About This Camera Installation
The owner rang after buying a eufy kit and asked whether it could be installed. Before quoting anything there were two questions worth asking, and both of them change the price.
The first was whether they already had the HomeBase. eufy cameras are not like Ring — a Ring camera joins your Wi-Fi and that is that, but eufy cameras talk to a HomeBase, and the HomeBase is also where the footage is stored, like a hard drive sitting in the house. No HomeBase, no system. They confirmed they had one in the kit.
The second was about the building. A single-storey house, or anything reachable from a ladder, is one person and a few hours. Cameras up at second-floor level is a different job: scaffolding, and someone on the ground. This house has two storeys, but the cameras were all going above doors at ground-floor level, so a ladder was enough and the price stayed at $180 + GST for the work.
On site the boxes came open first and the eufy Security app went on the owner’s phone. The HomeBase was paired first, then each camera onto the HomeBase — there is no point carrying a camera up a ladder before you know it talks to the base. The cameras are solar, but solar only tops a battery up; it does not fill an empty one. So all three were charged from a wall plug before they went outside, which is the difference between a camera that works tonight and one that works next week.
The positions turned out to be easy. Whoever lived there before had cameras on the same walls, unscrewed them when they left, and siliconed the holes so the cladding stayed weathertight. Those holes lined up with the new brackets, so the old silicone came out and the brackets went straight back into existing fixings. Nothing new was drilled into the cladding at all.
Each bracket went on, then the angle was set with the owner watching the live picture on their phone and saying when it looked right. Three cameras, start to finish, two and a half hours, done single-handed.
More on the HomeBase question and why it decides whether you pay a monthly fee: Do eufy Security Cameras Need a HomeBase?
