Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

Mega sploosh

 

Just had to throw £660 at the kitchen in the new place. There's no washer, but there is a dishwasher - so we're ripping that out and putting a Beko "Pro HygineShield"(!) washer/dryer in its place, paying extra to get an 8kg/5kg wash/dry capacity instead of the smaller ones. There *is* an under-counter fridge, but it's knackered - so an Indesit one of those, too.

Very limited in our choices, sadly, 'cos the gentleman who was very proud of his kitchen-fitting skills put the countertop at just shy of 85cm in height... which is too low for an 85cm appliance. How tall are most appliances? Yup, 85cm. Amaze!

 

Promised @Gunsmith I'd feed back on those Blink cameras. It's a mixed bag.

Installation: Easy. Though, weirdly, you only get a template and a step-by-step "how to install" wizard for the two-screw floor-level doorbell cameras, not for the three-screw work-at-height outdoor/floodlight ones.

Setup: Also easy, but if you've got the doorbell and started the process before adding a Sync Module you'll need to dip out, add the Sync Module, reset the doorbell, then add that. Oh, and if you don't have a Sync Module the doorbell's limited: it only responds to button press, no live-view functionality.

Use: The app's serviceable. It opens on views of all the cameras in a system, but they're not live - or even automatically updated. You have to push the little photograph button, then it updates the thumbnail - deleting the old thumbnail. There's no way to access the current photo - no enlarging, no saving, no sharing - and no history. There *is* a "Photo Mode" which takes a new photo every hour... but even that doesn't update the thumbnail. Instead, it just stitches them together into a time-lapse video. Useful(!)

Had some reliability issues despite good signal strength, but things seem to have gotten better on that front. Stuff like trying to go into live-view and it refusing a few times in a row - and when it eventually works, whatever you wanted to view's long-gone.

The doorbell's chime alerts respond slowly at times. Best I've seen is about five seconds, which is entirely reasonable - though it can take another ten seconds or so to activate live-view if you want to see who's there. Worst was about 50 seconds, which is effectively useless.

Motion alerts are entirely visual, there's no PIR. As a result, it can get confused: I've had to disable motion alerts front and back today 'cos it's windy and the speed at which the cloud's shadows are moving makes the thing detect "motion." They're also slow: I've got several clips 'ere of the postman's back as he's leaving. They'd get someone trying to break in, though, so that's the main thing - although I reckon you could, on a short enough driveway, run up and slap a piece of gaffer tape over the lens before the recording started.

You can set decently-shaped motion-ignore zones, but the privacy zones - which are greyed out in both live-view and recording - are limited: two arbitrary-sized rectangles is your lot. Need to block out neighbours to the left, right, *and* at the bottom of the garden? Sorry, you're outta luck.

Can't comment on the battery life yet, but the thing's already warned me that the settings I've chosen for recording length, motion sensitivity, and infrared illumination "may impact battery life." You can supposedly get a year standalone or two with a Sync Module, but I doubt I'll get anywhere near that. Six months, maybe? We'll see.

Oh, and it's "subscription free" with a Sync Module... kinda. If you don't pay for the sub, it disables a bunch of quite important features. One of 'em's the "photo mode," but as above that's useless anyway so no loss. A bigger issue is that it disables the ability to record from live view. It still captures event-based recordings - motion or for the doorbell someone pressing it - but if you're peering through live view and see something you want to save... you can't.

TL;DR: It's okay, I guess. Could be a lot better.

 

I know @liratheal was interested in the outcome of using this thing. Set it up in the room in question, turned the timer to 120 minutes - depending on which website you listen to a room of that size needs between eight minutes and four hours of exposure, so... <shrug> - beat a hasty retreat and even threw some masking tape around the door for good measure.

Came back the next morning, held my breath while I opened the windows - ozone's supposed to be completely degraded into oxygen and whatever-you-just-made-by-bonding-an-oxygen-molecule-with-the-stuff-that-smells within, like, four hours, but why take the risk and also who knows how bad the latter is.

Came back again in the evening with the decorator to get a quote for stripping the room back, sealing, and painting... and he was very confused 'cos there's no smell at all. Clear as you like. Now, I have no idea how long that'll last and, for chemical safety reasons, we're still getting it stripped, sealed, and painted, but... Yeah, seems to work a treat at getting rid of the smell, at least temporarily!

EDIT:
Oh, but finding useful information about this stuff? Impossible. It's all SEO blogspam, either trying to tell you how wonderful ozone generators are so they can sell you one or how terrible they are so they can sell you something else. The latter even lean heavily on a US study which showed that ozone generators putting out a level safe for occupation are completely useless at cleaning the air, but use that to argue against ones like the above where they put out a VERY unsafe level of ozone 'cos you're supposed to light the blue touch-paper and eff off until it's done.