Keeping an eye on your home, property or business has never been easier. All you need is a decent internet connection, a smartphone and good place to put the camera.
And, of course, a way to power it that doesn’t leave cables hanging outside your house. This is where the Aosu D1 classic solar camera may have the advantage.
The camera system is not only smart, with features such as person tracking, 360 degree pan and tilt, and smart alerts, it also has integrated solar panels so you don’t have to figure out how to hook it up to permanent power. Wire-free for the win.
Inside the box, you get the Aosu HomeStation, which connects to your home broadband modem, two cameras and all the screws and wall fixings you need to permanently install the cameras. Getting set up took a matter of minutes: once you have the app downloaded and ready to go, you switch on the base, turn on the cameras and push a button on both devices to sync with the base station.
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You immediately start seeing live footage in the app, but you can also enable and disable the extra features such as the security alarm and person tracking.
The footage is decent quality, at up to 2K, and works well in full daylight and at night, when you have the option of regular black-and-white night footage or colour night vision, facilitated by a small ring of LED lights. Although I had my doubts, the spotlight actually works surprisingly well, picking up details that might have gone unnoticed despite the distance from the subject.
The cameras have features such as motion detection, which can be enabled or disabled, or set to pick up people only, while the optional person tracking feature will lock on and follow people walking across its field of vision. There is two-way sound too,
That is particularly useful for those who live near busy roads. The more events your camera picks up, the more it impacts the battery life. If you don’t need to record vehicle motion, being able to set it to only record people on your property will help preserve that. The Aosu cameras also have a handy detection sensitivity setting that will set the appropriate level to preserve the battery life.
Speaking of battery life, I’m usually suspicious of products that offer small solar panels as a primary power source. Previous bad experiences with products has made me reluctant to trust them completely; I’ve been let down more times than I care to think about.
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But the Aosu cameras have a decent-size panel and a backup USB C connection that will give you a power boost should you need it.
The solar panels performed surprisingly well, but there is a caveat: they need to be positioned properly. That means south facing rather than north, and out of the shadows of your home to ensure the panel gets as much sunlight as possible. While subtlety might not be high on the list of requirements for home security cameras, these ones will need to be somewhere unobscured to get the full benefit.
If you really want to annoy the neighbours, you can enable the alarm feature. That triggers an audible siren when the camera detects movement. You can lower the volume, but the default is loud and should be used sparingly.
If you are happy to stick with the local storage, you can save up to 32GB of events on the internal storage of the HomeStation. Once that is full, the system will overwrite the oldest files, so if you need footage, you’ll need to review it quickly.
There are obvious advantages to this; not only does it mean your footage stays on your device and out of the cloud, but it is also subscription-free. The downside is if you need more than 32GB, you can’t expand the storage capacity further.
Aosu offers a cloud storage option, for a fee. The basic plan, which will cover a single camera, will give you access to 14 days of events stored in the cloud for just under €5 a month, or €50 for the year. If you want to use that second camera, you will have to upgrade to the Pro plan. That brings an extra 14 days of cloud storage, with the plan starting at €8 per month for a single camera and €13 per month for the two-camera option, or €80 and €130 per year.
Good
The camera system is easy to set up, it takes only a few taps and button pushes to get everything linked. Footage is high quality, and the app lays all the recorded events out in tiles, so they are easily sorted. You can set the motion detection to person only, which is useful if you live near a busy road, and the 360 degree pan and tilt function of the cameras makes them very flexible.
The local storage option is good if you want to keep costs down and avoid more subscriptions.
Bad
The solar panels need to be carefully positioned to make sure that they will deliver the necessary power. That means shadows from the eaves or window ledges need to be minimised.
Certain features – person tracking, for example – will impact battery life, so choose carefully on set-up.
Limited storage on the HomeStation and no way to expand it with a removable SD card.
Everything else
There is the option of USB charging if you find the battery isn’t lasting long enough. You can add up to four cameras to each HomeStation base.
Verdict
A good quality wire-free security camera set-up.
