and that is the audio settings here you can decide to not
use the mic or use the mic only when you’re talking to somebody at the door and not record at other times you can also adjust the volume of the speaker that you’re using to talk with people now overall i am pleased with this doorbell and that’s because i already have a nest home device if i didn’t have that device i wouldn’t be as happy because the compatibility here is rather limited so you can’t hear the doorbell inside of your house when somebody pushes the button unless you’ve got a nest speaker or a nest display and it doesn’t work at the moment with the amazon ecosystem nor does it work with apple homekit and it doesn’t even work with android tv which is a google platform so i’m hoping they expand out the compatibility here a bit because right now it’s very much limited to those nest devices and not much else but because i have that i’m in good shape so if you’ve got a google nest device i see this is a very good purchase and a nice complement to what you may already have but if you don’t and are trying to use this with other smart home devices or you just want to hear your doorbell ring this may not do it for you unless you make an additional purchase to be able to hear that doorbell sound that is going to do it for now until next time this is lon seiben thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by theland.tv supporters including gold level supporters hot sauce and video games brian parker chris allegretta tom albrecht thomas anfang jim tannis and handheld obsession if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe visit lawn dot tv s
