Did you get your video doorbell yet?
This is the question of the week over in our neighborhood. With apps like Next Door and Facebook Groups, we’re all up in each other’s business. This can suck but it is also great! Around the holiday season, as our online orders start getting dropped off daily, the posts about missing packages and unidentified persons start to skyrocket. Someone saw two youths ringing doorbells and looking in windows. Obviously, they are casing the joint. Then there are car break-ins. And then someone posts an image grabbed by their video doorbell. The image depicts a tall, thin, probably male subject with their hoodie over their head and the strings pulled tightly so you can’t see their face. In his hand is something non-descript, but the speculations are flying.
“It’s a garden paver! He’s going to use it to break the window!”
“It’s a box of tools! He’s going to break in!”
When the original poster got back on to share the rest of the story, she explained that when her husband responded to the doorbell from his phone app, the subject in the photo ran away. Police were alerted immediately.
Okay, that’s enough to sell these things to the entire neighborhood. Driving up and down the street you can see them all sticking out from the doorframes like sore, expensive, totally useful thumbs.
Santa brought ours for Christmas. We hooked it up right around New Year’s. It’s been about a month since we installed it and I can’t wait to tell you about what we caught on camera!
By the way, I get nothing for this post. I don’t have an affiliation with Nest or Google and this device is not sold on Amazon so yeah, nada. I have not tried any other video doorbells so I can’t compare either. This is just my story of my experience with the Nest Hello Doorbell and its associated device app.
Okay, before I show you what we caught on camera, I want to tell you what it was like to install this. So, I can figure out just about anything techy, see
Once we were in business, I dropped the Nest app on both of our phones, the familyish iPad and connected it to our Google Home Hub. At
So, is this camera cool? Yes.
Has it improved our lives? Not totally. Although I do feel a little better knowing it’s there. I hate answering the door or sneaking around the house when someone rings the bell so that I don’t have to answer the door. I have written blog posts about it in the past. I hate answering the door. So now I know who is there or what has been dropped off. Amazing. I also know the neighborhood traffic patterns. Not totally great but not a deal breaker.
Is it durable? Ummm… since I knew that you would want to know this, I was happy to test it out in the Great Polar Vortex of Chiberia 2019 and it worked great! Here are some screengrabs from my phone during the time I was working on this post:
I know we don’t even have it the worst!
The view from my Nest Hello Doorbell Camera as I write this post. Snowy, cold and quiet. Now I want some hot chocolate.
Have I caught anything awesome on camera? Yes, but not what you’d think.
I recently went back to work part-time to cover a maternity leave. My mom and my mother-in-law have graciously agreed to watch the girls for me while I am at work. On the first morning that I was away, my oldest walked out onto the front porch to catch the bus. Joey and I both watched the whole thing go down through the Nest app on our phones. You can see what happened below.