Can you hear me now?

We had some local firms come and give us estimates for installing security like systems.  But they were both pretty stumped when I told them I needed video AND audio.  After telling me I’d have an estimate in 2-3 days it was a week and a half before I heard back from either of them.  They gave me an estimate for a solution that would work but also said that when they were talking to their contacts that they were told about a wireless baby monitoring product that was already on the market.

After being given the link to Wifi Baby we decided to check it out before we committed a very large amount of money to the solution provided locally.  We looked at their website which was very impressive.  We watched the clips on their website from tv shows talking about how great the product was.  We were impressed and beginning to feel like this might be a much more cost effective, less invasive installation, product for us.  So then we did the real research: checking it out on review sites, seeing what other bloggers had said about it, etc.  Other than seeing that the setup to be able to watch from outside of your house might be difficult everyone praised the product.

We went ahead and bit the bullet and ordered the family pack of cameras.  We already had an iPad and two iPhone’s so we didn’t need to purchase anything else to be able to view the camera.  They came in quickly and set about installing the camera’s.  To be honest, the installation wasn’t the easiest that I’ve ever done, but then again I did have Charlotte looking over my shoulder the whole time wanting to know what I was doing and wanting to sit in my lap so that probably didn’t help.  It was also the end of the day and I was worn out to begin with.

The instructions provided were very thorough but if you’re not comfortable with computers and your router it might take a little help.  They do have customer support that can help you with it but from what I’ve found they only work in the evenings and on weekends.  There isn’t a customer support number that you can call and that they will answer.  This frustrates me a lot but I guess it just goes with it.

We have been using our camera’s for about a month and have been pretty pleased with them.  They do drop the signal occasionally but almost always pick it back up quickly.  One of our camera’s was farther away from the router and wasn’t getting a good signal so we ended up plugging it in to an ethernet port that we had.  Since then we’ve had no problems with it so proximity to the router is something to consider.  We did add a signal repeater to ours though so make our signal spread farther out.

The setup for external viewing was a piece of cake as opposed to the reviews that I had seen.  It was just a matter of getting my ip address (http://whatismyipaddress.com/) and entering it on the away mode screen.  I had to fiddle with the ports that my camera’s were using but by logging on to the settings page for the camera’s I was able to access that information.  I did register a dynamic ip name for free just in case my ip changes but that was easy also.  They provide some good information on their support page that helped me with that.

Overall we are really pleased with the whole thing and I would definitely recommend it to anyone that asks.  Actually, this whole post is my recommendation I guess!  I’m not being sponsored for this and wasn’t asked to write this.  But I know how much trouble we had finding a video monitor that works and so I wanted to share my information.

As a bonus though, Wifi Baby emailed their customers recently giving everyone a chance to share a 10% discount with their friends.  Use the code “WBFAM2012” after you go to their site and click ‘Add to Cart’ (not Buy It Now).  You’ll receive 10% off of your total order including shipping, tax, etc.  If you’re looking for a new solution this might be something to check out!